Welcome

The Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group, founded in 1992, represents an active community of scholars who work on a wide range of individual and collaborative projects, both within The Open University and in partnership with other academics and organisations. The group is organised as a research collective, and its activities are co-ordinated by its current director, Alex Tickell. 

The predominant focus of the group is on Anglophone literatures from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and forms of colonial and neo-colonial experience represented in these literary traditions, but group members’ interests also encompass the writing of the Caribbean and South-Asian diasporas; colonial cultural and literary history; anti-colonial political thought, and wider global literary systems. Members of the group also work on poetry, film and drama, anthropology, postcolonial theory, and the publishing and reception of literature in the post-colony.

In the past five years members of the group have directed and participated in several externally-funded AHRC and Leverhulme Trust projects (see Projects), organised numerous conferences and seminar series (see Events) and disseminated its research through the international journals incuding Wasafiri, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. In the past twenty-five years the group has published extensively and has shaped the field of postcolonial studies.

Follow the History link for more information about the Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group.

The aim of the Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group is to facilitate the study of colonial and postcolonial writings and expand the boundaries of the discipline through the group’s collaborative emphasis on history, material contexts and archival research. Members of the group share a common interest in the material cultures of post/colonial literature, and are currently working on aspects of anti-colonial political discourses, civil society, urban narrative and collective biography.