Dr Justine McConnell

Prior to coming to King’s in 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 postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University in Illinois and at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at Oxford. 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 the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013), Performing Epic or Telling Tales (co-authored with Fiona Macintosh; OUP, 2020), and Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (Bloomsbury, 2023). She has also co-edited four volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (OUP, 2011), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (OUP, 2015), Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (OUP, 2018).

Selected Publications:

• Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 

• Performing Epic or Telling Tales. Co-authored with Fiona Macintosh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 

• Postcolonial Sparagmos: Toni Morrison’s Sula and Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite’, Classical Receptions Journal 8.2 (June 2016): 133-154.

• The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. Co-edited with Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, and Patrice Rankine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 

• Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

Teaching

Justine teaches on the theories and methods of Comparative Literature, Classical Reception, and Postcolonial Literatures, as well as on myth, canonicity, and performance.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Justine has worked with the Almeida Theatre as an Academic Consultant, given pre-theatre talks at the National Theatre and Chicago’s Vintage Theatre Collective, and taken part in a post-show discussion at Southwark Playhouse. She has also curated poetry events featuring artists such as Kae Tempest, Caleb Femi, and Caroline Bird, and appeared in a BBC Radio 4 documentary on literary canons and culture wars.

Research interests

• Caribbean literature
• Classical Reception studies
• Epic and orality
• Performance
• Postcolonial theory

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 particularly interested in the syncretisation of myth and modes of storytelling and in the way classical literature has often been appropriated as a tool of resistance by writers. She also works on the performance reception of Graeco-Roman epic across a wide range of media, including theatre, film, and spoken word. Justine is happy to discuss PhD proposals relating to any of her areas of interest.

For more details, please see Justine's full research profile.