Members

Alessandra Di Pietro is a PhD student in English and American Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research interests include West African Literature, Anglophone Literatures, Postcolonial Theory and Gender Studies.

Grace V. S. Chin is Senior Lecturer in English Language Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia. She specialises in postcolonial Southeast Asian literatures in English, with emphasis on race and gender in contemporary societies and diasporas.

DR JENNIFER GRAY teaches Modern British and Contemporary Anglophone literature as a tenured assistant professor at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee, USA. From 1999-2018, she taught Composition and Sophomore Literature courses at TTU. In 2018, she received her PhD from Middle Tennessee State University and continued her career at TTU. In April 2021 her first book, Culinary Diplomacy’s Role in the Immigrant Experience: Fiction and Memoirs of Middle Eastern Women, was published by Rowman & Littlefield. Dr. Gray's research interests include immigration, postcolonial theory, British literature 1900-1950, and Contemporary Black British, Asian, and Minority Ethnic literatures.

I am a Senior Lecturer at Universiti Malaysia Sabah and have been primarily working on Malaysian Literature in English with a particular interest in female life-writings. I have a keen interest in studies related to national discourse and the ways in which the norms and limits of gender contest dominant narratives about the nation. Along this line of inquiry, my research includes an investigation of ethnicity/race, diaspora, and transnationalism as compounding issues in the debate leading to nationalism and national identity. My article on contemporary nature writings by Malaysian female life-writers of multi-ethnic origin has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2019). My work on the Malaysian Indian life-writer who straddles both the English and Tamil literary writing tradition has been published in Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities in February 2022.

I am a scholar in contemporary women’s writing with a broad international background and a particular interest in trans-disciplinary research. I am a member of the Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster based at De Montfort University, and a newly appointed member of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing, CCWW, London. From 2018-2021 I held the position of Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow in the Departments of Modern Italian Studies and Cultural Heritage at the University of Milan, Italy. In the past four years I have been acting as Expert Evaluator for the European Commission for the Humanities and Social Sciences cluster, assisting in the evaluation of project proposals under the main EU funding schemes. Currently, I am working on an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project which I would be happy to implement at SOAS across several departments within the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities. Using gender as an analytical category, this project will seek to propose a new paradigm influencing the way in which we understand postcolonial literary studies. It will do so by countering the identification of postcolonial literature as Anglo-centric, instead highlighting the multilingualism and multiculturalism of ‘minor’— in the sense of canonically peripheral — European literatures. Focusing on the socio-cultural processes of inclusion and exclusion through a postcolonial and feminist perspective, it will look at scarcely studied national literatures, with the aim of seeking out patterns and comparisons, and proposing new methodologies that adopt a transnational lens across national literatures and disciplines. These methodologies will connect Postcolonial, European, and Women’s Studies, while opening up new intersections with the field of Trauma Studies in terms of the textual expression of forms of trauma linked to exile, migration or inter-generational relationships/connections. This new strand of research links into, whilst also develops, the research practice I have thus far conducted on ‘minority’ feminist and ‘queer’ literatures and their shared expression of exclusion and non-assimilationism in relation to the canonical paradigms.

Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo has held a number of posts in UK higher education including Head of English at Newman University and Dean of the School of Arts and Letters at Anglia Ruskin University. She researches and writes on African literature, especially Zimbabwean and Somali, and contemporary women's writing.

I recently completed my PhD studies at the University of Manchester, with a thesis titled 'Metropolitan Dissent in Thomas Hardy's Fiction: Class, Gender, Empire'. My PhD research departs from a critical tradition in Hardy studies that has so far tended to interpret empire in the fiction in terms of the colonisation of Wessex. Instead, it focuses on the entanglement of Wessex with overseas imperial spaces, arguing for multiple, and, more importantly, deeply uneven forms of contact with the empire. My other areas of interest include cultural materialism, world-systems theory, theories of nationalism, 'thing' theory, labour history and imperial history. I am currently a sessional lecturer and tutor at the University of Salford, with previous teaching experience at the University of Manchester. I have two published articles with the Thomas Hardy Journal (2009 & 2014), a co-authored piece, 'Empire', in the edited volume Thomas Hardy in Context (CUP, 2013), and three book reviews in the Thomas Hardy Journal (2013) and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2014 & 2015). In 2013-2015, I was a steering committee member of the Manchester Postcolonial Reading Group, which included themed reading sessions, in addition to cross-disciplinary ateliers with leading academics to discuss their work-in-progress. In January 2016, I co-organised the major public-facing Northern Postcolonial Network workshop and twinned symposium on the topics of 'Asylum, Refuge, Migration', jointly hosted by the universities of Salford and Manchester.

Dr. Sharae Deckard is a permanent Lecturer in World Literature (with tenure) in the School of English, University College Dublin. Her current research interests include postcolonial literature and the environment, world-systems and world-ecology approaches to world literature, neoliberalism and the (eco)gothic. She is a collaborator with a with the Warwick Research collective (WReC) investigating the aesthetics of world literature.