Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series
Spring 2010
Jointly run by the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and the Open University Postcolonial Literatures Research Group, the seminars this term have been organised by Ole Birk Laursen (OU), and are designed to provide postgraduate students with an opportunity to present papers on aspects of their current doctoral research. With this series of seminars, we hope to create a forum for discussion amongst postgraduate students. The seminars will also be a lead in to the Open University Postgraduate Conference, ‘Reading Conflict’, to be held at IES on Monday 19 July 2010.
The seminars will be held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1.
Room: G35
Time: 17.30-19.00
For further information, please contact Ole Birk Laursen on O.B.Laursen@open.ac.uk
All are welcome; booking is not required.
26 January 2010 :
‘Publishing Wole Soyinka: Oxford University Press and the Creation of “Africa’s Own William Shakespeare”’
Caroline Davis is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Publishing at Oxford Brookes University, where she teaches book and publishing history on the undergraduate and MA publishing programmes. She is currently carrying out research towards a PhD at the Open University on the subject of OUP’s African literary series, Three Crowns, supervised by Dr. David Johnson and Prof. Robert Fraser. An article based on this research was published in Book History in 2005: ‘The Politics of Postcolonial Publishing: Oxford University Press’ Three Crowns Series 1962–1976’.
09 February 2010
‘“Seeing”/“Hearing” Bodies: The Question of (Un)Belonging in the Work of Bernardine Evaristo and Dubravka Ugrešic’
Vedrana Velickovic is a final year PhD candidate and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Kingston University, London. She is currently writing up her doctoral thesis which explores the idea of (un)belonging in post-1990s black British and Former Yugoslav women’s writing. She is also organising a Life Writing Seminar Series within the Centre for Life Narratives at Kingston to be held throughout the Spring semester 2010, and co-organising a postgraduate conference titled ‘Migrancy and/in the Text’ to be held at Kingston University in July 2010. She has recently had a book chapter on the Former Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešic, based on part of her research, published in Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe (New York: Peter Lang, 2009). She is particularly interested in exploring the intersections between postcolonial and black British studies/literatures and the studies/literatures of ‘ Eastern Europe ’ and The Balkans.
23 February 2010
‘Desirous daughters: women, performance, and popular culture in Shobha De’s Starry Nights (1991) and Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D (2009)’
Ipshita Ghose is a doctoral candidate and an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent. Her research interests include postcolonial and diasporic fictions, visual culture, and urban literature in India , and she is currently working on a thesis titled ‘Fictions of the postcolonial city: reading Bombay-Mumbai as the “locus classicus” of modernity in India, supervised by Dr. Alex Padamsee and Prof. Abdulrazak Gurnah. Ipshita has recently contributed a book chapter to The Idea of the City: Early Modern, Modern and Postmodern Locations and Communities (2009) and is writing an article on post-liberalization trends in Indian Writing in English, which has been selected for publication early next year.
09 March 2010
‘Inside “The Temple of Modern Desire”: Re-Collecting and Re-Locating Bombay ’
Maria Ridda is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kent. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah, concerns the mapping of transnational urban spaces in South Asian diasporic texts, with a particular focus on the reconfigurations of ‘India’ from abroad. Her research interests include South Asian diasporic writing, postcolonial theory, early 20th century English, American and Italian literature. Maria has presented at a number of academic conferences on topics which include intertextuality, memory and the glocal city in postcolonial literature. She is currently teaching a course on American and European Modernist poetry and fiction. She has contributed a chapter to a collection on the reception of Indian Writing in English, and is preparing another about the Indian diaspora in the United States.