Dr Christy Wensley

My research, writing and teaching broadly encompasses literature, film, and culture from a global perspective drawing primarily on the intersections of race, gender, form and imperialism/capitalism in the transatlantic imaginary. Guided by a multilayered and multidirectional sense of the transatlantic, my work engages with notions of exile, diaspora, and movement, as well as with questions of literary influence.

I’m currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English at Oxford and a Rothermere American Institute Fellow. My project, Deliberate Strangers: Cross Currents of Transatlantic Influence, explores the ways in which influence is refigured across, beyond and through literary anxieties and shared places, identities, or histories, in the work of James Baldwin, Stuart Hall and Caryl Phillips. I argue that their use and interrogation of broader literary criticism and methods that developed out of modernist critique and theory have radically upended literary and cultural studies which have been historically limited to or by whiteness. My ambition is to theorize the “stranger” in and through their work and consider the potential for “strange(r)ness” as a generative literary and cultural form of critique.

I’m also working on a monograph which argues that Blackness is a crucial ‘hidden subject’ in Henry James’s fiction, requiring sustained attention. To recontextualize his work, I draw on previous scholarship on James and race as well intersectional Black studies, critical race, queer, and feminist theories to highlight a historically contingent relationship between race and sexuality.