James Graham
Senior Lecturer in Media and Literary Studies
Department: School of Arts and Education
Contact
- Telephone: 5048
- E-mail: J.Graham@mdx.ac.uk
Qualifications
PGCertHE (Middlesex) BA Hons English Literature (Warwick) MA English Literature (Warwick) PhD Comparative Literary Studies (Warwick)
Research Interests
My current research project aims at understanding and critiquing the spectacular (re)emergence of ‘world literature’ in the Anglo-American academy. I have given a number of papers on this subject, with specific reference to the writing and reception of ‘minor’ writers from southern Africa: Charles Mungoshi, Brian Chikwava and Ivan Vladislavić. I convene the ‘Spectres of World Literature’ research network and organised the symposium ‘Ghosts, Mediums, Materialities: Reading, Writing and Reception in World Literature’ (2010), the conference ‘Spectres of World Literature’ (2011) and am editing the Journal of Postcolonial Writing special edition ‘Postcolonial Studies and World Literature’ (forthcoming, December 2012). My work on the 'problem' of world literature has developed out of more specific interests in postcolonial literary and cultural studies, in particular the representation of land and landscape in southern African writing; the aesthetics of postcolonial urbanism; and the rise and fall of ‘multiculturalism’ in recent British film and fiction. Outputs form these projects include a monograph, Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa (Routledge, 2009), as well as articles and book chapters that explore: gender and abjection in Zimbabwean fiction; migration and mobility in representations of Johannesburg; Ivan Vladislavić’s writings on art and the postcolonial city; the representation of the southern African ecosystem in Nadine Gordimer’s recent fiction; a number of contributions in the Oxford Companion to Black British History; the global city as a purgatorial space in Stephen Frears’s film Dirty Pretty Things; Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and the ‘marketing multiculturalism’ debate; the relationship between branding and cultural identity in Britain after Thatcher and New Labour.
Teaching Interests
I have taught and developed a range of modules in media and literary studies, including: Modes of Reading; Literature in the Modern World; Postcolonial Bodies; Film and Fiction of the Thatcher Years; Film and Fiction of the Blair Years; London: Diaspora and Difference; Early Twentieth Century Literature; Late Twentieth Century Literature; Writing the City; Media for Advertising and Marketing; Marketing: PR and Promotion. Supervision Kerstin Mueller. The Revival of a City. Reimagining New Orleans through US Television and its Media Paratexts (October 2011 - present). Kerstin's was one of only three AHRC scholarships allocated for PhD research in cultural studies in 2011.
