Dr Asha Rogers BA, MA (Sheffield), DPhil (Oxon)

• BA English Literature (University of Sheffield)
• MA English Literature (University of Sheffield)
• DPhil English Literature (University of Oxford)

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

I am a South Londoner of dual English-Indian heritage with family roots in Ireland, Kenya, and North India. Educated in the comprehensive system, I studied English Literature at the University of Sheffield (BA and MA), and went on to write a doctoral thesis on the global phenomenon of state literary sponsorship at St Anne's College at Oxford, supervised by Peter D. McDonald, where I spent three happy years in archives. My first academic teaching job was a temporary lectureship in the School of English and Drama at QMUL. I arrived at EDACS in 2016, where I have expanded the teaching of postcolonial literature and culture in the Department of English Literature. Outside of academic life I have worked in community development, community arts, campaigning, and multifaith chaplaincy. 

I teach anglophone writing across the twenty and twenty-first centuries. My research-led module Making Global Literatures in Britain, for which I was nominated for a College of Arts and Law Outstanding Teaching Award in 2019, will run in Autumn 2020. In the 20/21 academic year I will also be teaching the undergraduate modules Colonial/Postcolonial, Twenty-First Century Literature, and English in the World. 

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research projects on literature and the modern state, cultural institutions and cultural policy, postcolonial Britain and the decolonizing world, or related topics.

I currently co-supervise PGR projects on travel writing on Central Africa, the shifting values of Hindi literature in translation, and myth in postcolonial poetry.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research emphasises the archive-based study of literary and cultural institutions, cultural policy, and organizations as definitive forces in twentieth and twenty-first century literary history. I am interested in how forms of political liberalism have shaped culture through these structures, and how acts of literary writing have responded to these demands in turn.

I first addressed these questions in my AHRC-funded thesis, Officially Autonomous: Anglophone Literary Cultures and the State since 1945, which examined how the modern state intervened to protect literary culture from the marketplace. Case studies included the activities of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This research prompted me to consider the case of post-imperial Britain in particular. My first book State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020) established the changing justifications for state literary support in Britain across multiple institutional contexts, drawing heavily from public archives. It argues that the state acted as an integral custodian of literary freedom in this period, but also that changing beliefs about who constituted literature’s 'public' in the age of multiculturalism had a bearing on its expressive acts and how they were received. You can find out more, and access additional materials, at statesponsoredliterature.com

My next project aims to examine the institutional conditions behind the rise of English as a global language between 1930 and 1970, based on the activities of the British Council. I remain interested in the global histories of texts and their multivalent uses. 

Other Recent Activities

I am a committee member of the Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture and editorial Board member of the Journal for Postcolonial Writing (former Special-Issues co-editor with my colleague Dr Fariha Shaikh).

Other recent research projects I’ve curated include:

• Stuart Hall's Archive: A Symposium to mark the arrival of Hall's archive. In collaboration with the Ikon Gallery, Rob Waters (QMUL) and my Birmingham colleagues Michell Chresfield, Helen Fisher and Sadiah Qureshi. Read a write-up of the event by the Stuart Hall Foundation here.

• Uncovering Hidden Histories: A project interrogating the global history of the collection at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts for Black History Month, in collaboration with the Learning team and the poet Dzifa Benson. You can see the 'alternative labels' produced by the project here.