Uncomfortable Oxford
Literary Tour

I wrote the script and hosted the walking tour 'Uncomfortable Oxford Literary Tour' during the October 2019 IF Festival. Read about the motivations of this work on the Uncomfortable Oxford blog.

Oxford Science and Ideas Festival

I represented Futures Thinking at the 2019 Oxford Science and Ideas Festival, running an interactive research project titled 'The Noise That Keeps Me Awake At Night.'  Below is a page from the IF Festival's programme that featured a profile on my work.

The Responsibilities of the Author and the Archive: On the Award of the Bodley Medal to Sir Kazuo Ishiguro

Attended the Bodley Medal ceremony and dinner at the April 2019 Oxford Literary Festival celebrating the work of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro.  
Read here for more.

BIO

@chelsea_haith

My interest in urban cohesion (or lack thereof) and literary representations of humanitarian crises originates from witnessing systemic exclusion during my childhood spent in Johannesburg, South Africa. I completed a Bachelor of Arts and a BA Honours at the University Currently Known as Rhodes before moving to the University of Cape Town to pursue a second Honours degree in Gender Studies. Following the completion of this Bachelor of Social Sciences Honours at UCT I moved to the UK, where I joined the Centre for Modern Studies at the University of York. I obtained a Masters in Culture and Thought After 1945 from the University of York, which led me to adopt an interdisciplinary framework for my current research. Currently, I am a fully-funded DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford in the Faculty of English, based at Wolfson College. I am the PI and founder of the research network Futures Thinking and the creator of the podcast Narrative Futures. My research is on speculative fiction as a political literary genre that engages concerns from urban inequalities and decolonial theory.

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS

I present my research regularly at workshops, seminars and conferences around the world. I also run events, seminars and conferences through Futures Thinking, a research network that I founded at the University of Oxford.

ENGLISH: SHARED FUTURES

26-28 June 2020, Manchester/Salford

POSTPONED TO 2021 DUE TO COVID-19

Presenting/speaking on two panels:
- Another Heritage of Letters: British literature, publishing, and memory reexamined. 
- Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People

GENDERING TECHNOLOGY

6 & 7 May 2020,
Maison Française, Oxford

CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19

Invited to speak on the conference's concluding roundtable on Narratives of Gender in Technology. 

SOCIETY FOR NOVEL STUDIES BIENNIAL

2-4 April 2020, Oxford
CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19

Presenting a paper on the 'The Novel In Crisis' panel, organised by myself and colleagues. 

AMERCIAN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION 2020

19-22 March 2020, Chicago
CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19

Accepted to present on the Fictions of the Neoliberal City at the ACLA Conference, Chicago 2020.

YORK SOCIOLOGY SEMINAR

20 November 2019, York

Invited to present at the University of York's Sociology Seminar. Paper titled 'Women's Work: AI, Clones and Gendered Labour'

THEORIES OF READING

14 October 2019, Faculty of English, University of Oxford

Presented my work and method of reading 21st
century texts within an interdisciplinary framework.

FUTURES THINKING CONFERENCE

1-3 October 2019, Wolfson College, University of Oxford

I organised this three-day conference and gave the opening address welcoming our speakers and presenters. Read the conference report here.

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONVENTION

11-13 September 2019, University of Manchester, UK

Paper: A Justice Deferred: Postcolonial Intentions in Speculative Fiction

EMBODYING FANTASTIKA

8-10 August 2019,  University of Lancaster, UK

Paper: “As if I was already only a machine”: Posthumanism and the politics of techno-desire and fantasy in Ken Liu’s ‘Good Hunting’

OXFORD GRADUATE ENGLISH CONFERENCE 

7 June 2019, Faculty of English, University of Oxford

Panel organised with colleagues: Transgressive Bodies in the Asian Postcolony.
Paper titled: Sites of Violence: Postcolonial Posthumanism and Genetic Modification in Bacigalupi's The Wind-Up Girl

STORIES FACULTY OF EDUCATION GRADUATE CONFERENCE 

13 March 2019, Faculty of Education, University of Oxford

Presented on access, inclusivity and mental health as these themes pertain to the work of the public engagement with research project Uncomfortable Oxford

FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION PANEL

1 February 2019, St Hilda's College, University of Oxford

I was invited to chair this panel at the St Hilda's College Feminist Salon. The panel featured Roz Kaveney, EJ Swift, Juliet McKenna and Stephanie Saulter.

