Academia
In the not so distant past I used to teach and speak at conferences, seminars and public events.
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
CANCELLED 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.
AMERICAN 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’
ASSOCIATION OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 2019 CONFERENCE
15-19 July 2019, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Paper: Mouths, Mothers and Others – Renegotiating transnational migrant identity in Warsan Shire’s poetry.
UTOPIAN STUDIES SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE
1-5 July 2019, Monash University in Prato, Tuscany
Paper: 'That Path Brought Us To Ruin': Overcoming Anthropogenic Disaster in Speculative Fiction.
Panel: Dystopic futures: women writing ecological disaster from margin to centre
Chairing: Margaret Atwood session.
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
TRANSGRESSING BOUNDARIES IN SCIENCE FICTION
25-27 April 2019, Maison Française, University of Oxford
Paper: Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism: Anti-Anthropogenic Narrative in Queer Space Opera 'Wayfarers'.
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.
PUBLICATIONS
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 published May 2021
Review of AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Steven Cave, Kanta Dihal and Sarah Dillon, reviewed published July 2021.
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, published July 2021.
BOOK REVIEW: NARRATIVE POWER BY KEN PLUMMER, IN THE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
July 2020
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, one undergraduate, the other a Masters programme at Oxford. I have experience teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels, offering support and supervision to final year and Masters students alike since 2020.
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.
2020/2021
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.
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.
2020-2021
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.'
2019/2020
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.
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.
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.
April 2019 - June 2019
POSTCOLONIAL POSTHUMANISM
Designed and tutored a short course on Postcolonial Posthumanism at Stanford House for visiting students at the University of Oxford.
February 2016 - November 2016
ENGLISH I
Tutoring undergraduate students taking the English I course at Rhodes University.
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.