Rebecca Duncan

Rebecca Duncan is 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 "Aesthetics of Empire".

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 particular interests in world-ecological approaches, the body and embodiment, and speculative forms.

Her current project is generously funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and examines how world-literature mediates emerging generational politics in the context of planetary emergency. Her previous project, “Materialising Violence: Speculative Fiction and New Cultures of Resistance from Sub-Saharan Africa", was funded by the Craafoord Foundation, and concluded in 2021. 

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 on 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. Her work features in a number of edited volumes, including The Routledge Handbook of African Literature (Routledge 2019), Twenty-First-Century Gothic (Edinburgh UP 2019), The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2017), and Neoliberal Gothic (Manchester UP 2017).

Rebecca’s recent research on world-ecology and South African literature and cinema appears in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Science Fiction Film and Television, and the collection Gothic in the Anthropocene (forthcoming U. of Minnesota Press). With Dr Matt Foley, she is co-editor of Patrick McGrath and his Worlds: Madness and the Transnational Gothic (Routledge 2020), and, with Dr Rebekah Cumpsty, “The Body Now” (2020), a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

Rebecca's Guest Edited Special Issue of Gothic Studies, entitled "Decolonising Gothic", is forthcoming in November 2022

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.