BEFORE 2019

During my BA Honours in English I presented my work at the June 2016 ACLALS conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. In November that year I presented another paper at the Verbal Text and Literary Historiography conference hosted by Queen Mary University of London. In 2017 I presented papers at the EASA conference in Cape Town, at the SASGLS in Pretoria, and at EACLALS in Oviedo, Spain. In January 2018 I presented an ethnographic account of my experience in small press publishing at the Small Magazines, Literary Networks and Self-Fashioning in Africa and its Diasporas Conference at the University of Bristol, and in September that year I presented a paper at the Utopian Acts conference, hosted at Birkbeck University of London.

Media and Public Engagement with Research

The Sound of Contagion

In collaboration with colleagues at the Universitât der Kunste Berlin and the Royal Northern College of Music I am working on a project using AI and inflected by narrative theory and music composition. This work is part of the Oxford-Berlin Creative Collaborations and you can hear more about the project here. This project has been running since February 2020. 

Narrative Futures Podcast

Devised, recorded and edited the Narrative Futures podcast. It launched on 15 October 2020 and features interviews with Lauren Beukes, Mohale Mashigo, Sami Shah, Jared Shurin, Mahvesh Murad, EJ Swift, Ken Liu and Tade Thompson, as well as writing prompts by Louis Greenberg. This is a discreet series podcast and contains eight episodes, concluding on 30 November 2020.

Pandemics from Homer to Stephen King: What We Can Learn From Literary History

Published an article on pandemic literature on the academic journalism platform The Conversation, 16 March 2020. This was later translated into Japanese and included in Tokyo's Newsweek Magazine. I was also interviewed on the topic on TRT World, an English-language Turkish television programme. Link here.

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Futures Thinking:
Speculation & Percolation 

I co-conceptualised the Speculation & Percolation audio-visual reading list project in the Futures Thinking network. I also feature in Episode 5 of the series: Contradiction and Zombies, published on 26 February 2020. 

Writers Make Worlds 2017-2021

Since 2017 I have written over a dozen entries and short essays for Professor Elleke Boehmer and Dr Erica Lombard's Writers Make Worlds project, aimed at making Black British writing accessible to A-level and undergraduate students.
Key essays:
* Warsan Shire close reading
* Coverage of Patience Agbabi's  December 2019 reading event at Oxford 

* Vahni Capildeo close reading 

The Humility Gap Podcast

Bethan Willis interviewed me in late 2019 for Episode 4 of the The Humility Gap podcast on the topic of conflict management.

Uncomfortable Oxford
Literary Tour

I wrote the script and hosted the walking tour 'Uncomfortable Oxford Literary Tour' during the October 2019 IF Festival. Read about the motivations of this work on the Uncomfortable Oxford blog.

Oxford Science and Ideas Festival

I represented Futures Thinking at the 2019 Oxford Science and Ideas Festival, running an interactive research project titled 'The Noise That Keeps Me Awake At Night.'  Below is a page from the IF Festival's programme that featured a profile on my work.

The Responsibilities of the Author and the Archive: On the Award of the Bodley Medal to Sir Kazuo Ishiguro

Attended the Bodley Medal ceremony and dinner at the April 2019 Oxford Literary Festival celebrating the work of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro.  
Read here for more.

