Projects

Emperor Akbar conversing with Jesuit missionaries. Indian School, (16th century)

Private Collection/ De Agostini Picture Library/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

The Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group is currently involved in a major research network project (a collaboration between The Open University and the University of Liverpool) on British Chinese history and narrative culture.

Please visit the British Chinese Studies Network website for more information.

Group members have been successful in leading or acting as co-investigators on a number of major research projects funded by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust in recent years. For full details on each of these projects and their outputs, follow the links below:

• City Fictions of the New India: Literature, Infrustrature, Citizenship (2022-23)
• Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures and Literature (2014-16)
• Beyond the Frame: Indian British Connections (2010-13)
• Hyphenated Cultures: Contemporary British-Jewish Theatre
• Archiving Britain’s Global South Asian Heritage: Making Britain Continues (2010-11)
• Making Britain: Visions of Home and Abroad (1870-1950) (2007-2010)
• The Indian Ocean: Narratives of Literature and Law (2007-2010)
• The Colonial and Postcolonial History of the Book (2004-07)

The Postcolonial Literatures Research Group hosted a large-scale editorial project on the History of the Anglophone Novel in South and South East Asia between 2015-19.

Find out more about The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 10, The Novel in South and South-East Asia since 1945 project.

The Postcolonial Literatures Research Group is active in establishing collaborations nationally and internationally. These range from academic connections with universities in South Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, and include on-going non-HEI partnerships with the British Library, the British Council, the Arts Council, the Southbank Centre and several other institutions which bring literature to the public. The group continues to share its research with other groups at SOAS, Kings, UCL (and the IES), Oxford and Oxford Brookes, Southampton, Sussex and Kent. In addition it often works across disciplines with other research centres at the Open University.

A non-funded long-term project associated with the group is the Edinburgh University Press series Postcolonial Literary Studies. Members of the group also have editorial connections with a number of leading scholarly journals in the field including Atlantis, Wasafiri, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.