After completing a BA in English and Related Literature at the University of York, Rachel studied postcolonial and American literatures at the University of Leeds. Since receiving her PhD in 2003, she has taught at the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and Hull, and at Leeds Metropolitan University. She joined the department in 2007.

Rachel’s primary research interests lie in African American literature and culture, especially the Harlem Renaissance. A second area of research interest is postcolonial studies, with an emphasis on South Asian writers such as Anita Desai, Vikram Seth and Bharati Mukherjee.

Rachel is completing a monograph entitled The Collage Aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance, which explores the relationship between Anglo-American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, mapping out transatlantic stylistic and thematic connections.

Research Supervision: Rachel would be pleased to supervise research degrees in twentieth-century African American literature and culture, especially the Harlem Renaissance.

 Articles:

• ‘Moses and Nation-building: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said’s Freud and the Non-European’, Comparative American Studies 5:3 (2007), pp. 333-356
• ‘"[A]dventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic": Reading Jean Toomer's Collage Aesthetic in Cane’, Journal of American Studies 40:3 (2006), pp. 503-21
• ‘Testing the limits of the Transcultural: Travel, Intertextuality and Tourism in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World and Anita Desai’s The Zigzag Way’, Interactions (Fall 2006), pp. 61-74
• ‘Music and National Identity in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 5:2 (2005), pp. 42-53
• (with Claire Chambers), 'The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka : A Review Article of Literature and Criticism published in 2006', The Year's Work in English Studies, 86 (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1059-1075
• (with Caroline Herbert), 'The Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka : A Review Article of Literature and Criticism published in 2007', The Year's Work in English Studies, 87 (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1185-1204

   

   

 Administration:

• Department: Examinations Officer,  Staff Student Consultative Committee Faculty Representative
• School: School of Humanities Unfair Practice Representative