Research

Aesthetics, Colonialities & Cultures

This cluster explores literature and culture in relation to empire, capitalist imperialism, and decolonisation.

Staff

Publications

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,

2021

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.