Position: Lecturer in English

Research

• Caribbean literatures and theory
• Postcolonial studies
• Black British and British Asian writing
• Contemporary literary theory and continental philosophy
• Gilles Deleuze

Lorna’s research interests lie in the relationship between postcolonial literatures, especially Caribbean, and contemporary critical theory. Her PhD explored the theme of creolization in Caribbean writing from James Grainger’s 1764 poem The Sugar Cane to contemporary works such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros. In 2010, Lorna was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. As a Fellow she pursued a research project, ‘Caribbean Enlightenment’, that explored the philosophical legacies of the Radical Enlightenment on contemporary Caribbean and postcolonial thought. Her monograph in progress, Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy, builds on this work. Reflecting on the cross-cultural exchange of ideas that have shaped Caribbean writing from the 1940s surrealist movement to the present, her current research seeks to theorise the relationship between two significant areas of contemporary thought: postcolonialism and ‘post-continental’ philosophy, especially that of Gilles Deleuze.

Selected Publications

Essay in Edited Collections

‘Prophetic Visions of the Past: The Arrivants and Another Life’ in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 181-190.

Journal Articles

‘Politicising Paradise: Sites of Resistance in Cereus Blooms at Night’, Shani Mootoo: Writing, Difference and the Caribbean, a special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature, edited by Denise deCaires Narain, Alison Donnell and Evelyn O’Callaghan, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2011 pp. 52-67.

‘Uncovering the Marvellous: Surrealism and the Writings of Wilson Harris’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2011 pp. 52-64.

‘Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference and Repetition in Postcolonial “Writing Back”, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Deleuze Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2010 pp. 16-41.

‘Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: Édouard Glissant and the Poetics of Creolization’, Textual Practice, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2009 pp. 99-117.

‘Creolization and the Collective Unconscious: Locating the Originality of Art in Wilson Harris’ Jonestown, The Mask of the Beggar and The Ghost of Memory’, Postcolonial Text, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2008.

Forthcoming Publications

Monograph

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-continental Philosophy (Continuum forthcoming, 2012).

Editorial Work

with Wendy Knepper (eds) (‘Scapes’ of Globality: New Critical Approaches to Wilson Harris. A Special Issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 49, No. 1. Forthcoming, 2013.

with Birgit M. Kaiser (eds) Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2012).

Essay in Edited Collections

‘Beyond the Colonised and the Coloniser: Caribbean Literature as Postcolonial “Health”’ in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures, edited by Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2012).

with Birgit M. Kaiser ‘Navigating Differential Futures; (Un)making Colonial Pasts’ in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures, edited by Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2012).