
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 Tales: Building a Folk Map of St Lucia
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of EnglishDates
01/12/2024 to 01/07/2025
Telling Tales: Locating St Lucia's 'Ti Bolom' folk story
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of EnglishDates
01/10/2023 to 31/07/2024
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
Terror as Usual: Gender Based Violence and Women’s Work in Cherie Jones’ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature
‘Connecting Women through Water: Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) as Matrifocal Speculative Fiction’
Women and Water
‘Beyond the Nuclear: The Caribbean Family’
‘Is real mas outside’
Cultures of London
Recent publications
01/01/2025Terror as Usual: Gender Based Violence and Women’s Work in Cherie Jones’ How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House
Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature
‘Is real mas outside’
Cultures of London
Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature
Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature
‘Connecting Women through Water: Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003) as Matrifocal Speculative Fiction’
Women and Water