Joe Shaughnessy 

I am a College Lecturer at Churchill and a Teaching Associate in Postcolonial Literature with the Faculty of English. My primary research and teaching area is modern Anglophone literature. I have a particular focus on the histories of capitalism and imperialism as a world-system, ‘committed’ or expressly political literary forms, and the production of ideas of community.

I joined Churchill in 2024. I have taught Practical Criticism and Critical Practice in Parts I and II at Churchill for several years prior to joining and always enjoyed it. We look at different kinds of primary texts in ‘Prac Crit’, and, as a group, discuss their different elements and reflect on strategies which we might use to analyse them—writers you may or may not already know like Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ntozake Shange, Thomas Hardy, Anne Sexton, and A. K. Ramanujan.

Since 2023, I have been a Teaching Associate for the Faculty of English. My teaching for the faculty clusters around postcolonial and other modern literatures. For example, for Part II, I run faculty seminars critically examining key texts in anticolonial and postcolonial theory. In these seminars, we discuss the arguments and analysis of important thinkers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Jamaica Kincaid, and how their writings (though not always agreeing with one another) elaborate how imperialism—its legacies in terms of race, class, and gender—has shaped our world.

I completed a PhD in the Faculty of English at Cambridge in 2023, which was funded by the AHRC and also the Leverhulme Trust. Parts of my PhD were spent studying & researching at universities in South Africa and Aotearoa New Zealand. I am working towards producing a monograph based on my thesis, provisionally entitled Shards of the Literary International: Capitalism, Community, and Anglophone Literature, 1919-1950. It examines how leftist literary production in different geographies between 1919 and 1950 registers the form and scale of social connections, the extension of moral genres, and the political efficacy of aesthetic production. I’m especially interested in what this might suggest, from a materialist perspective, about the structure of capitalism—particularly the spatial and temporal programme of modernity, and the production of what is sometimes termed ‘affiliation’ within the relations of the world-system. Much of my work is concerned with anticolonial, antifascist, and socialist literary writing, and how literature responded to junctures such as the Spanish Civil War, the invasion of Manchuria, the Great Depression, and the anticolonial struggle in South Asia. I have a book chapter forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Red World Literature, which is concerned with ‘world-system temporality’ and internationalist Anglophone poetry in the 1930s and 1940s. I am, additionally, working on the history of a leftwing news agency run out of London, which I expect (or hope) to be a completed article very soon.