Dr Jason Allen-Paisant

Profile

I am a Lecturer in Caribbean Poetry and Decolonial Thought, with joint appointments in the School of English and the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. I am also currently the Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, having taken over from Professor Graham Huggan in September 2020.

My academic research is on cultural memory in the African diaspora, and I combine, and move between, disciplinary and methodological approaches (theatre studies, performance studies, poetics, literary criticism). My creative writing (poetry, memoir, critical life writing) addresses issues of time, race, class, and the environmental conditions underpinning Black identity. My creative writing has appeared in Granta, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII, Callaloo, among other places. 

I graduated from the University of Oxford in 2015 with a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages and joined the University of Leeds in 2016 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. At Leeds, I serve as board member of LUCAS (Leeds University Centre for African Studies) and as member of the Leeds University Poetry Centre. I also serve on the editorial board of Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters.

In September 2018, as part of my Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Leeds, I convened a three-day international and interdisciplinary conference called ‘Memory and Performance in African-Atlantic Futures’.

Research interests

Appearing soon

Thinking with Trees. Forthcoming from Carcanet Press, 2021.

“Silence, Sound, Ceremony: The Poetry of NourbeSe Philip.” The Poetry Review, Vol. 111.1 (Spring 2021).

"Animist time and the white Anthropocene." Forthcoming in "Animism in a Planetary Frame", special issue of New Formations, guest edited by Sam Durrant and Philip Dickinson.

Performing futures in the African diaspora: Time, ritual, ceremony. Forthcoming special issue of Parallax.
 

Creative Writing

Thinking with Trees, full-length volume of poems from Carcanet Press, 2021.

‘Naming’ in Granta 154

Poems in Granta

Poems in The Poetry Review.

Poems in Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII

‘Walking with the Word “Tree”’ & other poems in PN Review

‘A Sound from the Throat of God’, on The Verb, BBC Radio 3

’Un-Dad Elegy’ in Callaloo
 

Media

The Writing of Aimé Césaire, Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3

Dante in Caribbean Poetry, Podcast of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies

Thinking with Trees: Poetry and Conversation, EcoCast: Environmental Conversations On Creative Art, Scholarship, and Teaching

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy (University of Oxford)
• MPhil (University of the West Indies)
• BA (University of the West Indies)

Professional memberships

• Memory Studies Association
• Society for Caribbean Studies
• American Comparative Literature Association

Research groups and institutes

• French