Aesthetics, Colonialities & Cultures
This cluster explores literature and culture in relation to empire, capitalist imperialism, and decolonisation.
Staff
Publications
2026
Eastlake, L. (2026) Empires of desire: Cleopatra in the late-Victorian imagination. Brill
Ivry, H. (2026) White flight of the anthropos: gentrification of the Anthropocene imaginary. Cambridge University Press
Campbell, A. (2026) Docupoetics and hydraulic state power: infrastructural reading, “submerged perspectives” and the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Jonah Mixon-Webster. Routledge
Richardson, R. (2026) The stubborn will to mean: sympathy, relationality, and the origins of collecting Indigenous bones in the eighteenth century. English Literary History, 93, pp. 367-396. (doi: 10.1353/elh.2026.a993114)
Eastlake, L. (2026) ‘I am appetite’: meats, sweets and food studies readings of Dracula. Peter Lang
Ivry, H. (2026) The Jim Crow railroad bildungsroman. Textual Practice, (doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2025.2608848)
Willie, M. (2026) Carrying shame. Common Ground Networks
Willie, M. (2026) Colonialism, Exile and the Caribbean Psyche: the novels of Garth St. Omer. Liverpool University Press
2025
Campbell, A., Diamanti, J. (2025) Supply chain criticism: seam, interval, hold. Social Science Information, 64, pp. 508-527. (doi: 10.1177/05390184251403362)
Ivry, H. (2025) Listening to infrastructure: acoustic circulation and Black resistance. Errant Bodies Press
Willie, M. S. (2025) Matrilineal inheritance. Caribbean Writer, 39,
Willie, M. S. (2025) Hostage. sx salon, 50,
Friedman, G., Ivry, H., Stilley, H. (2025) “Introduction: Insurgent infrastructures and infrastructures of insurgency” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 66, pp. 197-204. (doi: 10.1080/00111619.2024.2427035)
Eastlake, L. (2025) The volcano and the vampire: the case for a volcanic gothic. Gothic Studies, 27, pp. 58-77. (doi: 10.3366/gothic.2025.0217)
Ivry, H. (2025) Forms of death and the death of form in contemporary Black fiction. Studies in the Novel, 57, pp. 102-118. (doi: 10.1353/sdn.2025.a952393)
Leask, N. (2025) ‘Such blessing is there in perfect liberty’: Coleridge’s ‘wild journey’ in Scotland, 1803. Coleridge Bulletin,
Small, D. R.J., Eastlake, L. (2025) ‘Our house came alive to shelter us’: happy gothic trauma and magical maturation in Disney’s Encanto. Screen,
2024
Ivry, H., Karpinski, M. (2024) Alien rhythms: sounding black futures from the ocean floor. Palgrave Macmillan
Eklund, H., Park, J., Sarkar, D., Thompson, A. (2024) Becoming undisciplined: on pathways to environmental and racial justice in early modern studies. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 139, pp. 791-805. (doi: 10.1632/S0030812924000683)
Park, J. (2024) Artisans of the skin: Recipe studies and race-making in Shakespearean skincrafts. Bloomsbury Publishing
Ivry, H. (2024) How to listen otherwise: Black sounds, Black ecologies. English Language Notes, 62, pp. 13-29. (doi: 10.1215/00138282-11096323)
Ivry, H. (2024) Insurgency, history, and infrastructure in Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift and Imbole Mbue's How Beautiful We Were. Contemporary Literature, 64, pp. 149-181. (doi: 10.3368/cl.64.2.149)
(2024) Romanticism, travel and the Celtic languages. Studies in Romanticism,
Willie, M. S. (2024) Blue shoes. sx salon, 45,
Park, J. (2024) Shakespeare, race, and science: the study of nature and/as the making of race. Oxford University Press
Constantine, M.-A., Leask, N. (2024) Introduction: Romanticism, travel, and the Celtic languages. Studies in Romanticism, 63, pp. 97-115. (doi: 10.1353/srm.2024.a931777)
