My research interests include 'postcolonial' literatures and cultures; postcolonial theory; imperialism, nationalism and anticolonial resistance; modernisation/ capitalist modernity/ modernism; globalisation. World literature, especially when theorised as literature of the modern world-system: distant reading, new theories of literary comparativism. More broadly, modern literature: the novel; literature of Empire; modernist literature and theories of modernism. Literary and cultural theory. Critical social theory, esp. Marxism, the Frankfurt school, the sociology of culture, world-system theory. My current project: Into Our Labours: Work and Literary Form in World-Literature. I have published numerous essays in such journals as Cultural Critique, Diaspora, differences, New Formations, Race & Class, Research in African Literatures, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Textual Practice. Chapters recently in the Oxford Handbook to Postcolonial Studies (ed. Graham Huggan, OUP, 2013) and Global Modernisms (ed. Mark Wollaeger, OUP, 2012); recent essays in Textual Practice (2013), Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2012), Race & Class (2011), and Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2011). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, a book collaboratively written by the Warwick Research Collective -- WReC -- of which I am a member, appeared in 2015.

Teaching and supervision

I am especially interested in supervising doctoral projects addressed to the world literary system or to materialist questions in postcolonial studies. At the MA level I teach the options, 'Problems and Modes in Postcolonial Literature' and 'Postcolonial Theory', and work on Warwick English's new MA programme in world literature.

Selected publications

• Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (Yale, 1990)
• Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (CUP, 1999)
• Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (CUP, 2002)
• Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (CUP, 2004).
• The Postcolonial Unconscious (CUP, 2011)
• Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool UP, 2015)

Qualifications

• BA (Hons) (Witwatersrand)
• MA (Essex)
• PhD (Keele)