- Caribbean literature, especially of the Windrush era
- Black British literature and Black Studies
- Diaspora and migration
- Contemporary literature, especially its distribution and circulation
My research is primarily interested in the mid-twentieth-century moment when disparate diasporic communities in Britain united underneath the heading ‘Black’ before organising under more distinct ethnic umbrellas in the decades that followed. It has, thus far, analysed the pre-history of this collective moment and its literary registration (as explored in my monograph Emigration and Caribbean Literature), touched on literary figures who devoted their careers to reflection on the experience of minoritisation in post-war Britain, such as Samuel Selvon (in the collection Beyond Calypso), and, in more recent work, explored the heady period of radical imagining in the 1960s and early 1970s that led to new understandings, not least through artistic work, of belonging and being among British diasporic writers (in a forthcoming monograph on the Caribbean Artists Movement). I am also interested in contemporary Black British literature and how it extends and develops the legacies of the 1960s. All of my work takes as its inspiration Raymond Williams’ call to be attentive to the dominant, emergent, and residual features of culture and to understand mass culture as an endlessly shifting, dynamic system in which literature, among other arts, plays a shaping role.
I publish fiction alongside my research and, for that reason, I am also intimately interested in the operation of the contemporary literary field.
I support the teaching of the MSt in World Literature and offer prelims teaching in my college, St Hilda's, on the Victorian to Modern papers. I have also offered MSt options on Black British writing and Black Studies.
To date, I have supervised graduate and undergraduate work on a range of Caribbean and Black British writers as well as projects interested in literary consecration and markets. I am currently supervising a DPhil thesis on Caribbean soundscapes.
In general, I am interested in projects that:
- seek to advance our understanding of Black British arts, especially projects with an interdisciplinary orientation;
- focus on inter-war and immediately post-WWII Caribbean writing;
- are concerned with the literary marketplace and its effects on what is understood as ‘literature’;
- seek to complicate our understanding of categories of identity, especially ‘Blackness’.
Trained as a postcolonialist, I am also open to projects that seek to explore the possibilities of postcolonial (and other) theories.
Public Engagement
Bringing research to audiences outside of the university has been one of the most nourishing features of my academic career. So far, I have worked with Writing West Midlands, the Runnymede Trust, Wasafiri magazine, and, most recently, the British Library to bridge the gap between university-based humanities study and the general public. I am proud to have co-led the history education project Our Migration Story, which won the Royal Society of History’s Public History Prize, and featured the creation of an online history resource widely used in British schools (see: https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/). I currently sit on the Advisory Board of Birmingham’s Nine Arches Press (see: https://ninearchespress.com/).
Selected Publications
BOOKS
- A Revolutionary Consciousness: Black Power, Black Britain, and the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (Faber and Faber, forthcoming)
- Parables, Fables, Nightmares (short story collection) (The Emma Press, 2023) – winner, Best Debut Collection, Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2025
- (ed.) Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (Ian Randle, 2016)
- Emigration and Caribbean Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS
- ‘“Let’s Deal with the People Oppressing All of Us”: Benjamin Zephaniah in Conversation’, Authorship, Activism and Celebrity: Art and Action in Global Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 17-30
- ‘Images of Transcendence: “Crisis Always” and the New Black British Poets’, Études Anglaises 76:1 (2023), pp.31-46
- (w/ Claire Alexander and Sundeep Lidher), ‘Our Migration Story: History, the National Curriculum, and Re-Narrating the British Nation’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies special issue History, Memory and Migrations, ed. by Christophe Bertossi and Jan Willem Duyvendak 47:18 (2020), pp. 4221-4237
- ‘Postcolonial Plurality in Black British Fiction’, The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945-2010) (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 193-207.
- ‘“Playing Mas Isn’t Playing the Ass: Moses Migrating as “Farce en Noir”’, Beyond Calypso: Re-reading Samuel Selvon (Ian Randle Press, 2016), pp. 135-49.
- ‘The Exigencies of Exile and Dialectics of Flight: Migrant Fictions, V.S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai’, Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 72-86.
- ‘Lamming versus Naipaul: Writing Migrants, Writing Islands in the British Literary Field’, Migrant Identities of “Creole Cosmopolitans”, Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Postcoloniality (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 79-93
- (w/ Letizia Gramaglia)‘Censorship, Selvon and Caribbean Voices; “Behind the Humming Bird” and the Caribbean Literary Field’, Brighter Suns: 60 Years of Literature from Trinidad, Wasafiri 28:2 (2013), pp. 48-54
- ‘The “I” as Messiah in Césaire’s First Cahier’, Research in African Literatures 43:2 (2012), pp. 77-94
SHORT STORIES
- ‘untitled’, Brum Library Zine, ed. by Catherine O’Flynn and Liz Berry (2024)
- ‘Imperial Homes’, Colonial Countryside (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2024)
- ‘A Game of Chess’, The Book of Birmingham (Manchester: Comma Press, 2018), pp. 93-103
- ‘A Love Story’, Under the Radar 18 (2016), pp. 66-68
- ‘Paint by Numbers’, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine 7.2 (2014),
- ‘New York’, Under the Radar 7 (2011), pp. 29-35
