Dr Gemma Robinson

Senior Lecturer

English Studies University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA

Dr Gemma Robinson

About me

B.A. (Cambridge), M.A. (Warwick), Ph.D. (Cambridge) I joined Stirling in 2006, having previously held lectureships at Newcastle University and Trinity College, Dublin. I teach across the undergraduate programme, including core modules (Author, Reader, Text; Texts and Contexts; Meaning and Representation) and the optional module, Colonial and Postcolonial Imagination: the Caribbean. Currently I am convenor of the MLitt in Postcolonial Studies and I contribute to the MLitt in English Studies and the MLitt in Film Studies.

My research interests include Caribbean writing, especially poetry; Guyanese culture and politics; postcolonial literatures and cultures; Black British writing; slavery in the Americas; publishing in the Caribbean; cultures of reading; textual criticism. My recent work has been collaborative and focused on questions about the writing of place and the role of reading within postcolonial contexts. With Jackie Kay and James Procter I co-edited Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe, 2012). This is an anthology of British place-poemswritten by black and Asian poets, and ordered in a journey from north to south.With Bethan Benwell and James Procter I co-edited a collection of essays, Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception (Routledge, 2012) and Reading After Empire, a special issue of New Formations (2011). These publications are all part of an AHRC-funded project, Devolving Diasporas, that explored the cultural production of ‘diasporic' literature and investigated relationships between reading, location, and migration (http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com). My current research continues my interests in Martin Carter and Guyanese writing. I am the editor of University of Hunger, Collected Poems and Selected Prose of Martin Carter (Bloodaxe, 2006), and am completing a book on Carter and Caribbean literary culture. I contribute to the Guyanese newspaper, Stabroek News, and have written articles on Guyanese writers on the radio, Wilson Harris, teaching ‘the Americas', Caribbean manuscripts, Caribbean protest writing, Scotland and the Caribbean, and locations of reading. I administer the Charles Wallace Fellowship, bringing Indian creative writers to Stirling University. The fellowships are awarded annually and last for one semester. For more information see http://www.english.stir.ac.uk/research/profile/charleswallace.php. I am interested in supervising postgraduate research in the following areas: postcolonial literatures and cultures; Guyanese writing and culture; Caribbean poetry, prose fiction and drama; contemporary poetry in relation to questions of readership and publishing.