Dr Lucinda Newns

Lucinda is dedicated to supporting students to develop to their highest potential and encourages them to expand their horizons through encounters with literature from diverse perspectives. She convenes the Year 1 modules ‘Introduction to Literary Studies’ and ‘The Literary Globe’; the Year 2 modules ‘Explorations in Literary Genre’ and ‘Becomings: Women and Writing’; the Year 3 modules ‘Writing the Environment’ and ‘Writing Back: Literature and Memory’ and contributes to the MA English Literature and the MA Children’s Literature and Literacies.

Lucinda has published widely on migration literature, women’s writing, environmental literature and genre studies. She welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students in any of her areas of interest.

Her monograph, Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction (Routledge, 2019), explores domesticity and everyday practices of homemaking in works by diasporic writers in Britain, including Buchi Emecheta, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy, Leila Aboulela, Abdulrazak Gurnah and Bernardine Evaristo. The book draws together intersectional feminist theory, postcolonial theory, feminist geography and theories of the everyday to demonstrate how seemingly banal practices like cooking, cleaning, dressing, caring and decorating take on complex political valences in the context of migration.

She is currently involved in two areas of research stemming from this work. The first is around Muslim women’s writing and the uses of genre. She published an article on this topic in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and was node leader of the AHRC International Network ‘Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction’ (2021-2023), along with colleagues at the University of Birmingham (UK), University of Georgia (US), Quaid-i-Azam University (Pakistan) and Koç University (Turkey).

Secondly, she is working on a larger book project about the intersection between human migration and the environment: ‘Migrant Ecologies: World Literature and Human Dislocation in the Era of Climate Crisis’. In the context of media and governmental discourses which place ‘climate refugees’ at the centre of debates about borders and securitization, this project focuses on how literature and art, especially by postcolonial and indigenous producers, reimagines the relationship between mobility and the non-human world.

From 2021 to 2023, Lucinda was a node leader of the AHRC-funded international network ‘Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction’, a collaboration between scholars in the United Kingdom, United States, Pakistan and Turkey. The project brought together researchers from a range of geographic contexts to consider popular and genre writing by Muslim women, including romance and chick lit, comics and graphic novels, crime and detective fiction, Young Adult literature, fantasy, speculative fiction and electronic literature.

The project asked:

• How does genre act as a ‘filter’ for Muslim women’s writing?
• What opportunities do popular and genre fiction provide for challenging the dominant ‘filters’ on Muslim women’s voices?
• What opportunities and pressures do popular fiction publishing and production models provide?
• How are Muslim women authors engaging with and transforming established narrative and genre forms?

The network hosted a series of events in each geographic node and an international conference in Birmingham in September 2023. It is also producing a number of publications from this work, including a forthcoming edited collection. More information can be found at: https://more.bham.ac.uk/mwpf-network/.

Monograph

(2019). Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction: Homing the Metropole. Routledge.

Edited Collection

with Ilott, S. & Mendes, A. C., (Eds.). (2018). New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches. Rowman & Littlefield.

Journal Articles

(2024). Necropolitical Ecologies: Creative Articulations of Nature’s Death-Work in the Borderzone. Interventions, 26(1), 36–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2023.2190919

(2022). ‘The Sea Cannot be Fenced’: ‘Natural’ and ‘Unnatural’ Borders in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 29(4), 1097–1120. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isab044

(2018). Renegotiating Romantic Genres: Textual Resistance and Muslim Chick Lit. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 53(2), 284–300. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989416686156

(2015). Homelessness and the Refugee: De-valorizing Displacement in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51(5), 506–518. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2015.1070007

Chapters in Edited Collections

(forthcoming 2024) Tracing ‘Home’ in the Critical Discourse on Migration. In G. Adair, R. Fasselt and C. McLaughlin (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature. Routledge.

(2013) Domesticity and the Nation: Buchi Emecheta’s Migrant Fiction. In A. Choubey (Ed.), Womancing Women: ‪Perspectives on Women's Writing Across Boundaries (pp. 119–140). Book Enclave.

Book Reviews & Other Publications

(2016). Refugees. In The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (pp. 1–6). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119076506.wbeps308

(2014). Speaking for Others: Tensions in Post-Colonial Studies. Times Higher Education. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/speaking-for-others-tensions-in-post-colonial-studies/2014501.article

(2013). Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (Book Review). Feminist Review, 104(1), e4–e5. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.7