Dr Anna Bernard

I came to King’s in 2012, following my first appointment as a lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. I received my BA from the University of California at Berkeley and my PhD from the University of Cambridge. I have held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2016-17), a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney (2017), an AHRC Research Network grant (2013-16), and a University of York Anniversary Lectureship (2010-11).

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Postcolonial and world literature in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew
• Decolonization and culture from the 1960s to the 1980s
• Literature and 20-21C political movements, especially the Palestinian national movement
• Cultural activism and advocacy including manifestos, documentary film, and protest poetry
• Solidarity, internationalism, anti-colonialism, human rights
• Theories of postcolonial, comparative, and world literature

My research is concerned with the literature and culture of anti-colonial struggles that have persisted after the formal end of European imperialism. I am the author of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (Liverpool UP, 2013, available open-access) and Decolonizing Literature (forthcoming 2023, in Polity Press’s Decolonizing the Curriculum series).

I am currently working on a book called International Solidarity and Culture: Nicaragua, South Africa, Palestine, 1975-1990. The book considers appeals for solidarity in literature and film that circulated among participants in the Nicaragua solidarity campaign, the anti-apartheid movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement. Drawing on archival records of international solidarity activism in Britain, I examine texts and films that resist a broader shift towards humanitarianism by promoting a solidarity based on shared political commitments.

I welcome PhD supervision enquiries from students interested in anti-colonial and third-worldist literature and culture, literature and transnational movements, and cultural activism and advocacy. 

Teaching

Postcolonial and world literature and theory, literature and solidarity movements, Arabic and Hebrew literature in translation.