Dr Lucy Evans

My current research focuses on literary representations of crime and violence in the Caribbean. My most recent book, Crime Fiction in the Caribbean: Reframing Crime and Justice, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. From 2021 to 2024 I led an AHRC-funded international project, Representing gender-based violence: literature, performance and activism in the Anglophone Caribbean, working with Caribbean-based researchers and NGO partners to develop strategies for using spoken word poetry and theatre in gender-based violence prevention initiatives.

International collaboration is a central element of my research practice as a British researcher, located in the UK, working in Caribbean literary studies. I recently led an international project, Representing gender-based violence: literature, performance and activism in the Anglophone Caribbean, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2021-24), working in collaboration with co-investigators, researchers and NGOs in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and the UK. This project had three main aims: to analyse representations of gender-based violence (GBV) in contemporary Caribbean literary and performance cultures, to generate new creative work on the theme of GBV, and to equip young people to take leadership in arts activism against GBV. As part of my work on this project, I co-edited an anthology with Shivanee Ramlochan, Unstitching Silence: Fiction and Poetry by Caribbean Writers on Gender-based Violence (Peekash Press, forthcoming November 2024), and worked with the project team and partners to produce an open-access teaching resource, GBV Education for Youth: a Caribbean Arts-based Facilitation Guide. 

This project emerged out of a broader international and interdisciplinary research networking project that I led in collaboration with Anthony Harriott (University of the West Indies) on Crime and its Representation in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1834-2018, funded by the British Academy (2016-19). The project brought social science researchers into dialogue with arts and humanities researchers, and involved over forty network members from the UK and across the Caribbean region. As an outcome of this project, I co-edited a special issue of the Caribbean Journal of Criminology, ‘Crime, Gender and Sexuality in the Anglophone Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’, and launched the ongoing University of the West Indies and University of Leicester International Summer School, an annual week-long global studies programme for postgraduate students and early career researchers based in the Caribbean and the UK, hosted in alternate years by the University of Leicester and the University of the West Indies. I also wrote a book, Crime Fiction in the Caribbean: Reframing Crime and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024)

I have a long-standing interest in literary form and genre. My first book was Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories (Liverpool University Press, 2014), which presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a distinctive feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. Before that I co-edited a book with Mark McWatt and Emma Smith, The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (Peepal Tree Press, 2011), a comprehensive collection which explores the significance of the short story form to Caribbean cultural production across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

I am currently developing research ideas around the use of arts-based methods in prison contexts in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

Books and edited collections

Crime Fiction in the Caribbean: Reframing Crime and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Co-editor, with Shivanee Ramlochan, Unstitching Silence: Fiction and Poetry by Caribbean Writers on Gender-based Violence (Peekash Press, forthcoming November 2024).

Guest Editor, with Rivke Jaffe, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22:1 (2020), special Issue: ‘Representing Crime, Violence and Jamaica’.

Guest Editor, with Dylan Kerrigan, Caribbean Journal of Criminology, 4:1 (2019), special Issue: ‘Crime, Gender and Sexuality in the Anglophone Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’.

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories (Liverpool University Press, 2014).

Co-editor, with Mark McWatt and Emma Smith, The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (Peepal Tree Press, 2011).

Guest Editor, with Mandala White, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 13:1 (2013), special Issue: Crime Across Cultures.

Guest Editor, with Mandala White, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47:2 (2012), symposium: Crime Narratives and Global Politics.

Journal articles and book chapters

With Kelsi Delaney, ‘“Here are the stories underneath”: Representing Gender-based Violence in Contemporary Jamaican Poetry’, in Gender Based Violence in the Caribbean: Historical Roots, Contemporary Continuities, ed. by Dalea Bean and Verene Shepherd (University of the West Indies Press, forthcoming 2024).

“Tidal Poetics in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon”, in Propagules: Essays on Dionne Brand’s Works, ed. by Titilola Aiyegbusi and Mark A. McCutcheon (Guernica, forthcoming 2024; reprint of 2009 article in the Caribbean Quarterly).

