Staff Profiles

Visiting Fellows

Associate Fellows

Affiliations & Links

Staff Profiles

Rita Christian
Carlolyn Hart
Gerald Martin
Paul McGilchrist
Patricia Murray
Jim Ross
Clem Seecharan
Paul Sutton
Nicholas Watts
Stephen Wilkinson

Rita Christian

Lecturer in Caribbean Literature. She has also lectured and developed links with the Université Aix en Provence (France), the Université Antilles-Guyane (Martinique) and the Université de la Réunion (St Denis). She has lectured at the Nationl Institute of Education in Mahé and developed links with the Institute of Créole Studies, Mahé (Seychelles). She has reviewed books and articles for journals such as Caribbean Studies (University of Puerto Rico) and French Studies. Her research interests include Caribbean literature; the French Caribbean; and literature, nationalism and identity.

Carolyn Hart

Lecturer in Caribbean Literature. She recently completed her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her research interests include African, African diasporic and Caribbean literature.

Gerald Martin

Gerald Martin is a Senior Research Professor at LMU and also Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages in the University of Pittsburgh. He is internationally known for his work on Latin American narrative, most notably through Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (1989) and several major contributions to the Cambridge History of Latin America. He is an authority on the fiction of both Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala, Nobel Prize 1967) and Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia, Nobel Prize 1982). From 2000-2004 he was the President of the International Institute of Ibero-American Literature (USA). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (London) and since 1983 he has been the only English-speaking member of the Scientific Committee of the Archive of Twentieth-Century Latin American, Caribbean and African Literature based in Paris (Nanterre-CNRS) and Poitiers, and supported by Unesco. He has served on the juries for the Casa de las Américas Prize (Havana) and the Juan Rulfo Prize (Guadalajara). In 2008 Bloomsbury will be publishing his biography of García Márquez and in 2009 Cambridge University Press will publish his Introduction to García Márquez.

Paul McGilchrist

Senior lecturer in History and Caribbean Studies. He teaches courses on African history, the black diaspora, the Caribbean experience in Britain and the theory and methodology of history. His research interests include histories of the black Atlantic and black labour in eighteenth century Britain.

Patricia Murray

Director, MA in Postcolonial Cultures, Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas (London). She has travelled widely in Latin America and the Caribbean and has research interests in a range of pan-Caribbean literature (including the work of García Márquez, Wilson Harris, Lawrence Scott and Erna Brodber) and related debates in cultural theory, particularly discourses of myth, science and religion; indigeneity and creolization. She has been keen to champion a comparative approach to and postcolonial literature and has organised conferences and research seminars in this area. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the work of Wilson Harris and García Márquez.

Jim Ross

Senior lecturer in English. His research interests include language, culture and identity in the Caribbean and Latin America. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in the islands of Providencia and San Andrés (Colombia).

Clem Seecharan

Professor in Caribbean History and Head of Caribbean Studies. His research focuses on Indo-Caribbean history, Guyana, nineteenth century non-conformist churches, West Indian cricket, and the intellectual history of the Caribbean. In recent years he has travelled and researched in India, the source of much Caribbean indentured labour. In 2003 he was awarded a Certificate of Distinction by the Guyana High Commission, in recognition of his academic achievements. His book Sweetening 'Bitter Sugar': Jock Campbell, the Booker Reformer in British Guiana, 1934-66 (2005) won the Elsa Goveia Prize (Association of Caribbean Historians).

Paul Sutton
Senior Professor in Caribbean Studies. Formerly Emeritus Reader in Politics, University of Hull. He is currently researching globalisation in the Caribbean, governance and democracy in small states, and the development problems of small island developing states. Previous research has included the regional politics of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean; the post-independence politics of Trinidad and Tobago; Eric Williams as politician and intellectual; the policies of Britain and the European Community in the Caribbean; US security policy towards the Caribbean; the security of small island states in comparative perspective; and development policy in the Caribbean.

Research Activity

Nicholas Watts

Principal lecturer, Department of Applied Social Sciences. Education Adviser to the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council, whose delegation to Mauritius he headed in 2005. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Member of the London Diplomatic Science Club. His research interests include comparative public policy and politics; environmental policy and politics; local environmental policy; new social movements; social policy and administration.

Stephen Wilkinson

Assistant Director, International Institute for the Study of Cuba. His doctoral research was on Cuban literature, and he has researched, and written numerous articles on, such questions as the history of US-Cuba relations, Cuban attitudes and policy towards homosexuals and the nature of the Cuban state; and more recently, contemporary trends in Cuban revolutionary ideology and the power structure within the state. He also contributes to the Economist Intelligence Unit's reports on Cuba, and has consulted on a number of documentaries about the island.

Last updated on 07/02/08

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