Hilary Cunningham

Hilary (Cunningham) Scharper is an Associate Professor (Emeritus) and a Canadian novelist. Her academic work focuses on human/non-human encounters and interactions as "borderscapes." As a multispecies ethnographer, Hilary also engages with visual, sensory and other arts-based methodologies.

Professor Cunningham also publishes literary fiction and is associated with a newly-minted subgenre of the Gothic called the “ecoGothic.” Literary scholars have described this as a “more ecologically aware Gothic,” attuned to the spaces of “dark nature” and the roles which human fear and ambivalence play in shaping responses to the agency of the natural world. Her current work entails a collection of short stories on nonhuman soundscapes, as well as a five-volume project on the sentient landscapes of The Great Lakes. The first volume in the series, “Perdita” was published by Simon&Schuster, Source Books USA, La Court Echelle (French-language edition).
(For more informations see her literary website: http://www.hilaryscharper.com/ )

In 2013, Hilary and her spouse (Stephen Scharper) achieved precedent-setting legal protection for urban trees, resulting in changes to municipal by-laws in Ontario and providing (internationally) the first holistic definition of a tree’s “trunk “ in English law. See Boundary Trees: Whose Woods These Are.