Leask, N., Ó Muircheartaigh, P. (2024) ‘Travelling Gaels’: Coloniality and dislocation in the Gaelic Atlantic. Studies in Romanticism, 63, pp. 231-253. (doi: 10.1353/srm.2024.a931783)
2023
Leask, N. (2023) Decolonizing Romantic Studies. Cambridge University Press
Park, J. (2023) On Shakespeare’s legacy, critical race, and collective futures. Shakespeare Quarterly, 74, pp. 264-280. (doi: 10.1093/sq/quad029)
Campbell, A., Carter, F. (2023) Saboteurial poetics: blockades, machine-breaking, & infrastructure from below. Routledge
Eastlake, L. (2023) Sugar. Victorian Literature and Culture, 51, pp. 515-518. (doi: 10.1017/S1060150323000074)
Ivry, H. (2023) Ecologies from the cargo: Zora Neale Hurston and the long Anthropocene. Modern Fiction Studies, 69, pp. 444-465. (doi: 10.1353/mfs.2023.a905745)
Willie, M. S. (2023) A genealogy of the recognition of blackness in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Foreigners: Three English Lives. Brill
Eastlake, L. (2023) The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities, by Patricia Pulham; pp. x + 226. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, £75.00. Victorian Studies, 65, pp. 333-335. (doi: 10.2979/vic.2023.a911124)
Ivry, H. (2023) Transscalar Critique: Climate, Blackness, Crisis. Edinburgh University Press
Ivry, H., Karpinski, M. (2023) Blackness after the end of the world: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s dub ecologies. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, 30, pp. 77-101. (doi: 10.1093/isle/isaa174)
Leask, N. (2023) Indo-Persia’s “Alter-Europe” Eighteenth Century, 64, pp. 327-331. (doi: 10.1353/ecy.2023.a950267)
Leask, N. (2023) Water. Romanticism on the Net, 80-81,
2022
Eastlake, L. (2022) The history of four festive sweets – from familiar favourites to the downright dangerous. Conversation,
Leask, N. (2022) 'Penetrat[ing] the Gloom of Britain's Farthest Glens': A response from the Highlands. Studies in Romanticism, 61, pp. 305-325. (doi: 10.1353/srm.2022.0021)
Ivry, H. (2022) Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. American Literary History, (doi: 10.1093/alh/ajac046)
Ivry, H. (2022) Ecology in the Wake: Black Studies, Literary Method, and the Nonhuman. Minnesota Review, 2022, pp. 611-72. (doi: 10.1215/00265667-9563877)
Eastlake, L. (2022) Are you not entertained?: Hollywood’s golden age was born of the popularity of swords and sandals on the Victorian stage. History Today, 72,
Leask, N., Ó Muircheartaigh, P. (2022) ‘Co-ainm na taca seo an-uiridh’: Dugald MacNicol’s Caribbean Lament for Argyll. Studies in Scottish Literature, 47, pp. 43-68.
Leask, N. (2022) Travel writing about the Highlands in the nineteenth century. Scottish Literature International
Leask, N. (2022) “Moral Electricity”: William Daniell’s voyage round Great Britain and early topographical representations of the Isle of Skye and the West Highlands. Romanticism on the Net, 79,
2021
Willie, M. S. (2021) Journey to Zion. Lolwe, 4,
Eastlake, L. (2021) Playing cute: sensation villainy and the aesthetics of small things in The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret. Journal of Victorian Culture, 26, pp. 568-581. (doi: 10.1093/jvcult/vcab042)
Ivry, H. (2021) ‘Improbable metaphor’: Jesmyn Ward’s asymmetrical Anthropocene. European Review, 29, pp. 383-396. (doi: 10.1017/S1062798720000708)
Willie, M. S. (2021) Musing history. Caribbean Writer, 35,
Ivry, H. (2021) Writing in the “second person plural”: Ben Lerner, ambient esthetics, and problems of scale. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62, pp. 123-136. (doi: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1787321)
(2021) Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720-1830.