PUBLICATIONS

Forthcoming Reviews and Essays:

Utopian Studies 2021

Edited Darko Suvin's forthcoming journal introduction from his key note at the 2019 Utopian Studies Society Conference

Review of How To Run a City Like Amazon and Other Stories, edited by Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, Shannon Mattern and Joe Shaw

Review of The Future, by Nick Montfort

Extrapolation 2021 

Review of The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, by Diletta de Cristofaro

Review of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Steven Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon

Special issue of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies on ‘New Approaches to Literary Activism in the 21st Century' 2021

Position piece on Africa in Dialogue

BOOK REVIEW: NARRATIVE POWER BY KEN PLUMMER, IN THE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

July 2020

Building on his long and distinguished career working in sociological queer studies, Ken Plummer’s recent offering, Narrative Power: A Struggle for Human Value, weaves personal reflections on the role of stories in the construction of identity with critical humanist ethnographic accounts of narrative self-making. Story-telling has long been central to Plummer’s research interests. This monograph stems from interests evident in the last thirty years of Plummer’s important contributions to queer theory and critical humanist debate. From Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (1994), to Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Hope and the Humanist Imagination (2015), the last thirty-odd years of Plummer’s work are developed further in this new work under the banner of what Plummer calls “narrative actions” (p.xi). Narrative, Plummer argues, is a central framing device for the problem of ongoing human suffering and our collective failures to fully recognise and act on individual human value.

Read the rest of the review here.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF SILENCE IN BUHLE NGABA’S THE GIRL WITHOUT A SOUND IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN TERTIARY EDUCATION PROTEST

September 2017

This paper aims to read Buhle Ngaba’s The Girl Without a Sound, a children’s book available for free online, alongside readings of silence in the context of the protests against rape culture at the university currently known as Rhodes (UCKAR/Rhodes University). The allegorical power of the text in the context of a genre largely populated by white, male protagonists is significant. This paper will also consider the role of children’s books as social texts and how these can be used to impart ideologies, for better or worse. I will argue that The Girl Without a Sound resists silencing in both historical and contemporary contexts. The protagonist is a little girl with a “fluff of hair, a mouth the shape of a cherry blossom and brown pools for eyes” (Ngaba 2016), an atypical protagonist in most English-medium children’s literature industries. This paper seeks to articulate the allegorical power of The Girl Without a Sound and to read it against theories of silence, protest and the contemporary moment of student protest, particularly with regard to the protests against rape culture that took place at UCKAR in April 2016. Ultimately, the text offers an affirmation of the agential power of girls of colour, speaking in concert with calls for intersectionality in contemporary political movements.
Published in Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, special issue, Vol 29, 2017

POSTCOLONIAL WRITERS MAKE WORLDS ENTRIES

October 2017 - Present

Short author bios and overviews. Occasionally also short essays aimed at non-specialist audiences and undergraduate students.

- No Beautiful Poems About Violence, December 2019

- The Responsibilities of the Author and the Archive: On the Award of the Bodley Medal to Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, April 2019

- Close Reading of Diran Adebayo's Some Kind of Black, February 2019

- Close Reading of Abdulrazak Gurnah's By The Sea, December 2017

- Close Reading of Vahni Capildeo's 'Fire & Darkness: And Also / No Join / Like', November 2017

- Close reading of Warsan Shire’s ‘Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, March 2017

- Author profiles and oeuvre overviews: Diran Adebayo, Patience Agbabi, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gautam Malkani, Kei Miller, Warsan Shire.

LANGUAGE AND DECOLONIAL JUSTICE IN KOLEKA PUTUMA'S 'COLLECTIVE AMNESIA'

August 2018

This paper concerns the meteoric rise of Koleka Putuma’s debut poetry collection 'Collective Amnesia' in the context of decolonial activism from the perspective of an insider in Cape Town’s literary scene at the time of the collection’s success. It explores questions of language and decolonial justice in relation to and in the reading of 'Collective Amnesia,' particularly with regard to the canon and this collection’s position as a cultural text or object in South African popular culture.
Published in Moveable Type, 'Peripheries' issue, 2017/18

