School of English

Dr Kaori Nagai

Honorary Research Associate

MagrittePh.D. (Kent)

I mainly work in the field of postcolonial studies, and I specialize in colonial discourses of the 19th century and early 20th centuries. In my book, Empire of Analogies, I looked at the recurrent pairing of India and Ireland in this period, and I analysed this through the work of Rudyard Kipling. In my recent project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I researched on the Esperanto movement in Britain in the first decades of the 20th century, to identify how this ‘trans-national’ space intersected with contemporaneous discourses of the Empire, and how Celtic and other marginal identities sought to express themselves through the international language movement. I have recently done much work on Kipling, including ‘Kipling Conference 2007’ which I co-organised with Prof. Jan Montefiore, and a collection of essays on Kipling, co-edited with Prof. Caroline Rooney, entitled Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism. My interest in critical theory, psychoanalysis and theories of writing led to the organisation of a conference entitled ‘Dream Writing’ with Dr. Sarah Wood in 2005. I am currently looking at Kipling’s The Jungle Books, and at the representation of animals in (post)colonial discourses more widely. I am one of the conference organisers of the forthcoming international conference ‘Cosmopolitan Animals’, October 2012.

Cosmopolitan Animals, forthcoming conference

Selected Publications
[Monograph]  Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (Cork UP, 2006)
[Edited Collections]

  • Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism, co-edited with Caroline Rooney (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
  • A special issue on Dream Writing, Journal of European Studies 38:4 (2008). 

[Book chapters]

  •  ‘‘’Tis optophone which ontophanes”:  race, the modern and Irish revivalism:’, in Len Platt (ed.), Race and Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  • ‘Kipling and Gender’, in Howard Booth (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  • ‘Ex-Patriotism’, co-written with Ben Grant, in Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai (eds), Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
  • ‘“The New Bilingualism”: Cosmopolitanism in the era of Esperanto’ in Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru and Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds), Re-routing the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium (Routledge, 2010), 48-59.
  • ‘Quotations and boundaries: Kipling’s Stalky & Co.’, in Janet Montefiore (ed.), In Time's Eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

[Journal articles]

  • ‘God and His Doubles: Kipling and Conrad’s “The Man who would be King”’, in Julia Kuehn and Tamara Wagner (eds), Re-Imagining the Victorian Orient, Critical Survey 21:1 (Spring 2009): 88-102.
  •  ‘Dream Shibboleth’, Dream Writing, in Kaori Nagai (ed.), Journal of European Studies 38: 4 (2008), 421-30.
  •  ‘The Writing on the Wall: The Commemoration of the Indian Mutiny in the Delhi Durbar, and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Little House at Arrah’’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7:1 (2005), 84-96.
  • ‘Florence Nightingale and the Irish Uncanny’, Feminist Review 77 (August 2004), 26-45.
  •  ‘A Harem in the Home: The Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill and the Colonisation of the English Hearth’, in Robert Dingley, Jennifer McDonell and Catherine Waters (eds), Special Issue: ‘The Erotic Empire: Sexuality, Gender and Power in Britain and Beyond’, AVSJ (Australasian Victorian Studies Journal) 8 (December 2002), 45-59.

 [Other] 

  • An introduction and notes to Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills (Penguin Classics, 2011)
  • An introduction to Abe Kobo, Face of Another (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006), v-xi.
  • Appendices to Lyn Innes’s An Introduction to Post-Colonial Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2007) [glossary, biographies of selected postcolonial writers, and brief colonial histories: Australia, the Caribbean, East Africa, India and Pakistan, Ireland, West Africa], 233-273.
Contact details
Address: School of English, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX.
Fax: 01227-827001
Email K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk

 

 

School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX

The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T: +44 (0)1227 823054

Last Updated: 21/07/2011