Dr. Melanie Otto

Biography

I received my first degree from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, majoring in English and minoring in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. I graduated in 1998, writing my MA dissertation on the novels of Ben Okri. In 2003, I completed a PhD on the work of Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite at Swansea University. Since 2003, I have been lecturer in the School of English at Trinity College. I was Director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas for many years, and I currently act as Global Director and Coordinator of Visiting Students. Teaching My teaching interests cover all major aspects of postcolonial studies with a particular focus on Caribbean literature, settler colonialism, Indigenous studies, and comparative literature. I coordinate and teach the Senior Fresh module 'Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction to Key Debates and Texts' and the Sophister options 'The Pain of Unbelonging: Writing from Canada, South America, and the Pacific' and 'Writing from the Creole Americas'. I teach several sessions on the core courses of the School's MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies as well as the MPhil option 'Caribbean Literature'. Students who completed their PhDs under my supervision have worked on a range of postcolonial topics, including settler colonial narratives in the work or Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys, black gay male identity in the Black Atlantic, the work of Maeve Brennan, and symbolic (dis)order in the works of Derek Walcott, Adonis and W. B. Yeats. I welcome research proposals from prospective students and postdoctoral scholars on any aspect of postcolonial literature. Research I am a nationally and internationally known expert in postcolonial literatures and leading scholar on poet Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020), a paradigm-shifting figure in Caribbean and global poetics. My first monograph, A Creole Experiment: Utopian Space in Kamau Brathwaite's 'video-style' Works, a groundbreaking assessment of Brathwaite's poetry, established my reputation as a scholar of Caribbean poetics and aesthetics. I have contributed chapters on Caribbean visual art and poetics to significant series: Caribbean Literature in Transition (2021) and, on Brathwaite specifically, A History of Punctuation in English Literature (in press), both published by Cambridge University Press. My current scholarship is in the area of word-image research. I have published substantial articles on Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan and on Irish painter Lorcan Walshe. Walshe's signature series The Artefacts Project is a postcolonial intervention in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland. My article on The Artefacts Project, published in Word & Image, relates my work directly to Trinity's Colonial Legacies project. My research and my teaching are comparative and intermedial in methodology. I deepen this approach in my current monograph on writing and its counter-languages art and music in Lorcan Walshe's work.