Group members

Kelsi Delaney

Kelsi’s research explores the cultural politics of craft in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean poetry. She also currently work on the AHRC-funded project, ‘Representing Gender-Based Violence: Literature, Performance and Activism in the Anglophone Caribbean’, where she considers representations of GBV in Caribbean poetry and spoken word, as well as contributing to interdisciplinary research on how arts-based methodologies might be employed in GBV education and activism.

Erin Forbes

Erin specializes in African American and U.S. literature of the long 19th century, with interests in the intersections between race and environment, aesthetics, late 18th-century yellow fever epidemics, crime writing / the popular periodical press, the penitentiary, slave insurgencies/revolts, and literature and religion, especially the Spiritualist movement. 

Josie Gill

Josie’s research interests include black British and Caribbean writing, African American literature, science and medical humanities, fiction, life writing and memoir. She is the author of Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Billy Kahora

Billy is currently working on a multi-vocal novel that attempts to capture a key political moment in Kenya during a Constitutional referendum. Based on this, his research interests are narrative voice, novelistic societal registers and multi-vocality. He is also interested in creative writing teaching histories and pedagogies and involved in past (and ongoing events) on the African continent around this.

Madhu Krishnan

Madhu’s current project involves looking at how creative practice, literary activism and translation produce understandings of the social, including racial and ethnic identities, as well as how this might enable new, if contested, modes of solidarity and group identity.

Emma Parker

Emma’s research interests include modern, contemporary, and postcolonial literature, autobiographical writing, and the cultural legacies of the British Empire. Her first book Life Writing and the End of Empire is due out with Bloomsbury in late 2023

Tara Puri

Tara is currently working on Indian women’s magazines in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. More broadly, she’s interested in feminist literary history, Victorian dress and material culture, literary representations of work and leisure, and discussions of women’s education and citizenship in late colonial India.

Leighan Renaud

Leighan Renaud’s research focuses on Caribbean literature, and she is often interested in the racial dynamics at play on islands that are often described as “cultural melting pots”.