Welcome to the website of the Postcolonial Studies Section of the Department of Anglophone Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. These pages provide news and relevant information for students and inform them about forthcoming events as well as past activities.
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
Room: R12 R05 B40
Office Hours: Wednesday, 13-14h
Tel.: 0201/ 183-3406
patricia.plummer@uni-due.de
Monika Forstreuter
Room: R12 R05 B45
Office Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 9-12h
Tel.: 0201/ 183-4004
monika.forstreuter@uni-due.de
Patricia Plummer's publications, research and teaching focus 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. Patricia Plummer is currently 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.
Artist Talk with Sabine Bürger (Essen)
7 January 2016, 14-16h, Bibliothekssaal, Campus Essen
On January 7th 2016, Sabine Bürger, an Essen-based media artist who trained at Düsseldorf Art Academy, will talk about the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846). Born in Wisbech, East Anglia, Clarkson became aware of the injustice of slavery in his student days at Cambridge. The talk focuses on Clarkson’s contribution to the Abolitionist movement, and introduces the Clarkson display at Wisbech & Fenland Museum, one of the oldest museums in England, simultaneously reflecting on the artist’s engagement with the museum. Great Expectations (2013) is Bürger’s filmic portrait of the museum, and its curator, David Wright. The film was screened at the Department of Anglophone Studies in July 2014 as part of the ongoing collaboration between Sabine Bürger and Prof. Dr. Patricia Plummer, Chair of Postcolonial Studies at Duisburg-Essen University.
The talk takes place in the context of Professor Plummer’s current lecture course “Narrating Slavery in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts.“ Excerpts from the video will also be included in the talk, which will be followed by a discussion.
A thematic exhibition of selected photographic works by Sabine Bürger, including information on Thomas Clarkson and the Wisbech & Fenland Museum will be on display in the university library (Essen Campus, level 1, room BC) until 12 February during opening hours.
Award-winning writer and critic Rajeev Balasubramanyam will teach an intensive creative writing course to students of Anglophone Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. After an introductory meeting with students, the author will read from and discuss his works on Thursday, 2 July (18.30h, Bibliothekssaal). The actual workshop will be taught on Friday and Saturday, 3-4 July. The course offers a unique opportunity for students to meet and interact with a published author who has held numerous writing residencies across the globe. Participants should be prepared to write short exercises and read them out in class. A selection of texts created in the workshop will be published later this year.
Dr. Rajeev Balasubramanyam was born in Lancashire, England. He is a graduate of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and received his Ph.D. in English Literature from Lancaster University. He has published three novels to date, In Beautiful Disguises (2000), The Dreamer (2010) and Starstruck (2014). Balasubramanyam has written numerous short stories, many of which have been included in important anthologies (e.g. Britain Re-Written, ed. Barbara Korte and Eva Ulrike Pirker); he is also the editor of Tell Tales (vol. 2, 2005), a collection of short fiction.