Claire Westall

Profile

Biography

I joined the department in 2010 as a Teaching Fellow. I became a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in 2011 and a Senior Lecturer in 2016. Before York, I worked in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, where I also completed my doctoral research.

My research interests include: World-Literature; Anglophone Caribbean Literature; Sport, particularly cricket, and Literature; Englishness; Britain & Devolution; The Energy Humanities; and Prison Writing/Film.

Research

Overview

I am the author of the forthcoming monograph The Rites of Cricket and Caribbean Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and my second monograph project considers cricket's place in contemporary world-literature. I am the co-author of The Public on The Public (2015), and co-editor of Cross-Gendered Literary Voices (2012), Literature of an Independent England (2013) and Prison Writing and the Literary World (2020). I have also co-edited an issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (53.3), where my editorial was titled "World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism", and I edited another issue of the same journal (52.3) titled "The Worldliness of Cricket and its Literature". I am currently co-editing an issue of the journal New Formations, titled, "Dependencies". I have a number of publications - articles and book chapters - about cricket and literature, including contributions in Cold Times: Neoliberalism, World-Culture and Forms of Discontent (2019), Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket: CLR James's Beyond a Boundary (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to Cricket (2011).

Supervision

I would welcome enquiries from graduate students interested in working on areas related to the above publications, or more broadly in the areas of: World-Literature of the World-Literary System; the Energy Humanities; Postcolonial Literature & Theory; Caribbean Literature and Culture; Literary/Cultural Representations of Sport, especially Cricket; Depictions of Imprisonment; Contemporary English Literature; Contemporary Literature and Marxism; British Devolutionary Debates; Debates about the Discipline of English Literature.