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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
The Centre
Kent is distinctive among British Universities in having attended to postcolonial literatures and British Black and Asian writing from its foundation in 1964. It was the first University to offer a BA in African and Caribbean Studies, and now offers a BA in English with Postcolonial Literatures. It has hosted major international conferences, including the Silver Jubilee Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Societies (ACLALS) in 1989, sponsored a leading critical and creative journal in Wasafiri, and welcomed many visiting writers and scholars from all over the world, including Africa, India, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
In 1994, the Centre developed out of these activities and gave rise to new initiatives. Based in the School of English, it runs a long-established MA in Postcolonial Studies and, with the extension of its research facilities, it has attracted and supported an on-going community of postgraduate doctoral students. It organises a regular research seminar, talks by visiting scholars and writers, colloquiums and conferences. Past conferences include: ‘Terror: its Representation and its Politics’; ‘Islands: Histories and Representations’; ‘Inscriptions of Identity in the Discourse of Arab Women’ and ‘Connecting Cultures’. It also hosts annually a writer-in-residence funded by the Charles Wallace Trust. In addition to readings of work by the visiting writers from India, the Centre has staged events with other well-known creative writers, including: Nurrudhin Farrah; Caryl Phillips; Pauline Melville, Romesh Gunsekera and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Members of the Centre act as consultants for Routledge’s Postcolonial Research series.
Between 1998 and 2006 it produced an internationally distributed newsletter, Postcolonial Forum, edited by the Centre's research students. This will soon be relaunched in electronic format.
Contact:
Dr Alex Padamsee
Director of the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Research
a.padamsee@kent.ac.uk
The School of English
University of Kent
Canterbury CT2 7NX
Kent
UK