“Imperial Homes”: Creative Reading and Q&A with Professor Malachi McIntosh

Event details

A short story written as a commission for the Colonial Countryside project, “Imperial Homes” attempts to think through the way the Victorian past, as presented and promoted through the heritage industry, affects two characters from markedly different social and racial backgrounds.

The story hinges on an encounter with Calke Abbey, a unique National Trust property in rural Derbyshire. Unlike other stately homes owned by the Trust, Calke Abbey has been preserved in a state of decay—as a snapshot of the declining fortunes of the family who failed to maintain it. In its collection of colonial curios, visitors are encouraged to explore ‘a vast’ array ‘of hidden treasures’[1] that play into a familiar narrative of Britain’s Victorian rise and post-modern fall. Aligning with the conference’s theme of ‘expansion’, the story explores two at times clashing, at times compatible, at times confused confrontations with the Victorian world that complicate concepts of ‘home’. 

[1] Calke Abbey website, accessed 1 April 2018

About the speaker

Professor Malachi McIntosh

Malachi McIntosh is an Associate Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Oxford and the Barbara Pym Tutorial Fellow in English at St. Hilda’s College. He is the author of Emigration and Caribbean Literature (2015) and the editor of Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon (2016). He is a 2023 British Library Eccles Fellow and the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award (2022).

From 2019-2022, Malachi was the Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing. Prior to that, Malachi co-led the Runnymede Trust’s multiple-award-winning Our Migration Story history education project and taught at the universities of Cambridge and Warwick. His first collection of short stories, Parables, Fables, Nightmares was published by the Emma Press in September 2023 and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2024. He is currently working on a non-fiction book on the Caribbean Artists Movement.