
Dr Leighan Renaud
BA, MA, PhD
Current positions
Lecturer
Department of English
Contact
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Research interests
My research focuses on contemporary Anglophone Caribbean literature. I am primarily interested in how contemporary writers from the region engage with themes such as gender, family, neo-coloniality, legacies of slavery, and language. My forthcoming monograph, Motherhood, Mothering and Marronage (Peter Lang 2023), examines the representation of matrifocality in twenty-first century Caribbean fiction, and argues that matrifocality is represented, not only as an integral component of family and community life, but also as an act of marronage and a symbol of resistance against patriarchal and Eurocentric normativity.
Other research areas I am interested in include: creative responses to archives of the Caribbean, Black Aquatic literature, and Black women’s writing. My research seeks always to be community-focused and interdisciplinary, and I am interested in the ways that the study of literature can speak to and inform debates across the humanities and social sciences.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Telling and Re-telling Tales: Caribbean Folklore and the Art of Storytelling
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of EnglishDates
19/05/2023 to 19/11/2023
Does Motherhood Need Mitigating? A Collective Examination of Parenting and Academic Practice
Principal Investigator
Role
Collaborator
Managing organisational unit
Department of History (Historical Studies)Dates
01/01/2023 to 31/07/2023
Publications
Selected publications
01/11/2020‘“The end linked with the beginning and was even the beginning”: Fractal Poetics in Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat’
Journal of West Indian Literature
‘Beyond the Nuclear: The Caribbean Family’
Recent publications
01/01/2024‘Is real mas outside’: Community, Resistance and Notting Hill Carnival
Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration
Motherhood and Marronage: Representing Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction
Motherhood and Marronage: Representing Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction
‘Connecting Women through Water: Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) as Matrifocal Speculative Fiction’
Women and Water
‘Beyond the Nuclear: The Caribbean Family’
‘“The end linked with the beginning and was even the beginning”: Fractal Poetics in Erna Brodber’s Nothing’s Mat’
Journal of West Indian Literature