Ben Grant’s research interests include postcolonial and world literature, the theory and practice of the aphorism, travel literature, life writing, psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence.
In his first book Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Routledge, 2009), Ben examined how the iconic Victorian explorer and translator, Richard Francis Burton, engages with the non-European world in his many writings. His second book, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge New Critical Idiom, 2016), gives a consolidated picture of the exciting and often marginalised genres of the aphorism and related short forms of writing, such as the proverb and the fragment. Ben’s most recent book, Jenny Diski (Manchester University Press, 2026), is the first critical monograph to be published on Diski, and it brings her fiction and non-fiction together in a thematic approach to her work. As well as writing articles on a number of other subjects, including the explorer Paul du Chaillu, Frantz Fanon, and Claude Cahun alongside Diski, Ben has contributed the entry on Richard Francis Burton to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, and that on 'Anthology' to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. An essay of his appears in the catalogue of a major international exhibition on the Kama Sutra held in Paris in 2014, and he wrote the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Jenny Diski.
Since completing his book on Diski, Ben has become interested in how Large Language Models work, and is exploring this subject from a literary-critical perspective.
Ben has taught in a wide variety of areas of British, American, and Postcolonial and World literature from the Romantic period to the present. He also has considerable experience teaching Critical Theory. He particularly enjoys tutorial and small group teaching, and loves to discover the different perspectives that people bring to literary and critical texts. In his teaching, he always encourages students to explore their own ideas, and supports them to develop their independent thinking.
Ben is currently supervising DPhils in British women travellers in colonial India, and nineteenth-century illustrations of The Thousand and One Nights.
In addition to his teaching and research, in Oxford Lifelong Learning, Ben directs the Weekly Class Programme of in-person short courses. These courses are in a wide variety of subject areas across the Humanities, Social Sciences and STEM. Ben also acts as the Academic Partnerships Coordinator. In that role, he oversees Oxford Crisis Education (OxCRED), which delivers online educational resources to Higher Education students in crisis settings, and which was awarded a prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Award in 2026.
Ben is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.