‘Representations of White Collar Crime in the Caribbean’, in Organised Crime, Financial Crime and Criminal Justice: Theoretical Concepts and Challenges, ed. by Dan Jasinski, Amber Phillips and Ed Johnston (Routledge, 2023) 

With Rivke Jaffe, ‘Imagining infrastructure in urban Jamaica’, GeoHumanities, 8:1 (2022), 17-32.

‘“How Godfather Part II of You”: The Gangster Figure and Transnational Masculinities in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22:1 (2020), 49-70.

With Rivke Jaffe, ‘Introduction: Representing Crime, Violence and Jamaica’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 22:1 (2020), 1-7.

‘Domestic Noir in Trinidad: Elizabeth Nunez’ Bruised Hibiscus’, Caribbean Journal of Criminology, 4:1 (2019), 155-183.

With Dylan Kerrigan, ‘Introduction: Crime, Gender and Sexuality in the Anglophone Caribbean’, Caribbean Journal of Criminology, 4:1 (2019), 1-28.

'Regionalism and the Short Story', in The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, ed. by Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 227-241.

With Mandala White, ‘Introduction: Crime Narratives and Global Politics’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47:2 (2012), 139-143.

'Reinventing the Badman in Jamaican Fiction and Film', in Constructing Crime: Discourse and Cultural Representations of Crime and 'Deviance', ed. by Christiana Gregoriou ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 162-176.

'Local and Global Reading Communities in Robert Antoni's My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales', in Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception, ed. by Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (Routledge, 2012), pp. 140-153.

'A Kind of Chain: Reworking the Short Story Sequence in V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World', in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt and Emma Smith (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2011), pp. 284-297.

'Introduction', in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt and Emma Smith (Peepal Tree, 2011), pp. 11-25.

'Introduction', in Mark McWatt, Interiors (Caribbean Press, 2010), pp. 1-6.

'Tidal Poetics in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon', Caribbean Quarterly, 55:3 (2009), 1-19.

'"Free to Come to Grief": The Problems of Formal Freedom in Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 44:3 (2009), 33-49.

'Questioning Black Identity: Strategies of Digression in E.A. Markham's Meet Me in Mozambique', Moving Worlds, 9:2 (2009), 125-136.

'The Black Atlantic: Exploring Gilroy's Legacy', Atlantic Studies, 6:2 (2009), 225-268.

Interviews 

'An Interview with Lawrence Scott', Moving Worlds, 11:1 (2011), 93-103.

'Re-encountering Guyana: An Interview with Mark McWatt', The Arts Journal: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Literature, History, Art and Culture of Guyana and the Caribbean, 5:1-2 (2009), 57-68.

'An Interview with Opal Palmer Adisa', Moving Worlds, 7:2 (2007), 66-76.

Teaching resource

Co-editor, GBV Education for Youth: A Caribbean Arts-Based Facilitation Guide 

I have supervised ten PhD projects to successful completion, and am currently supervising four PhD projects. Past and current students have worked on topics such as representations of matrifocality in contemporary Caribbean fiction, the cultural politics of form in contemporary Caribbean poetry, the pastoral mode in Derek Walcott’s poetry, representations of Indigenous women in cultural texts set in British Guiana/Guyana, mixedness in contemporary Guyanese writing, and queer literary resistance in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writing.

I would be interested in supervising PhD research within the broad areas of Caribbean literature and contemporary global literatures. I would also welcome enquiries about PhD research on crime writing, and on gender-based violence. 

Undergraduate Teaching

• EN1010 Reading Poetry
• EN1020 A Literary Genre: The Novel
• EN2060/EN2360 Critical Perspectives (Convenor)
• EN2192 Diversifying Publishing and the Literature Industry (Convenor)
• EN3340 Rewriting Britain: Literature 1945-Present
• EN3010 Dissertation

Postgraduate Teaching

• MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature: EN7141 Literature and the Environment Global Eco-Fiction: (Convenor)
• MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature: EN7252 Twenty-First Century Fiction
• MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature: EN7033 Critical Dissertation 

BA in English, University of Leeds

MA in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Leeds

PhD in Caribbean Literature, University of Leeds

Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Higher Education, University of Leicester

Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy