Dr Roxanne Douglas

Roxanne is a Teaching Fellow for the English and Comparative Literary Studies Department for 2026/27. In 2024-2026 she was a Pathways to Knowledge Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, where she worked on her second monograph project, It's the End of the World As She Knows It, which uses the motley crew and overwhelm/shipwrecks as a frame for a world-literary reading women's apocalyptic writing from across the world .

Her research adjoins feminist materialisms with genre and world-literary studies, primarily in the gothic, horror, the weird, and science fiction.

Teaching 2026/27

Modes of Reading

Literature in Theory

Dissertation supervision

Women in World-Literature

Roxanne was the co-organiser of the Women in World(-)Literature conference in 2022 with Dr Fiona Farnsworth, which asked 'in “a singular modernity, combined and uneven”, what is specific about women’s experiences; and how are these specificities registered in world(-)literature?'. Since then, Roxanne has led a special issue on Women in World-Literature for the Journal of World Systems Research, the journal's first special issue dedicated to literary studies; alongside an edited collection, Women in World-Literature, which will be published by Liverpool University Press in 2027.

The follow up conference, 'Women in World-Literature: Climate, Crisis, and Contagion', Link opens in a new window focused on how the ecological and health impacts of the world-system are implicated by gender. An edited collection of the same name is under contract with Liverpool University Press.

Roxanne now chairs the Women in World-Literature networkLink opens in a new window. You can sign up to the Network's newsletter here.

Selected publications

Feminist Gothic, Critical Irrealism and Arab Women’s World-Literature: ‘Living with Ghosts’ - Palgrave Macmillan's ‘New Comparisons in World Literature’ series is out now.

Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film, and Media. Edited collection, Bloomsbury.
Co-editor alongside Giulia Champion and Stephen Shapiro.

'Scheherazade and Bluebeard: Transnational Gothics and Bloody Chambers in Arab Women’s Writing'. Chapter for The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic Literature. Edited by Rebecca Duncan and Rebekah Cumpsty. Cambridge University Press.

Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work
Special journal issue for Journal of World-Systems Research. Spring/Summer 2024 Issue. Editor, and author of two papers:

‘A Woman’s Work: Making Something Out of Nothing - Introduction to the Special Issue’ doi 10.5195/JWSR.2024.1232

‘A Woman’s Work is Never Done: Exhaustion and Alienation - A Concluding Coda’ doi 10.5195/JWSR.2024.1239.

S/oil: the Energetic Potential of the Dead in Arab Women’s Petrogothic Writing. Journal of Postcolonial Writing. May 2026. doi: 10.1080/17449855.2026.2663346

Office: FAB 5.37

Office Hours:
tba

roxanne.n.douglas@warwick.ac.uk