Leask, N. (2021) 'Lost in Words': Macpherson's Ossian, translation, and ballad collection in the eighteenth-century Scottish Gàidhealtachd. inTRAlinea Special Issue: Space in Translation,
Ivry, H. (2021) The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King. University of Toronto Quarterly, 90, pp. 406-408. (doi: 10.3138/utq.90.3.hr.18)
2020
Ivry, H. (2020) Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty's transscalar critique. English Literary History, 87, pp. 1133-1162. (doi: 10.1353/elh.2020.0040)
Campbell, A., Paye, M. (2020) Water enclosure and world-literature: new perspectives on hydro-power and world-ecology. Humanities, 9, (doi: 10.3390/h9030106)
Leask, N. (2020) Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour, c.1720-1830. Oxford University Press
Campbell, A. (2020) Violent dwellings and vulnerable creatures in Burning Elvis and Something Like Happy. Bloomsbury Academic
2019
Leask, N. (2019) Philosophical vagabonds: Pedestrianism, politics and improvement on the Scottish tour. Studies in Scottish Literature, 45,
Leask, N. (2019) Philosophical Vagabonds: Pedestrianism, Politics, and Improvement on the Scottish Tour. University of South Carolina Press
Campbell, A. (2019) A world of islands: the archipelagic imagination in contemporary Scottish literature. Palgrave Macmillan
Campbell, A. (2019) Extractive poetics: marine energies in Scottish literature. Humanities, 8, (doi: 10.3390/h8010016)
Eastlake, L. (2019) Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity. Oxford University Press
Leask, N. (2019) Eighteenth-century travel writing. Cambridge University Press
Campbell, A. (2019) Atlantic exchanges: the poetics of dispersal and disposal in Scottish and Caribbean seas. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 55, pp. 195-208. (doi: 10.1080/17449855.2019.1590622)
Leask, N. (2019) Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism. By Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Keats-Shelley Journal, 66, pp. 174-176.
2018
Eastlake, L. (2018) Review of Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Masculinity, Emotion and Tactility in the Crimean War (Oxford University Press, 2016) Wilkie Collins Journal,
Leask, N. (2018) Thomas Pennant, national description, and the project of improvement. Routledge
2017
Leask, N. (2017) Marilyn Speers Butler 1937–2014. Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press
Park, J. (2017) Glass bellies and artificial wombs: Gender, science, and reproduction in early modern alchemical performance. Performance Matters, 3, pp. 41-56.
Leask, N. (2017) Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary and the Ossian controversy. Yearbook of English Studies, 47, pp. 189-202.
Hutton, A., Leask, N. (2017) "The first antiquary of his country": Robert Riddell's extra-illustrated and annotated volumes of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Scotland. Anthem Press
(2017) Enlightenment Travel and British Identities: Thomas Pennant's Tours of Scotland and Wales.
Constantine, M.-A., Leask, N. (2017) Introduction: Thomas Pennant, curious traveller. Anthem Press
Eastlake, L. (2017) ‘Antique Fiction’ and the forgotten legacies of Ancient Rome in Wilkie Collins’s Antonina. Classical Receptions Journal, 9, pp. 193-210. (doi: 10.1093/crj/clw007)
Eastlake, L. (2017) Review of Molly Youngkin’s British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840-1910 (Palgrave, 2016) English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 60, pp. 534-538.
Campbell, A. (2017) Sound waves: “Blue Ecology” in the poetry of Robin Robertson and Kathleen Jamie. Etudes Ecossaises, 19, (doi: 10.4000/etudesecossaises.1199)
Leask, N. (2017) The Weaver's Cottage in Islay.
Leask, N. (2017) “Writing myself out”: Robert Burns and the 18th century commonplace book tradition. Peter Lang
Postgraduate research students
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This research cluster explores the relationships and tensions between culture, aesthetics, and the critical and institutional inheritances of colonialism. A trans-historical group, we are interested in how literature, media, and material culture shape our understanding of colonial power structures and the manifold forms of cultural production that emerge to challenge the apparatus of racial capitalism and imperial domination. Drawing together scholarship in Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Theory, Decolonial Feminisms and Postcolonial Theory, we interrogate the persistence of the ‘colonial’ as an organising condition that structures our understanding of history, the environment, and the future. While much of our work critiques the legacy of colonial violences, and its refusal, we are committed to engaging research that is anti-extractive and desire-based and thereby centering issues of sovereignty, speculation, and self-determination as the coordinates of critical inquiry.
The cluster meets on a regular basis and hosts a variety of events including works-in-progress, grant workshops, ‘critical close-ups’ (in which members nominate a short reading/listening/viewing to discuss in detail), invited speakers, and community outreach sessions. The cluster is particularly keen to create a supportive space for Postgraduate researchers to share and develop their work. We are interested in fostering meaningful collaborations in research and teaching across the School of Critical Studies and beyond.