Our Connections

Research and teaching in the Department of English has been galvanised by its core principle of diversity as well as its London, UK, European and international connections.

On the doorstep of King’s in central London the Globe Theatre, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Royal Society of Literature, the British Museum and the Imperial War Museum have all provided stimulating contexts for continuing working partnerships.

Further afield, postgraduate exchanges with the University of North Carolina, National University of Singapore and the Global Edge programme with UC Berkeley foster research and teaching across Medical Humanities, English and Theatre Studies.

A dedicated Creative and External Relations Committee embedded in the Department supports this ever-growing repertoire of pedagogic engagements, research placements and collaborative events.
Professor Anna Snaith is involved in an international collaboration with Jessica Stites Mor (University of British Columbia) and Anthony Alessandrini (CUNY), the International Solidarity Action Research Network, investigating new directions in interdisciplinary scholarship on solidarity.
We were recently awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant (Canada) to support an event in Toronto, and are planning co-edited publications and a podcast.

Featured: Configurations of Empire

Configurations of Empire is an interdisciplinary reading group for researchers and postgraduate students that explores the conditions of life, labour, and belonging under contemporary formations of empire. It runs in parallel from two sites: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership network at King's College London.

We meet regularly to share individual projects and discuss readings from the latest scholarship in critical race, feminist, queer, postcolonial and decolonial theory. Theorists that have been discussed in the reading group include Saidiya Hartman on fragile archives, Denise Ferreira da Silva on global delineations of race, Jasbir Puar on homonationalisms, Cedric Robinson on Black intellectual history and Marxist theory, Chandra Mohanty on feminism across the global north and global south as well as Sylvia Wynter on the interrelations of social injustice and climate change. Non-theoretical texts have included Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and videos produced by the LGBT Pink Dot movement in Singapore, attesting to both the breadth and methodological precision of the reading group’s interests. These meetings culminate in annual summer work-in-progress conference in either London (2017; 2019) or Chapel Hill (2018).

The Configurations of Empire working group was originally founded by Christine Okoth (KCL) and Sam Bednarchik (UNC-CH) in 2016. Its current convenors are James Rakoczi (KCL), Trisha Remetir (UNC-CH) and Rafael Lubner (KCL).