March-April 2022 – I was honoured to work with staff and students at Paris-Sorbonne University, France, as a Visiting Professor.June 2022 – I participated in a symposium concerning the work of Paul Gilroy at the University of East Anglia, UK, where I gave an invited paper titled ‘Bloody Diasporas’.September 2022 – I was delighted to deliver the 2022 Kathleen Firth Lecture, titled ‘Writing Resistance and the Figure of the Trespasser’, at the University of Barcelona, Spain.I have supervised PhD theses on a wealth of topics including:Īlong with this, I have also worked as a doctoral thesis examiner in the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Italy, Australia, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Canada. My current research activities concern migration and mobility amid the prohibitions of twenty-first-century globality, with a particular focus on transcultural adoptees, elite sporting figures and documented migrants in world cities. I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to support this research. I am on the editorial boards of a number of important journals in postcolonial studies – Moving Worlds, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, New Literatures Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature - and I have guest-edited two issues of Kunapipi(XXI, 2, 1999, and XXV, 1, 2003). Farrell, which concerns one of my favourite novelists, while in 2014 Bloomsbury published my co-edited collection The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction which includes my essay on Black British writing in the seventies. Naipaul. I maintain a healthy general interest in postwar British literature and the novel in general. In 2007, Northcote House published my book J. I have published in the field of Caribbean and black British writing, with particular focus on the work of Caryl Phillips, Derek Walcott and V. I am also interested in critical theories of the postcolonial - my first book, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester University Press, second edition, 2010) introduces many of the key concepts in the field and considers their application to the reading of literature. I have also edited the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Routledge, 2007), which engages with the histories, cultures, theories and key figures of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Hispanic postcolonial contexts.

Previously I have published Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004) which explores how London has been reimagined by a variety of post-war writers, while my co-edited collection The Revision of Englishness (Manchester University Press, 2004) considers the ways in which Englishness has been imaginatively reconsidered by different kinds of writers and film-makers. I have also contributed many scholarly essays to academic journals and books concerning postcolonial, diasporic and transcultural literatures. It attends to the sorry histories of severance and sundering which adoption always exposes, while addressing the transgressive and transformative possibilities which thinking through adoption makes available to all. I shape a new concept of 'adoptive being' from these possibilities and explore the new forms of transpersonal relations and modes of personhood that transcultural adoption texts may prefigure beyond the usual lines of biogenetic, racial or cultural filiation.Īdoption writing remains a key research priority and passion of mine. I am co-editor (with Emily Hipchen) of the new Ohio State University Press series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture, and I am also a member of the editorial board of the international journal Adoption and Culture. My book, Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015), explores fiction, film and memoir writing concerning the adoption of children across the lines of culture, race and nation. I work primarily in the field of postcolonial studies, and have particular interests in transcultural adoption writing and representations of diasporic and once-colonised locations.

In May 2022 I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Turku, Finland, in recognition of my contribution to postcolonial studies. I have also been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC), Faculty of Arts, University of Utrecht, Netherlands (2009), a Transatlantic Forum Scholar at Washington University in St Louis, USA (2014), a Visiting Researcher at the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2019), and Visiting Professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (2022). I was raised by Scottish parents in Manchester, UK, before arriving at the University of Leeds in 1987 as a student of English literature. My first academic post was as Lecturer in English at Southampton, before returning to Leeds as a staff member in 1996. I was promoted to Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures in May 2010.

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