Dr Justine Mcconnell

Biography

"Prior to coming to King’s in September 2016, Justine was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford, researching contemporary African, Caribbean, and ancient Greek poetics. She had previously held two postdoctoral fellowships: the first at Northwestern University in Illinois, and the second at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at Oxford, where she worked on the ‘Performing Epic’ project. She has a BA in Classics from Cambridge, an MPhil in English Literature from Bristol, and a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013), and co-editor of three volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (OUP, 2011), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (OUP, 2015), and Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (Bloomsbury, 2016). Justine’s research focuses on Caribbean and African diaspora literature of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, on ancient Greek literature, and on the interconnections between the two. She is fascinated by the way classical literature has often been appropriated as a tool of resistance by writers, and is particularly interested in the performance reception of classical epic across a wide range of media, from theatre, to opera, film, and spoken word. She also works on the syncretisation of myth and modes of storytelling in the work of Caribbean writers such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Junot Díaz, and Derek Walcott, and is currently writing a book on the latter. Justine is happy to discuss PhD proposals relating to any of her areas of interest."

Research Interest

"Caribbean literature; Classical Reception studies; Epic and orality; Performance; Postcolonial theory"