Charlotte Spear
Thesis Working Title
Locating the Human: World-Literature and the Concept of Rights
Bio
Charlotte is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick. Her research explores how peripheral literatures intervene in dominant human rights discourses. Working at the intersection of world-literature, environmental humanities and disaster studies, her project is animated by three key questions:
- How does the (semi-)peripheral novel register the impact of human rights discourses and practices?
- How does it interrogate the concept of ‘inalienable rights’ at a bodily level?
- How do our understandings of human rights discourses and practices change when confronted with a spatialised textual embodiment questioning the very notion of humanity?
Her PhD is supervised by Prof. Pablo Mukherjee and Dr. Mike Niblett.
Research Interests
World-Literature, Human Rights Literature, Environmental Humanities, Critical Theory
Conference Papers
May 2021: “Rethinking Registration: Reading the Modern World-System through the Contemporary Refugee Novel”, Regeneration, University of Glasgow
Upcoming June 2022: “Defining a Space for Women’s Rights: World-Literature and the Aesthetics of Combined Unevenness”, Women in World(-)Literature, University of Warwick
Qualifications
BA (Hons), English Literature (University of Warwick)
MA (Distinction), World Literature (University of Warwick)
