Profile
Biography
Janine is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing and Culture. She’s an award-winning poet and critic working across several research areas including contemporary African American and Black British writing, popular culture, American Studies, and creative writing.
Before joining the department in 2021, Janine was a teaching associate at The University of Sheffield (where she completed her PhD), and Associate Professor in Literature at York St John University where she worked for eight years. She has written for the Guardian, and the Young Vic Theatre, and has been a repeat guest on BBC Radio 4. In 2024, she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker.
Research
Overview
Janine’s wide-ranging academic criticism on topics such as professional wrestling, racial passing and the tragic mulatta, Grace Jones, African American comedy, and the work of Toni Morrison has been published by Palgrave Macmillan, Bloomsbury, Routledge, and others. Her PhD examined representations of the tragic mulatta in contemporary African American women’s writing (including works by Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy West, BarbaraNeely and Alice Walker).
One of the key themes connecting Janine’s interests is a concern with how we read, discern, and interpret the embodiment of feeling and identity. From the rapturous response of wrestling fans, to the melodramatic rendering of racial identity in films about passing-for-white like Imitation of Life (1959), Janine’s critical and creative work explores the affective (il)legibility and ambivalence of these cultural texts. How are we meant to feel about these texts (and the people they represent)? How are we supposed to ‘read’ them? What is the relationship between reading, feeling, and identity? And what do we do as readers, teachers, and students when a text resists straightforward interpretation and obvious modes of identification?
Janine debut poetry pamphlet, Sometimes Real Love Comes Quick & Easy (ignitionpress, 2024) explores these questions with a playful look at sentimentality, desire, and popular culture and is the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn 2024 Pamphlet Choice.
Janine’s poetry has been published in Magma, Oxford Poetry, Black Lines, and in the collection Blood & Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood (Emma Press 2023). She was a winner of a 2020 Poetry London Mentoring Prize, was shortlisted for the 2020 Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition, was nominated for a prestigious Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship in 2021, and in 2022, was a finalist for The Aurora Prize for Writing (Poetry).
Link to Janine’s personal website
Supervision
Janine welcomes enquiries from PhD applicants who are working specifically on African American and/or Black British writing or contemporary writing and its relationship to race. She also welcomes enquiries from creative writing students but only when the candidate’s creative or critical interests intersect with her research interests.
Teaching
Undergraduate
Janine convenes the third-year undergraduate module Contemporary Black Writing.
Janine has a long-standing national reputation for her learning and teaching practice and has delivered plenaries and invited talks across the country on her work in the classroom.
Janine is committed to excellent learning and teaching practice and to broadening access to higher education. Her work in this area contributed to The Runnymede Trust’s Aiming Higher Report (2015), which was presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Race and Education at the House of Commons. Janine’s teaching has been recognised via numerous nominations for teaching awards and she was highly commended in the YUSU Excellence Awards (2022/23) in the “Most Inspiring” category.
External activities
Memberships
Janine is a member of the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) and The Poetry Society.
