About

Michael Niblett is Associate Professor in modern world literature, and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies programme

Research interests

My research centres upon Caribbean literature and culture, as well as world literature, environmental history, and critical theory. I am interested in the literary encoding of ecology, modernity, nationhood, and class struggle in texts produced in peripheral and semiperipheral areas within the capitalist world-system. Broadly speaking, my current research explores the relationship between world literature and what environmental historian Jason Moore terms the "world-ecology". I recently undertook a Leverhulme-funded project -- World Literature and Commodity Frontiers: The Ecology of the ‘long’ 20th Century -- that examined literary responses to the forms of environment-making through which a selection of key commodity frontiers (including sugar, cacao, coal, and tin) have developed (see 'Research' for further details of the project). Much of my research focuses on what might loosely be termed global proletarian or working-class writing.

Teaching and supervision

I would be interested in supervising doctoral projects in the areas of Caribbean studies, world literature and the world literary system, global proletarian or working-class fiction, environmental criticism, and the relationship between world-ecology and cultural production. At MA level, I teach the Postcolonial Theory module, and the option The Caribbean: Reading the World-Ecology.

Selected publications

• World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

• The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form, and the Nation-State (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012)

• The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Co-edited with Chris Campbell (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016)

• Perspectives on the ‘Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture. Co-edited with Kerstin Oloff (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)

• “Time and Tidalectics Wait for No Nam: Catastrophe and Creativity in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite”, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 14.2 (2014): 108-22

• “Spectres in the Forest: Gothic Form and World-Ecology in Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute”, in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 44 (18.2) (2014): 53-68

• “The ‘impossible quest for wholeness’: Sugar, Cassava, and the Ecological Aesthetic in The Guyana Quartet”, in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49.2 (2013): 148-60

• “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature”, in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16.1 Postcolonial/Global Ecologies (2012): 15-30

Qualifications

BA (Hons) (Cardiff)

MA (Warwick)

PhD (Warwick)