Professor Alison Donnell, who takes up her post as Head of School of Literature and Languages from January, has been researching and writing about Anglophone Caribbean Literature for the past twenty years. Alison was recently asked to write about her intellectual formation and how she came to work in this field by the journal Anthurium for its special issue dedicated to exploring the personal histories of some of its most influential scholars. You can read her piece at
http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol10/iss2/12
It gives you some sense of her work when she says, “If there is a proper function of criticism, it should be to intervene against orthodoxy and comfortable regimes of value, and especially to intervene in order to unsilence subjects (in both senses of that word). My own work was not a match to such a task but it tried to look those intentions in the eye.”
Alison willing be running a day workshop at Reading on Caribbean Sexualities on Wednesday 27 November and places are still available [please contact Nicola Abram (n.l.abram@reading.ac.uk). Also as part of her AHRC fellowship, Alison will be in Jamaica next month organising a workshop on Embracing Jamaican Sexualities: ‘Can You Be Loved?’