FEMININITIES AND FEMINISMS: TENSIONS IN (NEO)-BURLESQUE

July 2018

This paper argues for a re-labelling of Neo-burlesque, or burlesque performance art, as ‘(Neo)-burlesque’, making the case that in this politicised, largely queer space, tensions emerge in the way that performers articulate their femininity and feminist ideology in their narratives about their performance. This paper is drawn from a sociological, gender studies dissertation, including interviews and participant observation conducted with (Neo)-burlesque performers who are either a part of or are associated with The Rouge Revue Burlesque Company based in Cape Town. A Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis method is used for the analysis of the data and the main findings of this study were that contradictory discourses emerged in the participants’ articulations of their experiences. These tensions are productive because they suggest the creation of new discourses of femininity and feminism. A key finding in this project is that the subversion of femininities and invocation of feminism in the genre of (Neo)-burlesque emerges from the individual’s performance and experience, and not from the genre itself. 
Published in Track Changes, Issue: Sex, Gender and Sexuality, September 2018

TEACHING

I've tutored at undergraduate level since 2014 in subjects ranging from English I, to The Politics of Gender and Sexuality in African Contexts, to Critical Science Fiction. In 2020 I was the Teaching Assistant on two courses: Oxford's new MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation, the other a third year course on Postcolonial Literature.

2020/2021

OXFORD Teaching Assistant - Postcolonial Literature Paper 

Teaching Assistant position on the Postcolonial Literature option paper for third year students at the University of Oxford.

2020

Floreat Humanities Outreach Programme

Designed the syllabus and taught four two-hour classes for A-Level students in Hertfordshire schools on the Floreat Humanities Outreach Programme for Balliol College, Oxford. 
I teach English and Gender Studies on this programme. 

2020

SHORT STORY LECTURE

Lecture in the Short Story Lecture Circus presented at the Faculty of English, Oxford during Hilary Term.
10 Feb. 'The African Short Story.'

2019

CRITICAL SCIENCE FICTION

Designed and tutored a course on Critical Science Fiction at Stanford House for visiting students at the University of Oxford.

2017

THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN AFRICAN CONTEXTS

Tutored ±44 students in this Gender Studies course aimed at second and third year students at the University of Cape Town.

2019

20TH CENTURY LITERATURE

Designed and tutored a course on 20th Century Literature at Stanford House for visiting students at the University of Oxford.

2019

MODERNISM

Designed and tutored a course on Modernism for visiting students at Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford.

2020/2021

The Brilliant Club

Teaching an Introduction to Literary Theory course for Year 8s at Prospect School in Reading. This work is part of the outreach and access charity work of The Brilliant Club.

2020

Morrison, Modernism and MeToo

Tutored Stanford University students on two self-designed courses, one focussing on the work of Toni Morrison in the context of current  civil rights protests, and the other on the articulation of women's lives in fiction from the modernist period to 21st century dystopia.

February 2015 - November 2016

JOURNALISM AND MEDIA STUDIES I

Tutoring undergraduate students taking the JMS1 course at Rhodes University.

February 2014 - November 2016

CONVERSATIONAL FRENCH

Tutoring undergraduate students taking the French 1 Preliminary course at Rhodes University.

February 2016 - November 2016

ENGLISH I

Tutoring undergraduate students taking the English I course at Rhodes University.

2019/2020

OXFORD Teaching Assistant - Master of Studies (MSt) in COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CRITICAL TRANSLATION 

Teaching Assistant position on the new Master of Studies in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford.

2020

OXFORD Prelims 1B Approaches to Literature

Designed the supplementary reading list and taught Weeks 2, 4, 6, and  8 of the Prelims 1B course 'Approaches to Literature' at Wadham College, Oxford. 

Taught the classes and tutorials on: 
- Authority and Intentionality

- Reading Narrative

- Reading Self and Other

- Literature and Identity

2020

MODERNISM TUTORIAL & DIRECTED READING

Designed and tutored a course on Modernism for visiting students on the Stanford-in-Oxford programme. 
Designed and facilitated a directed reading on Science Fiction and Architecture.
I also run the extra-curricular programme for the visiting students from Stanford majoring or minoring in English.