English & Comparative Literary Studies News

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 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

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.

In conversation with the awards winning Palestinian novelist Suad Amiry, the department’s PLCRG convened a literary critical seminar to discuss registrations of modernity in the Kafkaesque, realist novel Mother of Strangers, which brilliantly restores urban modernity and hierarchical social relations in the Palestinian metropolitan coastal city of Jaffa before the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) as well as narrates the tragic loss, contradictions and travails experienced by Palestinians in Jaffa in the aftermath of colonial modernity and their massive dispossession and dispersal. The seminar started with an elaborate introduction by the convenor, Nadia Hajal-Backleh (PGR), followed with a seminal talk by Sam Naseem from Lancaster University, before the collective engaged in an open and convivial conversation with the novelist. The experience was meaningful.

Worth to mention that this event built on an equally engaging experience last April, wherein we actively discussed multiple readings of Minor Detail (2017 [2020] and had a lovely, insightful conversation with the awards winning novelist Adania Shibli.

The University of Warwick, in collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, invites applications for a fully funded 3.5-year PhD studentship to explore co-creation in civic theatre. The project investigates how co-creation, as an emergent method and process, seeks to build reciprocal partnerships between arts workers and local communities for the purpose of promoting social justice and challenging notions of who has knowledge, expertise, and the right to be seen and heard in cultural organisations.

The Belgrade has placed co-creation at the heart of its role as a civic theatre, with an ambitious aim to "make the local community part of every show at the Belgrade." Spotlighting four productions—Big Aunty (2023), I, Daniel Blake (2023), Romeo and Juliet (2025), and Nanny of the Maroons (2027)—the project will discover how this commitment to co-creation shapes the values that drive the theatre's culture. It will particularly address Nanny of the Maroons, a retelling of Jamaican revolutionary leader Queen Nanny's history involving over 1,000 community participants drawn from the West Midlands Black Creative Network, Coventry Caribbean Centre, and other local groups. Employing mixed methodologies such as participant observation, interviews, and surveys, the project will ask: What does co-creation mean for artists, participants, audiences, and locals? How can co-creation offer alternatives to models in which creative professionals exclude or exploit the local communities in which civic theatres are embedded? What challenges and learnings arise from co-creation, and how might the Belgrade's experience inform wider arts policy and practice?

The student will be supervised by Dr Matthew Franks (English and Comparative Literary Studies) and Professor Nadine Holdsworth (Theatre and Performance Studies), and benefit from integrated support within Warwick's arts and humanities research environment and the Belgrade's professional networks, including Creative Director Corey Campbell and other staff members. The student will be able to determine whether to receive their doctorate from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies or the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies.