Role
Dr Jenni Ramone undertakes research and teaching in postcolonial studies in literature, and in interdisciplinary studies, including art and architecture. She joined NTU in October 2012. She is a director of the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group and welcomes applications for group membership from staff and students in all disciplines at NTU, and associate membership from those undertaking relevant research or practice outside the university.
Jenni Ramone teaches postcolonial literature and theory and is Module Leader for the popular second-year module, Black Writing in Britain. She also leads innovative workplace partnership and literary work-like event and publishing modules that she devised to enable undergraduates to put into practice their literary skills and knowledge. Special guest speakers invited by the students to date have included Okechukwu Nzelu, Peter Kalu, and Lainy Malkani. She also teaches on the MRes English Literary Research and supervises postgraduate students. She welcomes applications to supervise doctoral candidates in any fields related to her research specialisms.
Her research to date has focused on global literature, postcolonial literature, gender, and translation, approaching literary texts through interdisciplinary methods engaging with visual arts, archaeology, performance, and the marketplace.
Jenni’s current research project is on representations of breastfeeding in global art and literature. Her project compares located (particular, material contexts) and global representations of breastfeeding in literary texts and works of art.
Jenni Ramone’s most recently published monograph, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. This book insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.
Jenni leads a programme of public events in partnership with Bonington Art Gallery in Nottingham, Formations, which enables interdisciplinary engagement prompted by themes or objects and is concerned with making visible the centrality of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic artists and thinkers, and the patterns and materials that connect global creative and intellectual histories.
You can find Dr Ramone on X/Twitter. @jenniramone @PSCNTU
Career overview
Before joining Nottingham Trent University, Dr Ramone was Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Newman University, where she developed and taught an online MA in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. She has also taught at Loughborough University and the Open University.
Research areas
Jenni Ramone’s current research project examines the representation of breastfeeding in literature and art.
Her most recently published monograph, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jenni Ramone edited The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates (2017). Other research projects have included the monographs Postcolonial Theories (Palgrave, 2011) and Salman Rushdie and Translation (Bloomsbury, 2013). Dr Ramone has coedited a double special issue of the journal Life Writing, with a focus on women's life-writing and diaspora in postcolonial contexts.
Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Routledge) is forthcoming in 2024.
Dr Ramone supervises research and welcomes prospective postgraduate research students in any field related to her research specialisms. Further information regarding MPhil / PhD study may be obtained from the NTU Doctoral School.
Current doctoral projects supervised:
- Ramisha Rafique, The ontology of the British Pakistani Muslim Flâneuse: Decolonisation in British Pakistani Muslim women's writing
- Miguel Martin Mejia Tamariz, A Decolonial Critique of Critical Urban Theory in the Andes
- Rupal Bansal, The Heterochrony of the Night in Partition and Post-Partition Literature of India and Pakistan
- Eve Makis, The Writer as Outsider: Writing Fiction and Cultural Identity
PhD students supervised to completion:
- Arwa Almefawaz, 'Silence Shoutin' the Loudest': Intersectionality and the 'Poetics of Failure' in the Theatre of debbie tucker green.
- Bethan Evans, Publishing Black British Short Stories: The Potential and Place of a Marginalised Form.
- Paul Adey, Nothing New Under the Sun: Literary Allusion, Intertextuality, and Lyrical Performative Quotation.
- Jenny Owen, A Barren Legacy: The Arabian Desert as Trope in English Travel Writing, Post-Thesiger.
- Shantel Edwards, Marketing Exoticism: Mixed Race Identities and Contemporary British Fiction.
- Sofia Aatkar, Caribbean-British Travel Writing, 1958-2018.
External activity
Jenni leads a programme of public events in partnership with Bonington Art Gallery in Nottingham, Formations, which enables interdisciplinary engagement prompted by themes or objects and is concerned with making visible the centrality of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic artists and thinkers, and the patterns and materials that connect global creative and intellectual histories.
Jenni Ramone (with colleagues Anna Ball and Nicole Thiara) led the Changing Wor(l)ds Partnerships, which enables partner organisations and writers to collaborate on projects to extend opportunities for cultural self-representation.
