School of English
Academic & Teaching staff
Professor Graham Huggan
Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures
+44(0) 113 343 4767
Research Interests
My research spans the entire field of comparative postcolonial literary/cultural studies, and I also have interests in the areas of ecocriticism, travel writing, short fiction, and film. Recent publications include Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (co-written with Helen Tiffin, Routledge, 2010) and Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Two further books will be coming out this year (2013): Nature's Saviours: Celebrity Conservationists in the Television Age (Routledge/Earthscan), and the single-edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford University Press). A revised collection of my own essays, Interdisciplinary Measures, which came out in 2008 with Liverpool University Press, shows my continuing interest in cross-disciplinary approaches to postcolonial studies, as is also confirmed by the book series for which I am the founding co-editor, 'Postcolonialism across the Disciplines' (also Liverpool University Press).
I am on the editorial board of numerous journals in the postcolonial field, am a regular national/international examiner and reviewer, and am a current member of the English Association (UK) and the MLA (US). I am also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Queensland (Australia). At the University of Leeds, I currently direct the Centre for Canadian Studies (CCS) and the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies (ICPS), both cross-disciplinary bodies drawing on a wide range of university teaching and research in these fields. I am also project co-leader for an AHRC-funded international research network, 'Postcolonial Europe', with partners in Germany (the University of Munich) and the Netherlands (the University of Utrecht), now in its second three-year phase, and network leader for a White Rose Consortium-sponsored project on the political ecology of water in Egypt, Israel/Palestine, and Sri Lanka. I regularly organise events at Leeds--many of them postgraduate-oriented--for the two networks I lead, for the ICPS and CCS, and for the School-based Postcolonial Research Group. I am general convenor of 'Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies', the School of English's postcolonial MA scheme.
I have supervised PhD research, both at Leeds and elsewhere, on a wide range of topics and would welcome the opportunity to supervise further work in all areas of the postcolonial field, in the crossover area between literary and environmental criticism, in tourism studies and travel literature, and in contemporary film.
Recent Activities
In 2012 I gave invited talks in Australia and Hong Kong, spent a month at Australian National University as a Humanities Centre Visiting Fellow, and sat on the German Council of Science (Wissenschaftsrat), which advises the German government on educational matters. This year (2013) I will give further talks in Britain, Finland, France, and the US, and will act as external reviewer for the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Introduction to Postcolonial Cinema
Postcolonial Literature
Travel Writing
Classics of Short Fiction
Human/Animal/Machine
Postgraduate
Postcolonial Representations
Postcolonialism, Animals and the Environment