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.
Research areas
Jenni Ramone’s current research project examines the representation of breastfeeding in literature and art.
Her most recent 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.
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 PhD students
Ramisha Rafique (Director of Studies)
Paul Adey (Co-supervisor)
Miguel Martin Mejia Tamariz (Co-supervisor)
Recently completed PhD students
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".
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 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.
Publications
Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives. Ramone J, (forthcoming), London: Routledge.
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.
