
Dr Alexandra Reza
BA (Cantab.), MPhil (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)
Expertise
I am a writer and lecturer in comparative literatures and cultures working in French, Portuguese and English. I am also a cultural broadcaster and translator.
Current positions
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Cultures
Department of French
Contact
Press and media
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Biography
After my undergraduate degree in English Literature at Cambridge University, I worked first for a think tank with a focus on British politics, and then as a political analyst focussed on elections in Africa. During this time I undertook research, analysis and reporting in Guinea, Senegal, Brazil, Tanzania, Nigeria, Gabon and South Africa. I also worked as a reporter for Reuters. In 2013, I returned to university and graduated with an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford University in 2015.
Research interests
My research explores cultural production in the conjuncture of decolonization and its afterlives. The histories of European empires are not spatially, culturally, politically, or linguistically hermetic. My work proposes that the overlaps between them, and the connections between those who resisted them, can help us re-imagine the spatial and aesthetic co-ordinates of culture and politics in literary and cultural studies. Not only did anticolonial writing and art remake the world, but it can help us, today, to contest and re-order the fixed coordinates of colonial, nationalist and post-imperial spatial imaginaries.
I have written widely about the connections between poetics and politics in the conjuncture of decolonization. In 'Stepping out of line in independent Conakry', I analyse aesthetics of dissent in 1960s Conakry. My article 'Reading the radio-magazine: culture, decolonization and the PAIGC’s Rádio Libertação' examines the multilingual ‘radio magazine’ as one inheritor of mid-century journal networks. My first monograph, Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire (OUP: 2024), analyses the transnational geographies of literary journals that connected francophone, lusophone and anglophone anticolonial writers in the 1950s and 1960s. The book considers the particularity of the literary journal as a literary form and traces the history of changing anticolonial ideas about the stakes of writing, reading and translation.
In 2023, with Dr. Musab Younis at Queen Mary University of London, I guest-editing a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly entitled 'Southern Questions: Theory at Europe’s Colonial Frontiers'.
As a 'BBC New Generation thinker', I have made a number of radio programmes drawing on my research, for example 'Colonial Papers' and 'I arrive without leaving – the story of women surrealist poets'. I have also published broadly in long-form literary and political journalism, for instance in The London Review of Books, New Left Review, Le Monde Diplomatique, Dissent Magazine and The Times Literary Supplement. I am also a translator of poetry and prose from French and Portuguese into English.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Sarah Maldoror: the radical lens of anticolonial film
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of FrenchDates
01/09/2023 to 31/08/2026
Publications
Selected publications
03/04/2022I arrive without leaving - The Story of Women Surrealist Poets (BBC Radio Feature)
Reading the radio-magazine
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
Anticolonialism in the Present Tense
South Atlantic Quarterly
Recent publications
22/02/2024Anticolonial Form
Anticolonial Form
Anticolonialism in the Present Tense
South Atlantic Quarterly
I arrive without leaving - The Story of Women Surrealist Poets (BBC Radio Feature)
BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking: Frantz Fanon
BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking: Maryse Condé's writing
Teaching
I would be delighted to hear from graduate students who want to work on any area of my research.