Inaugural Lecture - Professor Sarah Lawson Welsh

This event will be in person and online

Sarah looks back at her long academic career as a Caribbean specialist: nearly thirty-five years teaching and researching global literatures with particular interests in decolonizing pedagogies, postcolonial studies, Anglophone Caribbean and black British literatures.

Her lectures review her most recent interdisciplinary research, key within the emergent field of postcolonial food studies. Her 2018 monograph, Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean, engages with a wide range of writing from and about the Caribbean. It considers historical narratives of European travellers and plantation owners, the role of Caribbean cookbooks at home and abroad, original interviews with Barbadian women and the way in which food and storytelling are interlinked.

However, Sarah’s lecture also focuses on a more universal experience: that of being interrupted. Despite being extensively theorised within and across different disciplines (law, art, theatre, theology, sociolinguistics, psychology), interruption as lived experience is frequently perceived by academics as simply inconvenience or delay. Sarah reflects, briefly, on her lived experience of three kinds of interruption: cancer (2023-4), the pandemic (2020-1) and parenthood (2001-) and their lessons, arguing that interruptions can present liberating possibilities, a chance to pause, rethink, refocus and reframe in some powerful ways.

Biography:

Professor Lawson Welsh went to school when she was four and a half years old and hasn't had a year out of education yet. She has a first degree in English and American literature from the University of Kent at Canterbury and a PhD in Caribbean Studies (Language and Literature) from the University of Warwick. She didn’t do an MA and thinks it might have been a good idea to do so. As an undergraduate, she was supervised by Nobel prize winning novelist from Zanzibar, Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah and as a PhD student by acclaimed Guyanese-British writer and broadcaster, Professor David Dabydeen.

She publishes on decolonizing pedagogies based on her own varied teaching experiences across both Russell Group and post 1992 universities, Caribbean and Black British writing and postcolonial food studies. Sarah is widely published internationally and has also acted as a specialist consultant researcher for Vice Munchies Food Magazine and the BBC programme Who Do You Think You Are. She is one of the founding editors of the international journal: Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Taylor & Francis) and served as an editor for many years. Her fifth book, a commissioned monograph entitled Twenty-first Century Literatures: the Anglophone Caribbean, will be published by Routledge in 2025.

Timings and Refreshments

This event will close at 7.00pm and will be followed by a drinks reception from 7.00pm - 7.45pm for all attending.

Venue: De Grey Lecture Theatre, York St John University, Lord Mayor’s Walk, YO31 7EX.

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