Bild på Rebecca Duncan

New post doc at Concurrences

Dr Rebecca Duncan joins Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies as a postdoctoral researcher, generously funded by the Crafoord Foundation, from January 2020.

Rebecca holds degrees from the University of Cape Town and Justus-Liebig University Giessen, and since 2015 has taught literature in the Department of English at Stirling University, where she was also affiliated to the International Centre for Gothic Studies. She has research interests in postcolonial and world literature (with a focus on Southern Africa), political ecology, decolonial thinking, and speculative fiction.

Rebecca is the author of South African Gothic (University of Wales/University of Chicago Press 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize in literary criticism in gothic studies. The first book-length study of speculative gothic and horror forms in contemporary South African fictions, this monograph examines gothic as a critical lexicon for postcolonial anxiety, which appears with force over South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, both to register real anxieties that emerge with this political and socio-economic shift, and to interrogate the processes via which it unfolds. 

Her recent work includes articles for Science Fiction Film and Television (“From Cheap Labour to Surplus Humanity: World-Ecology and the Post-apartheid Speculative in Neil Blomkamp’s District 9”, 2018), and for ARIEL (“Writing Ecological Revolution from Millennial South Africa: History, Nature and the Post-Apartheid Present”, forthcoming 2020). Rebecca is co-editor, with Dr Matt Foley, of the collection Patrick McGrath and his Worlds: Madness and the Transnational Gothic (Routledge 2020), and with Dr Rebekah Cumpsty, of the special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies entitled “The Body Now: Somatic Vocabularies from the Millennial Global South” (forthcoming, 2020). She is also General Editor of the peer-reviewed Fantastika Journal.

Rebecca’s current project, “Materialising Violence: Speculative Fiction and New Cultures of Resistance from Southern Africa”, examines representations of violence, and their mobilisations, in Southern African speculative texts by young and emerging writers, considering these in the context of decolonial activisms driven, both in Southern African and globally, by members of the millennial generation.