English Department | Columbian College of Arts & Sciences site logo

Department of English

Columbian College of Arts & Sciences

British and Postcolonial Studies, 1700 to the present

The area of strength in British and Postcolonial Studies spans the field of modern British literature and culture post 1700, often with attention to questions about Empire and its aftermath. It has especial strengths in gender in British Literature, eighteenth century literature of the British Empire, social history, aesthetics and photography, nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature and the visual arts, and colonial and postcolonial literature and cinema.

Seminars often focus on special topics as well as surveys of literary and cultural themes in the field of British and Postcolonial Literature and Culture. Graduate courses engage a theoretically and historically attentive approach to a wide range of materials, both canonical and non-canonical, in literature as well as visual culture. Seminars often complement and connect with those offered in the MEM and ALC areas through theoretical intersections around transnational approaches, and the analysis of gender and race.

Faculty:

  • Kavita Daiya is the author of Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Temple UP, 2008), which dwells on literary and film representations of ethnic violence and migration from the subcontinent and its diasporas. Her research engages the field of feminist colonial and postcolonial studies with American studies. Her specializations include imperialism, nationalism, gender and sexuality, public culture, postcolonial cinema and immigration. She is affiliated faculty in the Women’s Studies Program, and working on her second book on refugee narratives. She also directs a Digital Humanities video archive project www.1947Partition.org.
  • Daniel DeWispelare is the author of Multilingual Subjects: On Standard English, Its Speakers, and Others in the Long Eighteenth Century (UPenn, 2017). His research focuses on language politics, translation, and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
  • Maria Frawley is the author of A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (1994); Anne Bronte (1996); and, most recently, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2004). She also prepared an edition of Harriet Martineau's Life in the Sick-Room for Broadview Press (2003). She authored the chapter on the Victorian Era for English Literature in Context (Cambridge, 2008). Her research interests include nineteenth-century medical history as well as print culture and histories of reading and authorship. Her current book project is titled Keywords of Jane Austen's Fiction.
  • Jennifer Green-Lewis teaches courses on British fiction (approx.1840-1930), and its relationship to the visual arts. She is the author of Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Cornell, 1996), Teaching Beauty in Delillo, Woolf, and Merrill (with Margaret Soltan; Palgrave, 2008), as well as numerous reviews and essays on nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature and photography. Most recently, she has authored the chapter on photography in the forthcoming handbook from Oxford on Victorian Literature (2011). She is currently completing a book on Victorian photography and the invention of postmodern memory.
  • Tara Ghoshal Wallace's books include an edition of Frances Burney's A Busy Day, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority, and Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-Century Literature. She is co-editor of Women Critics, 1680-1820, and has published articles on Austen, Burney, Dr. Johnson, Tobias Smollett, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Walter Scott. Her research interests include British imperialism and national identity, literature and public history, and gender studies.