Room: R12 R05 B40
Office Hours: Wednesday, 13-14h
Tel.: 0201/ 183-3406
patricia.plummer@uni-due.de

Administrative Staff

Monika Forstreuter
Room: R12 R05 B45
Office Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 9-12h
Tel.: 0201/ 183-4004
monika.forstreuter@uni-due.de

Culture, language, politics, the economy – European colonial expansion affected innumerable parts of daily life on a global scale. And indeed, neo-colonial structures are not a thing of the past, but still inhibit freedom and economic growth in a large number of former colonies today.

Postcolonial Studies is concerned with the relationship former colonies had and have with the coloniser. How is the subordinate culture represented? How is language used to subdue the colonised? How is power exerted through cultural institutions? As the field of study includes such diverse cultures as, for instance, Australia, Canada, India and various African nations, issues like ethnicity, identity, hybridity and gender always have to be taken into consideration.

Prof. Dr. Patricia Plummer's research and teaching focus on a variety of topics, especially on literature and culture of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on travel writing, Orientalism, Islamophobia and transcultural spirituality, postcolonial and gender studies as well as popular culture. She is the author of a monograph on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and of a forthcoming study on eighteenth-century English representations of the Ottoman Empire. Currently, she is editing the proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on transcultural Western encounters with Zen-Buddhism (to be published later this year); she is also writing a book on women, art and Theosophy in early twentieth-century Australia.

The Postcolonial Studies department frequently hosts readings and creative writing workshops by visiting authors, academics and artists, for instance the Postcolonial Writers in Residence. Moreover, students are encouraged to take part in workshops, artist talks and lectures organized, for instance, in cooperation with the Essener Kolleg für Geschlechterforschung (EKfG). For more information, please consult Events.

Please note that this website is still under construction. Feel free to send in your suggestions via email to esma.sen@stud.uni-due.de