The Empire Studies stream explores how the ideologies and practices of empire have shaped Western and global writing. How has empire created structures of violence and hegemony that pervade and are enacted through literary texts? How has it created global linguistic hierarchies; achieved technological advances to service racial capitalism; contrived political forms promising universality while enacting ethnic and civilizational myths; normalized exploitation, dispossession, and planetary hierarchies through liberal ideology? How has modernity emerged out of empire’s bloodied infrastructures of printing, transportation, and plantation agriculture? What afterlives did these infrastructures and ideologies initiate in the postcolonial era, from nationalistic enthusiasm to Western nostalgia for cultural imperialism? Empire Studies courses aim both to theorize new models for the critique of empire and to promote the interdisciplinary exchange of research at the University of Houston. Courses in the stream will ask students to engage with a range of voices, including the literature of high imperialism, academic critiques of colonialism, and voices of resistance from both the colonial and postcolonial eras. Courses will also treat a range of historical formations, from the European colonial empires to more recent formations in the Global South and the current U.S. geopolitical hegemon.  

Empire Studies Faculty:

• Hosam Aboul-Ela
• Margot Backus
• Sreya Chatterjee
• Ann Christensen
• Karen Fang
• Sebastian Lecourt
• Auritro Majumder
• David Mazella
• Kavita Singh
• Lynn Voskuil
• David Womble

Recent Faculty Books

• Sreya Chatterjee, Family Fictions and Contemporary World Making: Irish and Indian Women’s Writing in the Contemporary Era (Routledge, 2021)

• Auritro Majumder, Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (Cambridge, 2020)

• Sebastian Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018)

• Karen Fang, Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film (Stanford University Press, 2017)

Featured Courses

• Topics in Postcolonial Studies: World Literature and the Global South (Dr. Hosam Aboul-Ela)

• Women Writers in World Literature (Dr. Sreya Chatterjee)

• Running on Steam (Dr. David Womble)