English & Comparative Literary Studies News
Associate Fellow Dr Emrah Atasoy writes for The Conversation
Article Title: How George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four predicted the global power shifts happening now
Authors: Emrah Atasoy (University of Warwick) and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (University of California, Irvine)
Publication Date: 19 January 2026
Louisa Toxvaerd-Munch on RADICAL with Amol Rajan
Louisa Toxvaerd-Munch did an episode of RADICAL with Amol Rajan on BBC 4 on ‘Knowledge, Nostalgia and The Value of a University Education’: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002f1d0/radical-with-amol-rajan
Congratulations to Emrah Atasoy
Associate Fellow Dr Emrah Atasoy received an IASH Heritage Collections Research Fellowship from the University of Edinburgh to work on Archiving Futures: Utopia, Dystopia, Environmental Crisis, Identity, and Inequality in Edinburgh’s Special Collections (January-July 2026).
Project Details:
Project Title: Archiving Futures: Utopia, Dystopia, Environmental Crisis, Identity, and Inequality in Edinburgh’s Special Collections
Host Academic: Mathias Thaler, Professor of Political Theory, the School of Social and Political Science, the University of Edinburgh and Chair of Political Theory
Summary of the Project:
This project explores utopian and dystopian visions with a focus on environmental crisis through Edinburgh’s special collections. Drawing on rare books, activist archives, and historical materials, it investigates how these sources imagine identity, inequality, and resilience while engaging with questions of governance and social organisation. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the research combines literary analysis, political theory, and decolonial thought to critique anthropocentrism and structural exclusions. It examines whether speculative imaginaries reinforce exclusionary worldviews or create possibilities for more inclusive and ecologically grounded futures. By connecting archival storytelling with contemporary environmental humanities, utopian and dystopian studies, and future studies, the project aims to respond to the growing need for innovative methodologies that link cultural narratives to real-world societal challenges.
Sixty Years of Warwick English & Comparative Literary Studies: A Department Celebration
Sixty Years of Warwick ECLS - Agenda/TimingsLink opens in a new window
All are welcome to join us on this fantastic celebration of Sixty Years of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Saturday 22 November 2025, 2-5pm
Student Hub, FAB 5.49
Palestinian Literature & Culture event: “Fragmented Lives, Modernist Narration: Edward Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)
How did history, form and narrative interweave in After the Last Sky (1986) by Edward Said, adjoined with photographs by Jean Mohr? How did the text register peripheral modernism? And what social meanings and political significance resided there? PLCRG explored these questions, with Nadia Hajal-Backleh (convenor), zooming into the Palestinian tonalities of 1980s and their structure of feeling through literary-cultural critical writings, Palestinian poetry and artworks, as well as situating the conjuncture and its emergent peripheral modernism in relation to the historico-political changes, which the forcibly displaced and the exiled had to experience and endure in refugee camps both inside the occupied land and in the neighbouring Arab countries. We closely read some excerpts and interpreted some photographs mediating the production of the text, its aesthetic unity and politics, the uneven living conditions of Palestinian refugees, their fragmented lives and registered acts of disavowal, and more. The text is rich, and the collective engagement of students (UG, PGT, PGR) and professors from the different Warwick departments was crucial and astute.
Worth to mention that this event built on an earlier experience in February 2025, wherein we discussed Emile Habibi’s historical novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (1974), exploring history, critical irrealism, satire, and the paradoxes faced by dispossessed Palestinians under Israel’s colonial rule, its militarization, ghettoization, and high surveillance. We started with an elaborate introduction by the convenor, Nadia Hajal-Backleh, followed by reading excerpts to mediate both form and narrative as well as literary geographies of subversion and resources of hope within the uneven and combined colonial modern condition. The event was co-organized with students’ bodies, including Warwick Action for Palestine, Shakespeare Society, and Literature Society.