Rachel Malkin is currently an Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. She has previously held posts in the Faculties of English at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
She teaches widely in literature from the C19th to the present, with a focus on C20th and C21st writing in English. Her research specialisms lie in C20th/C21st North American writing (literature/intellectual history/philosophy).
Her current research has several strands:
Her first book (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press) considers the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell in context, alongside the writing of C20th literary contemporaries.
She is currently completing articles and chapters bridging her first and second monograph projects. These pieces take up themes such as love, acknowledgement, and conversation.
A related element of her research explores the legacies of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin). She is interested in how these thinkers are engaged with in contemporary writing, including uses of this tradition that place it in dialogue with history and politics, and with questions of racialisation and gender.
A second monograph project is planned under the provisional heading of ‘The Critical Everyday’. This work explores the ways contemporary writers are repurposing modernist aesthetics and modalities of the everyday, to critical effect.
Forthcoming publications include chapters on Stanley Cavell and James Baldwin, and on Percival Everett and Ordinary Language Philosophy.
