Caitlin Vandertop

Biography

Before joining the University of the South Pacific, she worked and studied at universities in the UK, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. she took up a fellowship at the University of Hong Kong in 2012 as part of a research cluster on global modernisms. Her research project, which is titled Concrete jungles: modernist literature and the British colonial metropolis, was supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and later by a scholarship from the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. she defended her PhD thesis in December 2016, while working at the University of Hong Kong as an archival research assistant. she have taught courses in modern and world literature, as well as academic English, at institutions including the University of Hong Kong, Birkbeck, University of London, the University of Westminster and the University of Canberra. Her research is in twentieth-century global literatures in English, urban culture, and postcolonial studies with a special interest in Asia-Pacific literature. she was preparing a monograph that weaves together Anglophone modernist narratives from a network of four British colonial cities in the period 1900-1940. The book explores how modernist writers confronted the monumentalised landscapes of the late British Empire with diverse and dissonant experiences on the city streets. It argues that contemporary theorisations of modernism’s ‘unreal city’ should focus on the uneven, asynchronous modernity experienced in early twentieth-century colonial urban laboratories. Other areas of research and teaching interest include literature and development, colonial financial enclaves and gated communities, literature and commodities, in particular opium, and intersections between the urban humanities and world-ecological criticism.

Research Interest

Twentieth-century global literatures in English, Urban cultures of the British Empire, Postcolonial studies & Asia-Pacific literature, Materialist and environmental criticism