Dr Caitlin Vandertop

Associate Professor

Email: Caitlin dot Vandertop at warwick dot ac dot uk

5.45 Faculty of Arts Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

About

I joined the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in 2019, after teaching for three years at the University of the South Pacific's Laucala campus in Fiji. Before this I was based at universities in Hong Kong, Australia, Canada and the UK.

Research Interests

I work in modern world-literary and postcolonial studies, with a special interest in anglophone writing from the Pacific Ocean region. My research has focused on the representation of colonial environments, from the port city to the plantation. I am also interested in the connections between colonial histories of literature, cultural property and the extractive industries.

My book Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth Century Literature (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the first sustained, comparative study of the British colonial city in literature. It shows how key texts and movements associated with modernism drew on the uneven, strangely superimposed landscapes of British colonial cities. A short article introducing the project can be found here.

My current book project, provisionally titled After the Pacific Pastoral, charts the trajectory of the island novel from the mid nineteenth century to the decolonisation period as it responds to the ‘opening’ of the Pacific Ocean, and its marine oils, manures and minerals, as a resource frontier for global agriculture.

I am also co-editor of Commodities and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2025): this traces a literary history of the commodity as a concept, bringing together chapters on the aesthetics, genres and narrative 'lives' of global commodities such as coffee, sugar, opium, guano, oil and lithium. A short article introducing the project can be found here.

Outside Warwick, I have worked as a commissioning editor for Literature Compass (2020-2025) and I serve as reviews editor for the open-access journal Postcolonial Text (2019-present).

Teaching

EN2L4 Literature in Theory

EN942 Fundamentals of World Literature

EN2B6 Literary and Cultural Theory

EN123 Modern World Literatures

Selected Publications

Modernism in the metrocolony: urban cultures of empire in twentieth-century literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Review in the Times Literary Supplement here.
‘Reading Commodities: An Introduction’ and ‘Guano and the Fictions of Fertile Islands’, in Commodities and Literature, ed. by Sudesh Mishra and Caitlin Vandertop (Cambridge UP, Critical Concepts series, October 2025).
‘Pirating the archive: Timothy Mo’s opium history, oceanic Orientalism, and print cargo at sea’, Global Nineteenth Century Studies (in press, forthcoming 2026).
'Gothic Inheritances in Oceania: Problems of Origins and Ownership', in Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumpsty (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic (in press, forthcoming 2026).
'"The land has eyes and teeth": copra plantations, gothic fertility, and literary genealogies in Oceania', Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, special issue 'World Literature and Commodity Frontiers' (October 2025). Open access link here.
‘(Dis)inheriting Stevenson: inheritance crisis, postcolonial periodization, and literary property in the Pacific’, in Paulo de Medeiros and Sandra Ponzanesi (eds.), Postcolonial Theory in Crisis (De Gruyter, 2024), 173-88. Open access link here.
'Unearthing phosphate in the Pacific pastoral', ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 31. 2 (2024), 268–289, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac059 https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac059Link opens in a new window
‘Floating cities, imperial bodies: reading water in Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession (1986) and Xi Xi’s ‘Strange Tales of a Floating City’ (1986), in John Parham (ed.), The Literature and Politics of Environment (Boydell and Brewer, 2023), 29-48. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805430735.003
'"A swamp becomes the capital": urban ecologies of empire in Fiji', Shima 16.1 (2022), 45-60, 10.21463/shima.152Link opens in a new window
'Ghosts of the plantation: sugar, narrative energetics and gothic ecologies in Fiji', Green Letters 24.2 (2020), 155-168 10.1080/14688417.2020.1772847Link opens in a new window
‘Architectures of the invisible hand: envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad’s Singapore’, Textual Practice 34:2 (2020): 127-45.
'Opium cities, carbon routes: world-ecological prehistory in Amitav Ghosh's Hong Kong', Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.4 (2019), 527-40. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2018.1562491
‘Peripheral urbanism, imperial maturity and the crisis of development in Lao She's Rickshaw and Mulk Raj Anand’s Coolie’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 53.2 (2019), 369-85. https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-7738542
“The earth seemed unearthly’: capital, world-ecology and enchanted nature in Conrad's Heart of Darkness', Modern Fiction Studies, special issue 'Anthropocene Fictions' 64:4 (2018), 680-700.
'The colonies in concrete: Walter Benjamin, urban form, and the dreamworlds of empire', Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 18:5 (2016), 709-29.
‘Travel literature and the infrastructural unconscious’, in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 26-44.

Office Hours

On leave Autumn 2025

Teaching

EN2L4 Literature in Theory