Jenni Ramone is Managing Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Jenni Ramone is Treasurer of the Postcolonial Studies Association
Jenni Ramone is Editor for English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain, 1945-present, Literary Encyclopedia
Jenni Ramone regularly appears on BBC Radio Nottingham to discuss news, current affairs, and literature. She has contributed several articles to The Conversation.
Jenni Ramone regularly hosts film directors and screenings at NTU, usually in connection with Black Writing in Britain. Filmmakers who have screened their films at NTU with Jenni include Destiny Ekaragha, Perivi Katjavivi, and Cass Pennant. She also led a film screening series inviting doctoral candidates to screen and invite conversations on films related to their research projects.
Jenni Ramone ran a parent-and-baby reading group called Short and Sweet: A Place for Parents to Read and Meet.
Publications
Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Ramone J, (forthcoming), London: Routledge.
“There are things you don’t need to be told. You suckle them at your mother’s teat”: Dynamic Subjectivity, Breastfeeding, and Storycrafting in The First Woman (2021) by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Ramone, J. (forthcoming 2024). in Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George, eds., Experimental Subjectivities. London: Bloomsbury.
'Big Milk back and forth’: Breastfeeding and Border-crossing in Postcolonial and global literatures and networks. Ramone, J. (forthcoming 2024). In: Muzna Rahman, ed. Postcolonial Text: Reimagining the Border: Contemporary Articulations.
#HandsOffMyHijab: Muslim women writers challenge contemporary Islamophobia. Rafique, R. and Ramone, J. (forthcoming 2024). In: Irene Zempi and Amina Easat-Daas, The Handbook of Gendered Islamophobia. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Mother Country: Leonora Brito Writes Wales – Black British Identity, Maternity, And Memory in The Welsh Short Story. Evans, B. and Ramone, J. 2023. In: Rachel Carroll and Fiona Tolan, eds., The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism. London: Routledge.
Diasporic Identities. Ramone, J. 2023. In: Florian Stadtler, ed. Salman Rushdie in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strange Metaphors: Contemporary Black Writing in Britain. Ramone, J., 2020. In: Richard Bradford, ed. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature. London: Wiley Blackwell.
Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading. Ramone J, 2020, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Architecture is repetition: Adapting postcolonial spatial theory for post-revolutionary socialist Cuba. Ramone J, 2019, Interventions, 21 (7), pp. 959-976, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2019.1585909.
The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing: New Contexts, New Narratives, New Debates. Ramone J, 2017, London: Bloomsbury.
Reading takes place: reading and the politics of space in Leonardo Padura’s Havana quartet. Ramone J, 2016, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 4 (1), pp. 99-118. ISSN 1073-1687
Salman Rushdie and Translation. Ramone J, 2013, London, Bloomsbury
An Intimate Disconnection: Sara Suleri Tells her Mother's Story. Ramone J, Life Writing Special Issue: Women's Life Writing and Diaspora, 2013, 10 (1)
Postcolonial Theories . Ramone J, 2011, London, Palgrave Macmillan
Sweet-talker, Street-walker: Speaking Desire on the London Street in Postcolonial Diaspora Writing by Women. Ramone J in Gwynne J and Poon A (eds), Sexuality and Contemporary Fiction, 2013, New York, Cambria
Press expertise
Dr Ramone would be happy to discuss:
- Publishing and local and global literary marketplaces
- Breastfeeding in literature and art
- Literature and maternity
- Migrant literature and culture in Britain
- Postcolonial studies
- Colonialism / imperialism
- Black British writing
- Cuba - politics, society, tourism, literature, art, literary culture, publishing
- Nigeria - literature, literary culture, publishing
- South Asian literature
- Salman Rushdie
- Hanan Al-Shaykh
- Leonardo Padura
- Neocolonialism
- Translation theories
- Black consciousness and radical black arts movements
- Reading and literature as activism, resistance, consciousness
UN Sustainable Development Goals
Jenni Ramone's research on representations of breastfeeding contributes to all Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular to the goals which tackle gender and other inequalities, health, wellbeing, and production and consumption.
