Charlotte Spear

Thesis title:

Locating the Human: World-Literature and the Concept of Rights

Charlotte’s research explores how peripheral literatures intervene in dominant human rights discourses. Working at the intersection of world-literature, environmental humanities and disaster studies, her project is animated by three key questions:

How does the (semi-)peripheral novel register the impact of human rights discourses and practices?
How does it interrogate the concept of ‘inalienable rights’ at a bodily level?
How do our understandings of human rights discourses and practices change when confronted with a spatialised textual embodiment questioning the very notion of humanity?

Research Area

Comparative Literature
Languages and Literature

Publications

Forthcoming: “Crisis and the Postcolonial State: Human Rights and Contemporary Emergency”, Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, De Gruyter

Jan 2023: "'Though they have eyes [they] cannot see’: Political Blindness, Contemporary Literature and the Legibility of Crisis", MLR 118.1. January 2023.

Conferences

Jun 2023: “Examining the Invisible: Aesthetics of Rights and Responsibility”, The Aesthetics of Rights and Wrongs, University of South-Eastern Norway

Jun 2023: ““Unimagined Communities” and Re-Imagined Justice in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House”, Methodologies for Imagining an Alternative Politics of (Human) Rights, London School of Economics UK

Mar 2023: “The Intertwined Aesthetics of Invisibility and Responsibility in Tram 83” ACLA 2023, Chicago US

Nov 2022: "The Literature of Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Haiti and Narratives of Re-Imagination", British Comparative Literature Association PG and ECR Conference: New Pathways inComparative and World Literature, Queens University Belfast

June 2022: “Defining a Space for Women’s Rights: World-Literature and the Aesthetics of Combined Unevenness”, Women in World(-)Literature, University of Warwick

May 2022: "Where is the “post” in “postcolonial”? Human rights in the “Age of Crisis”", Warwick English Postgraduate Symposium, University of Warwick

May 2022: "‘This is a dead place, a place for dying’: Petrofictions and the Aesthetics of Human Rights Activism", Adversity and Creativity: African Literature, Film, Media and Public Discourse, African Literature Association

May 2021: “Rethinking Registration: Reading the Modern World-System through the Contemporary Refugee Novel”, Regeneration, University of Glasgow

Other Research Interests

Disaster Studies, Environmental Humanities, Gender Studies

Memberships

African Literature Association

British Comparative Literature Association

American Comparative Literature Association