Professor Myra J Hird

IAS Fellow at St Mary's College, January-March 2027

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Myra J. Hird is the inaugural Smith Chair in Engineering for Humanity at Queen’s University, Canada. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Queen's National Scholar. Professor Hird is a leading expert in Canadian Waste Studies, and internationally recognized in science studies. With two further books in production, Professor. Hird has to date published 14 books and over 90 articles and book chapters, such as Waste: The Basics (2025), Consuming the Environment (2024), Extracting Reconciliation: Inhuman Wastes, Indigenous Lands, and Colonial Reckoning (with H. Predko, 2024), A Public Sociology of Waste (2022), and Canada’s Waste Flows (2021). Professor Hird represented Canada at the 2019 G7 Microplastics meetings in Paris, France, and in 2024 provided expert testimony to Canada’s House of Commons 44th Parliament Standing Committee on Science and Research for the Innovation, Science, and Research in Recycling Plastics. She has earned over $13 million in research funding and supervised over 70 graduate students in several countries. Professor Hird has accepted invitations as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Uppsala and Linköping Universities (Sweden) and the École Normale Supérieure (France), and garnered keynote speaker invitations at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Berkeley, The Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society, and the École Urbaine, among others. Professor Hird delivered the United Kingdom’s esteemed Leverhulme Trust Lecture Series (2013–2014), as well as 31 keynote addresses, 84 invited presentations and 51 conference papers in 10 countries. Her publications are housed in thousands of libraries worldwide (see WorldCat), translated into several languages, and read in >60 countries. Professor Hird earned the Queen’s Prize for Research Excellence in 2015, and prizes for Excellence in Teaching. And in recognition of her outstanding public service and teaching, Professor Hird was elected by the Rotary Foundation International as a Paul Harris Fellow in 2021.

As an IAS Fellow, Professor Hird will investigate the topic of circulatory materials. While supranational organizations such as the European Union, several governments (the UK and Canada among them), and extraction and production industries have promoted the Circular Economy (CE) as a solution to our global waste crisis, the increasing scarcity of primary materials, and a way of developing new economically profitable materials throughput systems, significant challenges endure. Professor Hird is interested in exploring the material (including low-value) limits of industrial-scale reuse, energy use, geographical (including transportation) environmental costs, as well as the rhetorical framing of the CE within global capitalism. Professor Hird is particularly interested in the environmental and human-health costs incurred by the material sites of extraction and production, and the systems of transportation that connect them to consumption, that the CE depends upon. Using a perpetual care approach to these sites, Professor Hird is interested in the decommissioning and long-term stewardship required where hazardous materials, community impacts, and intergenerational responsibilities persist. This perspective expands the temporal horizon of responsibility beyond regulatory timelines, emphasizing relational accountability, ecological reciprocity, and long-term community well-being. As an international expert in interdisciplinary research, Professor Hird will support the building of networks of engineering and natural sciences (ENS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH) to create collaborative projects involving these themes.

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