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Jennifer Leetsch
I am a postdoctoral researcher in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, where I research and teach on slavery's global entanglements in the Black Atlantic world and beyond. I am currently working on a second book project which intertwines forms and media of black life writing with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecologies.
In my research and teaching I am particularly interested in relating literary texts, life writing documents and other strategies of imagination to cultural as well as socio-political formations of resistance, refusal and repair. My research interests span from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
I received my PhD in English Literature from Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds with Palgrave’s series on Contemporary Women’s Writing, it explores contemporary literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with feminist and postcolonial Anglophone perspectives.
My PhD research was completed with the support of travel and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Volkswagen Stiftung, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Würzburg, and Erasmus+, among others.
I received my MA in English Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature from King's College London and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, where I was awarded highest distinction for an MA thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian narratives.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Contemporary Anglophone literatures, Anglophone literatures of the long nineteenth century, Cultural Studies, Caribbean Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Indian and Indian Diaspora Studies, Black Britain, Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities.
For current projects and other activities, see my website: www.jenniferleetsch.com
In my research and teaching I am particularly interested in relating literary texts, life writing documents and other strategies of imagination to cultural as well as socio-political formations of resistance, refusal and repair. My research interests span from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century.
I received my PhD in English Literature from Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds with Palgrave’s series on Contemporary Women’s Writing, it explores contemporary literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with feminist and postcolonial Anglophone perspectives.
My PhD research was completed with the support of travel and research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Volkswagen Stiftung, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften Würzburg, and Erasmus+, among others.
I received my MA in English Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature from King's College London and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, where I was awarded highest distinction for an MA thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian narratives.
Research and Teaching Interests:
Contemporary Anglophone literatures, Anglophone literatures of the long nineteenth century, Cultural Studies, Caribbean Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Indian and Indian Diaspora Studies, Black Britain, Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities.
For current projects and other activities, see my website: www.jenniferleetsch.com
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Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.
Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.
My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.
Dieser Band vereint unterschiedliche wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven und aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse zum Thema, wobei die Beiträge Pornografie in ihrem gegenwartsrele-vanten Kontext beschreiben und untersuchen. Die multidisziplinäre Perspektive auf das Phänomen der Pornografie macht deutlich, dass sie selten nur einen gesellschaftlichen Bereich berührt und daher kaum mit den Fragestellungen und Methoden einer einzigen Disziplin begriffen werden kann. Aus diesem Grund versammelt der Band Beiträge, die von Rechts- über Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprach-, Medien- und Sozialwissenschaften reichen und wirft einen Blick auf unterschiedliche Epochen und Kulturräume, wie etwa europäische Kulturen der Gegenwart, die USA der siebziger Jahre, China und seine Pornografie im 16. Jahrhundert oder pornografische Darstellungen im Kino und Fernsehen der Gegenwart.
Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.
Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.
My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.
Dieser Band vereint unterschiedliche wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven und aktuelle Forschungsergebnisse zum Thema, wobei die Beiträge Pornografie in ihrem gegenwartsrele-vanten Kontext beschreiben und untersuchen. Die multidisziplinäre Perspektive auf das Phänomen der Pornografie macht deutlich, dass sie selten nur einen gesellschaftlichen Bereich berührt und daher kaum mit den Fragestellungen und Methoden einer einzigen Disziplin begriffen werden kann. Aus diesem Grund versammelt der Band Beiträge, die von Rechts- über Kultur-, Literatur-, Sprach-, Medien- und Sozialwissenschaften reichen und wirft einen Blick auf unterschiedliche Epochen und Kulturräume, wie etwa europäische Kulturen der Gegenwart, die USA der siebziger Jahre, China und seine Pornografie im 16. Jahrhundert oder pornografische Darstellungen im Kino und Fernsehen der Gegenwart.
With a focus on critical interventions from the social sciences, including discussions about the Anthropocene and Plantationocene, slow violence, extractivism, black ecology and black geography, we will encounter a variety of possible responses to environmental crisis within and beyond local and planetary scales.
By engaging with these literary sources, students will gain a deeper understanding of the global encounters and exchanges embedded in asymmetrical forms of slavery and dependency, and of how the routes of African, Asian and Arab migrant workers and indentured labourers have created a wide-reaching political, economic, ideological, and cultural web that spans across oceans and continents, connecting Asia and Oceania to African and European shores.
The panel discussion is designed to provide a space for the exchange of experience and knowledge: the panelists (Robel Afeworki Abay, Astrid Biele Mefebue, Paul Mecheril, Heike Pantelmann & Anne Waldschmidt) will critically consider measures and processes of change within institutions and reflect on how to further strengthen diversity awareness.
The panel is organized in collaboration with the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Unit; it is part of the Germany-wide Diversity Days (23-24 May 2023) at Bonn University.
https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/outreach/news-bcdss/panel-discussion-diversity-in-german-academia-on-may-23-2023
Time: Tuesday, 23.05.23 - 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Location: Festsaal (‘Ballroom’), University Main Building
Am Hof 1, 53113 Bonn
February 25–26, 2021
Julius- Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
We invite you to join us for the free and public events during the conference:
Artist Intervention | Thursday, February 25 | 16:30–18:00 CET
Charl Landvreugd (Rotterdam, NL)
Notes on Ososma : Imagining Spaces
Keynote | Friday, February 26 | 10:00–11:30 CET
Ananya Jahanara Kabir (London, UK)
Moving Material: (Un)Making Migration through Dance
Reading & Discussion | Friday, February 26 | 18:00–19:30 CET
Olumide Popoola (London, UK)
Please register in advance via Zoom: t1p.de/im2021-zoom
***
For more details, see our website: imaginingmigration2020.wordpress.com
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Organised by
Jennifer Leetsch
Frederike Middelhoff
Miriam Wallraven