I am an emerita professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, and Visiting Professor of the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, Birmingham City University, UK. My research is in the fields of diaspora and postcolonial studies and focuses on the white settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Another strand studies contemporary literary representations of poverty, precarity and vulnerability. Projects within these two areas include study of the early reception in the UK and USA of the work of New Zealand modernist short story writer Katherine Mansfield; and an updating and expansion of my monograph, Fleur Adcock (2007), to consider the recent writing of this New Zealand-born, UK-based poet. I am coediting an essay collection on New Zealand medievalism for which I will contribute a study of academic medievalism and decolonising the curriculum, focusing on 20th century New Zealand medievalists in Oxbridge and North America. Recently I have published articles on refugee writing and the ethics of representation and am currently co-editing a volume on Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability. From October 2019-April 2022 I was PI of the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network that focused on Black British and British Asian visual screen studies. I am editor in chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, co-editor of the book series, Studies in World Literature (Ibidem-Verlag) and chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.
Selected Publications
2021. “Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation.” In The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture, edited by Rudolf Freiberg and Gerd Bayer. Cham: Springer Nature, Ch 4, 24 pp.
2021. “Narrating Precarious Lives: Refugee Tales, African Titanics, and The Year of the Runaways” Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World, edited by Barbara Schmid-Haberkamp, Marion Gymnich and Klaus P. Schneider. Brill, pp. 191-206.
2021. “Citizenship as Contestatory Practice: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2015).” In Law, Literature and Citizenship, edited by Caroline Koegler, Jesper Reddig, and Klaus Stierstorfer. Special issue of Law and Literature, pp. 67-84.
2021. “Offshore detention in Australia: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018)”. “Enemy Aliens or Captive Allies?”, edited by Donna Coates. Special issue of Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies. 163-83. https://anglica-journal.com/resources/html/article/details?id=222845.
2020. With Om Prakash Dwivedi and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, ed. “Planetary Precarity and the Pandemic.” Special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing 56 (4): Introduction “Challenging Precarity,” 439-46.
2020. Ed. The General and the Nightingale: The War Stories of Dan Davin. Otago University Press.
2020. “Such ‘rich unlawful gold’: Mansfield’s semiotic manoeuvres in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’.” The Katherine Mansfield Yearbook, edited by Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 182-202.
2020. “‘An ocean of thought’: AI, Robots, and Ian McEwan’s Machines like me: People like you (2019).” In “Symbolism and the Future,” edited by Florian Klaeger. Special issue of Symbolism 20: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, pp. 205-220. Doi. 10.1515/9783110716962-012.
2020. “Boom and Bust: The Global Novel of Ireland (2007) and India (2008).” Recherche Litteraire: Literary Research 35, pp. 97-118.
2019. “Vulnerable Lives: Post 9/11 Fiction and the Search for Meaning,” In Modern and Postmodern Literature The Urge for Becoming, edited by Siya Ram Rai. Macmillan Education, pp. 19-30.
2018. With Chandani Lokuge. “Introduction, Realigning the Margins: Asian Australian Writing.” Mediating Literary Borders: Asian Australian Writing, ed. Janet Wilson and Chandani Lokuge. London: Routledge, pp. 1-6.
2018. “(Not)being at home: Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012).” In Mediating Literary Borders; Asian Australian Writing, edited by Janet Wilson and Chandani Lokuge. Routledge, pp. 19-32.
2017. With K. Stierstorfer, ed., The Diaspora Studies Reader. Routledge.
2017. “Transnational Movements: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the South Pacific.” In The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol 12, edited by Coral-Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcote. Oxford University Press, pp. 141-158.
