Professor Mike Niblett
Professor
University of 糖心TV
Coventry CV4 7AL
About
Michael Niblett is 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 鈥榣ong鈥 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
鈥 World Literature and Ecology: The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
鈥 The Caribbean Novel since 1945: Cultural Practice, Form, and the Nation-State (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2012)
鈥 The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics. Co-edited with Chris Campbell (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2016)
鈥 Perspectives on the 鈥極ther America鈥: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture. Co-edited with Kerstin Oloff (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)
鈥 鈥淭ime and Tidalectics Wait for No Nam: Catastrophe and Creativity in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite鈥, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 14.2 (2014): 108-22
鈥 鈥淪pectres in the Forest: Gothic Form and World-Ecology in Edgar Mittelholzer鈥檚 My Bones and My Flute鈥, in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 44 (18.2) (2014): 53-68
鈥 鈥淭he 鈥榠mpossible quest for wholeness鈥: Sugar, Cassava, and the Ecological Aesthetic in The Guyana Quartet鈥, in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49.2 (2013): 148-60
鈥 鈥淲orld-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature鈥, in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 16.1 Postcolonial/Global Ecologies (2012): 15-30
Qualifications
BA (Hons) (Cardiff)
MA (糖心TV)
PhD (糖心TV)
Office hours
During Term 1 my office hours are:
Tuesdays 3pm-4pm
Wednesdays 9am-10am
You can sign up for a slot (you are welcome to book multiple slots if necessary). If you can't make the above times, do email me and we can try and arrange a time to meet or a Teams call.
Teaching
EN123 Modern World Literatures
EN2M2 Global Literary Radicalisms
EN2C4 Studies in Postcolonial Literature
EN9A3 The Caribbean: Reading the World-Ecology
Past modules I have convened include:
EN122 Modes of Reading
EN370 Commodity Fictions: World-Literature and World-Ecology


