Dr Caroline Herbert

Dr Caroline Herbert is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature and is the Course Director for the English Literature undergraduate and MA programmes. Her research centres on postcolonial cultural production, especially South Asian literature and film.

An expert in contemporary Indian literature and film, Caroline has particular interests in city life (notably Bombay/Mumbai), social inequality, spectrality, and the environmental humanities more broadly. Her articles in these areas have appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Textual Practice, and BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, as well as prize-winning essay collections such as Popular Ghosts and The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature. She is co-editor (with Claire Chambers) of Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representation (Routledge 2015), and a special issue of Moving Worlds exploring South Asian cities. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Spectral Dispossessions in Postcolonial Bombay/Mumbai which explores representations of social and spatial inequality in fiction, poetry, and film.

Caroline was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing from 2015-2023 and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Before joining Leeds Beckett, Caroline was a Canadian Commonwealth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Concordia University, Montreal, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Figura: Centre de Recherche sur le Texte et l'Imaginaire, at the University of Quebec, Montreal.  

• Contemporary Literary Studies (L4)
• Postcolonial Literature (L5)
• Postcolonial Cities (L6)
• Imagining India (MA)