I joined King's in 2024 as a Research Associate on the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded project LITAID: Decolonization, Appropriation and the Materials of Literature in Africa and its Diaspora. I have a BA in English and Italian from the University of Galway, and an MA and PhD in English from York. I’ve been the recipient of an NUI Travelling Studentship, a BA Small Grant (Institutions of Freedom) and was co-investigator on a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship (Coetzee’s Other Arts).

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Postcolonial and world literature, especially African and South African literature
• Book historical and sociological approaches to literature
• The literary-activist networks of the post-war years, especially the activities of PEN International
• The relationship between the material and the aesthetic, especially at the intersection between literature and other art forms and media
• Forms of twentieth and twenty-first century authorship
• Prison writing

My research interests are in the area of world and postcolonial literature, with a particular focus on African and South African literature, and on literary activism and authorship in the post-years and the global cold war. I’ve published several articles on the fiction of J. M. Coetzee and continue work on a book on Coetzee’s ‘confessional aesthetics’. I’m the co-editor, with Claire Westall, of Prison Writing and the Literary World (Routledge 2020), to which I contributed an essay on ‘PEN and the Writer as Prisoner’. A new project on ‘The Imprisoned Writer in the International Imagination 1960-present’ concentrates particularly on the role of writers’ organisation PEN International. As part of this I’m collaborating with Andreas Hedberg of Kungliga biblioteket (National Library of Sweden) to examine the international advocacy work of the Swedish PEN centre.My interests in African literature and post-war literary networks converge in my work as a Research Associate on the LITAID project. I am contributing to the project’s focus on the Ghanaian literary field in the years around formal decolonization by concentrating on Ghanaian print culture, tracking texts across different print forms, and mapping local, national and transnational communities of writers and publishing networks.

Selected publications

• Michelle Kelly, 'Grace, the Body, and the Aesthetic in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe.' Nordic Journal of English Studies 23.1 (2024): 145-165.
• Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall, eds., Prison Writing and the Literary World. London: Routledge, 2020.
• Michelle Kelly, ’PEN International and the Writer as Prisoner.’ In Prison Writing and the Literary World. Edited by Michelle Kelly and Claire Westall. London: Routledge, 2020.
• Michelle Kelly, ‘Other Arts and Adaptation.’ Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee. Edited by Jarad Zimbler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
• Michelle Kelly, ‘Serving “a male philosophy”? Elizabeth Costello’s Feminism and Coetzee’s Dialogues with Joyce.’ Australian Literary Studies, February 2018.