Jenni Ramone

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 co-director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and welcomes applications for centre 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 Literary Cultures, an innovative module that she devised to enable undergraduates to put into practice their literary skills and knowledge by writing and publishing a special issue of an open access journal each year, and organising and running a literary conference for a public audience. 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 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.

External activity

Jenni is currently leading a year-long 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) leads 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 Treasurer of the Postcolonial Studies Association

Jenni Ramone is Editor for Black British Writing 1945-Contemporary, Literary Encyclopedia

Jenni Ramone regularly appears on BBC Radio Nottingham to discuss news, current affairs, and literature.

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.

In 2011, Dr Ramone ran a parent-and-baby reading group called Short and Sweet: A Place for Parents to Read and Meet.