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.

 

British Chinese Studies Network (BCSN)

The British Chinese Studies Network is a UK-based international network supporting academic research, creative work and public engagement relating to the history and culture of British Chinese communities and individuals.

Visit the BCSN website for more information.

News

City Fictions of the New India by Alex Tickell promotional card. Including a 30% promotional code: AAFLYG6

City Fictions of the New India available for pre-order

Alex Tickell’s Leverhulme Trust project monograph City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrastructure, Citizenship, will be published in April 2025 and is available for pre-order. A discount code is available on the attached flyer.

21st November 2024
The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals book cover

Launch of the Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals

Co-edited by a long-standing member of the Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group, David Johnson, the Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals redefines research on small-press publications across the colonial public sphere.

18th September 2024

Publication of Angela Eyre's Kipling in India

Angela Eyre contributed to a Routledge publication on Kipling edited by Jan Montefiore and Harish Trivedi: Kipling in India, India in Kipling. Her article is titled 'Mind the gap: Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani words in Kipling’s Kim'. (March 2021)

16th March 2023
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Heer Ranja DVD cover

Film cover of Masood Parvez’s adaptation of the popular Punjabi romance Heer Ranja released in Pakistan in 1970. In the same year a Hindi version, Heer Ranjha was released in India. The latter, directed by Chetan Anand, featured a screenplay entirely in verse: a reminder of the famous poetic version of the story by the great Punjabi Sufi poet Waris Shah, written in 1766.

Image Copyright: Wikipedia

Contact us

Alex Tickell
Department of English
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK76AA

Tel: +44-1908-652092
Email the team