The English Department is delighted to welcome five new permanent lecturers who have joined the Department of English this September. They bring new research and teaching expertise in creative writing (poetry), Caribbean literatures and cultures, twentieth century and contemporary American literature, twentieth century and contemporary women’s writing, and world literatures in English.
Poet and critic Carrie Etter joins us from Bath Spa University. She will be contributing mainly to Creative Writing teaching and supervision. Since completing her PhD at the University of California at Irvine, Carrie has published four poetry collections, most recently The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren; US: Station HIll, 2018). She has also published eight poetry chapbooks, short stories, essays, and reviews. Carrie specialises in how contemporary poetry can articulate trauma through innovation in form, and current projects include verse novels on the Trojan women of classical mythology.
Natalie Ferris joins Bristol from Durham University as a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century women’s writing. She completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2017, and held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2018-21). Her publications include Abstraction in Post-war British Fiction 1945-1980, which came out with Oxford University Press earlier this year, special issues of Textual Practice and Modernist Cultures and articles in journals including Modernist Cultures, Modernism/Modernity Print +, and Women: A Cultural Review. She is working on a new book on dynamism and deception in post-war poetry and design, and a co-edited book Women, Modernism and Intelligence Work. She also publishes on contemporary art and visual cultures.
Doseline Kiguru joins the Department as Lecturer in World Literatures in English, after 18 months as a Research Associate on Professor Madhu Krishnan’s research project Literary Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her primary research interests is postcolonial print and digital cultures with a focus on African literary and cultural production mechanisms. Her recent publications include essays in the Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture (2022), African Literatures as World Literature (2022), Routledge Handbook of African Literature (2019), and an article on mapping the postcolonial African city through prizewinning urban stories in English Studies in Africa (2022).
Michael Kalisch is a specialist in American fiction and joins us from the University of Oxford, where he was a Departmental Lecturer; he received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019. His book, The Politics of Male Friendship in Contemporary American Fiction, was published by Manchester University Press in 2021. He is currently working on a book entitled The Midcentury Minor Novel, alongside a longer-term project on literary failure. He joins Bristol initially as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, and on completing that project will take up his lectureship in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature.
Leighan Renaud returns as Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures after winning a Bristol Teaching Award for her teaching in the Department in 2020-21. She completed her PhD at the University of Leicester in 2018), and is completing her first book on Motherhood, Mothering and Marronage: Representing Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature. She has published articles in Journal of West Indian Literature and History Workshop Online, and has chapters forthcoming in edited collections Women and Water: Exploring Global Portrayals of the Feminine (Routledge) and Cultures of London (Bloomsbury).
