Dr Rachel Malkin

Rachel Malkin's research specialisms lie in C20th/C21st North American writing. She is interested in traditions of the experiential and ordinary, and in connections between literature and philosophy. Her work engages with the afterlives of American romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism.

Her current research has several strands:

• Her first book (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press) considers the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell in context, alongside the writing of C20th literary contemporaries.
• She is currently completing essays and chapters taking up themes including love, acknowledgement, and conversation in the work of C20th/C21st American writers, including an article titled 'Endless Responses: Claudia Rankine's Just Us and Conversation'. 
• A further element of her research explores the legacies of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin). She is interested in the roles of these thinkers for contemporary writing, including uses of this tradition that place it in dialogue with history and politics, and with questions of racialisation and gender.
• A second monograph project is planned under the provisional heading of ‘The Critical Everyday’. This work explores the ways that contemporary writers are repurposing modernist aesthetics – via the inheritance of key figures – and the notion of the everyday. 
• Forthcoming publications include book chapters on Percival Everett's novel James and ordinary language, and on James Baldwin, Stanley Cavell, and love.

She teaches literature from the C19th to the present, with a focus on C20th and C21st writing in English.