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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Professor Caroline Rooney
(BA, Cape Town; PhD, Oxford)
| Professor |
|
|---|---|
| Phone: 01227 827948 | Office: NC 3 |
| Email: c.r.rooney@kent.ac.uk | on leave 2009-12 |
Interests
Caroline Rooney was born in Zimbabwe. She studied as an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town before taking up a Beit Fellowship to engage in doctoral research at Oxford University. She works and publishes mainly in the area of postcolonial studies, focusing on liberation struggles and their aftermaths, postcolonial theory and diverse philosophical traditions, religious extremism and political authoritarianism, literary and political uses of language, and cross-cultural articulations of gender and sexuality. She is particularly interested in Southern African writing, North African writing, and contemporary Arab writing, and has an interest in sea and desert studies across this range of work. Her book Decolonising Gender (Routledge, 2007), offers a critique of the performative reifications of language and gender from a postcolonial perspective, showing how poetic realist writing endeavours to engage in non-essentialist affirmations of the collective beyond identity politics. Her book before that, African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000), explores the positing of an unthinkable Africa in colonial discourse and further explores how African literature reflects and may be inflected by a consciousness of African philosophy.
She has long-standing theoretical interests in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, with articles in this area published in the Oxford Literary Review and Angelaki. She also works on the visual arts and music in relation to literature, and has co-written a book with the artist Vera Dieterich, Book Unbinding (Artwords Press, 2005). Her current work is on globalisation, terror and fundamentalism.
She is currently a Fellow on the ESRC Global Uncertainties scheme with a major research project on Radical Distrust.
Research Supervision
Caroline Rooney has supervised PhD theses on: contemporary Arab women's writing and performance; Egyptian women's writing and nationalism; psychoanalysis and the gothic; the imperial uncanny; Palestinian literature; and J.M. Coetzee and the politics of humiliation. Her current research students are working on: Algerian literature; global youth culture; and Zimbabwean literature.
Professional Activities
She serves on the editorial boards of Atlantis, The Oxford Literary Review and Postgraduate English, and acts as consultant editor for the Routledge postcolonial monograph series. Conferences she has been involved in co-organising include: Terror: Its Politics and its Representation; Europe and the Assumption of Democracy; The Postcolonial Caravan; Cultural Memory: Forgetting to Remember and Remembering to Forget; and Global Youth Culture (forthcoming). She is the Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research and convenor of the MA in Postcolonial Studies. She is also the Director of KIASH and serves on CIAS.
Teaching
I am the Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research and convene the Postcolonial MA. I teach:
Graduate
Undergraduate
Selected Publications
Books:
- Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism, co-edited with Kaori Nagai (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
- Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (Routledge, 2007)
- Book Unbinding: The Ontological Stain, co-written with Vera Dieterich (Artwords Press, 2005)
- African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000)
Editorships of Special Issues of Journals
- The Oxford Literary Review, 19 (1997). Special issue on Knowledge, Learning and Migration.
- The Oxford Literary Review, 22 (2001), with Andrew Bennett et. al. Special issue on Monstrism.
- The Journal of European Studies, 34.1/2 (March/June 2004), with Rob White. Special double issue on Claire Denis's Beau Travail.
Editorships of learned journals:
- The Oxford Literary Review, 19 (1997). Special issue on Knowledge, Learning and Migration, 3-162.
- The Oxford Literary Review, 22 (2001), with Andrew Bennett et. al. (2001), 5-171.
- The Journal of European Studies, 34.1/2 (March/ June 2004), with Rob White. Special issue on Claire Denis's Beau Travail, 5-188.
Some Recent Chapters and Articles:
- 'What's the Point of Killing a Poet? Poetic Fidelity in Algerian White' in Assia Djebar and Cultural Memory, ed. Ana de Medeiros (Peter Lang, 2009)
- 'Derrida and Said: Ships That Pass in the Night' in Edward Said, the Literary, Political and Social World, ed. Ranjan Ghosh (Routledge, 2008)
- 'What is the Oceanic?' in Angelaki, 12.2( August 2007)
- 'Narratives of Southern African Farms' in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
- 'The Scriptless Text' with Vera Dieterich in art-omma (online, 2005)
- 'Against the Corruption of Language: The Poetry of Chenjerai Hove' in Versions of Zimbabwean Literature: New Approaches to Literature and Culture, ed. Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac (Weaver Press, 2005)
- 'From the Universal to the Cosmic: The Surroundings of Beau Travail' in The Journal of European Studies, 34.1/2 (March/ June 2004)