Jenni Ramone

Dr Jenni Ramone undertakes research and teaching in postcolonial studies in literature, and in interdisciplinary studies, including art and architecture. She joined NTU in October 2012. She is co-director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and welcomes applications for centre membership from staff and students in all disciplines at NTU, and associate membership from those undertaking relevant research or practice outside the university.

Jenni Ramone teaches postcolonial literature and theory and is Module Leader for the popular second-year module, Black Writing in Britain. She also leads Literary Cultures, an innovative module that she devised to enable undergraduates to put into practice their literary skills and knowledge by writing and publishing a special issue of an open access journal each year, and organising and running a literary conference for a public audience. Special guest speakers invited by the students to date have included Okechukwu Nzelu, Peter Kalu, and Lainy Malkani. She also teaches on the MRes English Literary Research and supervises postgraduate students. She welcomes applications to supervise doctoral candidates in any fields related to her research specialisms.

Her research to date has focused on global literature, postcolonial literature, gender, and translation, approaching literary texts through interdisciplinary methods engaging with visual arts, archaeology, performance, and the marketplace.

Jenni’s current research project is on representations of breastfeeding in global art and literature. Her project compares located (particular, material contexts) and global representations of breastfeeding in literary texts and works of art.

Jenni Ramone’s most recently published monograph, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. This book insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.

Jenni is currently leading a programme of public events in partnership with Bonington Art Gallery in Nottingham, Formations, which enables interdisciplinary engagement prompted by themes or objects and is concerned with making visible the centrality of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic artists and thinkers, and the patterns and materials that connect global creative and intellectual histories.