Caitlin Vandertop

I joined the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies in September 2019. Before this, I was a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, having also worked and studied at universities in Hong Kong, Australia, Canada and the UK.

Research Interests

My research areas include modern and contemporary world literature, postcolonial studies, urban culture and the environmental humanities, with a focus on writing from Oceania and areas of the Asia/Pacific region. My book Modernism in the Metrocolony (Cambridge UP, 2020) is a comparative study of twentieth-century Anglophone literature from a network of British colonial port cities. A blog post introducing the book can be found here.

Following on from this, I’m working on two new projects: the first looks at post/colonial literary engagements with the British empire’s environmental legacies, with a current focus on the idea and practice of ‘reclaiming’ cities; the second is broadly concerned with resources in Oceanic literature from the colonial to independence periods.