Rebecca Duncan

Rebecca Duncan is Associate Professor and Researcher in the Department of Languages, and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, where she co-ordinates the research cluster for Ecology, Culture and Coloniallity (ECCo)

Rebecca holds degrees from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Justus-Liebig University Giessen (Germany). She works in postcolonial- and world-literature, with a focus on Southern Africa, and is particularly interested in the ways that 'speculative' genres mediate intersecting struggles for racial, gender and environmental justice.

She is currently principal investigator of Resources and Energy in South African Literature, a three-year research project funded by the Swedish Research Council. Her previous research has been generously funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2021-24) and the Crafoord Foundation (2020-21). 

Teaching

At LNU, Rebecca is Coordinator for the MA Course "Theory and Criticism: Current Debates in the Humanities", and teaches more generally on topics related to postcolonial studies and political ecology. She has supervised theses in post- and decolonial literature, ecocriticism and literature and millennial politics. 

Research

Rebecca has published widely in literary ecocriticism, and speculative genres in global contexts. She 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. She is the editor of several collections, including 'Decolonising Gothic', a special issue of Gothic Studies, and The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (EUP 2023), which won the Justin D. Edwards Prize in 2024.

Commissions

Rebecca sits on the advisory board for Cambridge University Press' "Elements of the Gothic" series, and between 2017 and 2021, she was General Editor at Fantastika Journal. She is a member of the International Gothic Association and the Postcolonial Studies Association, and a former member of the International Centre for the Gothic at Stirling University. She has served as peer reviewer for a number of publications, including English Studies in Africa, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Feminist Theory and Gothic Studies.