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Dr. Melanie Otto

Assistant Professor (English)
ARTS BUILDING

 ottom@tcd.ie

 3531896 1355


Biography

I received my first degree from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, majoring in English and minoring in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. I graduated in 1998, writing my MA dissertation on the novels of Ben Okri. In 2003, I completed a PhD on the work of Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite at Swansea University. Since 2003, I have been lecturer in the School of English at Trinity College. I was Director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas for many years, and I currently act as Global Director and Coordinator of Visiting Students. Teaching My teaching interests cover all major aspects of postcolonial studies with a particular focus on Caribbean literature, settler colonialism, Indigenous studies, and comparative literature. I coordinate and teach the Senior Fresh module 'Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction to Key Debates and Texts' and the Sophister options 'The Pain of Unbelonging: Writing from Canada, South America, and the Pacific' and 'Writing from the Creole Americas'. I teach several sessions on the core courses of the School's MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies as well as the MPhil option 'Caribbean Literature'. Students who completed their PhDs under my supervision have worked on a range of postcolonial topics, including settler colonial narratives in the work or Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys, black gay male identity in the Black Atlantic, the work of Maeve Brennan, and symbolic (dis)order in the works of Derek Walcott, Adonis and W. B. Yeats. I welcome research proposals from prospective students and postdoctoral scholars on any aspect of postcolonial literature. Research I am a nationally and internationally known expert in postcolonial literatures and leading scholar on poet Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020), a paradigm-shifting figure in Caribbean and global poetics. My first monograph, A Creole Experiment: Utopian Space in Kamau Brathwaite's 'video-style' Works, a groundbreaking assessment of Brathwaite's poetry, established my reputation as a scholar of Caribbean poetics and aesthetics. I have contributed chapters on Caribbean visual art and poetics to significant series: Caribbean Literature in Transition (2021) and, on Brathwaite specifically, A History of Punctuation in English Literature (in press), both published by Cambridge University Press. My current scholarship is in the area of word-image research. I have published substantial articles on Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan and on Irish painter Lorcan Walshe. Walshe's signature series The Artefacts Project is a postcolonial intervention in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland. My article on The Artefacts Project, published in Word & Image, relates my work directly to Trinity's Colonial Legacies project. My research and my teaching are comparative and intermedial in methodology. I deepen this approach in my current monograph on writing and its counter-languages art and music in Lorcan Walshe's work.

Research Tags

  20th Century New zealand and Caribbean writing   Postcoloniality and globalization

Representations

Details Date
Manuscript Peer-Review Cambridge University Press -- research monograph on the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys, Jean Rhys " Threads of her Literary Imagination 2020
External Examiner, PhD, UCD 2023
External Examiner, PHD, UCC May 2020
Co-editor, Caribbean Literature and Culture (Anglophone), Literary Encyclopedia -- The role consists of commissioning encyclopedia entries on key writers and texts in this field as well as editing and publishing submitted entries on the online platform of the Literary Encyclopedia. 2018 - current
External Assessor, appointment panel, Maynooth August 2007
ERC Mock Interviews Irish Research Council -- I was invited by the Irish Research Council to participate as an expert in my field in the ERC Mock Interviews. 2021
External referee, University of Valladolid -- I was invited by the University of Valladolid to conduct a pre-viva review a doctoral thesis. 2022
Manuscript Review Zed Book -- biography on the Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, The Steady Gaze of Nawal El Saadawi: A Life in Words and Images 2008
Distance supervision of visiting PhD student from Qurtuba University of Science and Technology, Pakistan -- I was invited to act as distance supervisor and assessor for a visiting PhD student from Qurtuba University of Science and Technology, Pakistan. As an expert in my field, I reviewed and commented on a section of the student"s work. July 2020
Peer-Review Journal of West Indian Literature 2023
Peer-Review Journal of West Indian Literature 2021
Peer-Review Libri & Liberi: Journal of Research on Children's Literature and Culture 2024
Peer-Review Interdisciplinary Study in Literature and the Environment 2024
Peer-Review Interdisciplinary Study in Literature and the Environment 2020
Peer-Review Interdisciplinary Study in Literature and the Environment 2019
Peer-Review Irish Journal of American Studies 2012
Peer-Review Modernism/modernity 2013
Peer-Review Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 2015
Peer-Review Mosaic (2x) 2016
Peer-Review Social Epistemology 2019
Peer-Review Modern Fiction Studies 2019
Peer-Review Central Asia 2020
Peer-Review Island Studies Journal 2023
Peer-Review Philological Quarterly 2020
NUI Travelling Studentships 2019: I was invited for proposal evaluation in the area of Historical Fiction. June 2019

Languages

Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
German Fluent Fluent Fluent

Memberships

Membership of Professional Institutions, Associations, Societies

Details Date From Date To
International Association of Inter-American Studies 2009 present
Irish Association for American Studies 2022 present
The Radical Poetics of Kamau Brathwaite"s Sycorax Video Style in, editor(s)Elizabeth M. Bonapfel, Mark Faulkner, Jeffrey Gutierrez, and John Lennard , A History of Punctuation in English Literature Vol III [three volumes], Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2025, pp721 - 744, [Melanie Otto], Book Chapter, IN_PRESS
Melanie Otto, `Untold Stories": The Relationship of Word and Image in the Work of Shaun Tan, Image & Text: a Journal for Design, 38, (1), 2024, p1 - 25, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  URL
Melanie Otto, Returning the Colonial Gaze: A Close Reading of Lorcan Walshe"s Shaman, IAAH/Artefact Symposium 2023, Trinity Long Room Hub, 6 May 2023, 2023, Oral Presentation, PRESENTED
Melanie Otto, Challenging the Dominance of Words in Postcolonial Ireland: The Visual Language of Lorcan Walshe"s The Artefacts Project, Hunt Museum Lecture Series, Hunt Museum Limerick, 25 August, 2022, Hunt Museum Limerick, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Melanie Otto, `The word's challenging opposite': the visual language of Lorcan Walshe"s The Artefacts Project and Museum Pieces, Word & Image, 38, (4), 2022, p348 - 360, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  URL
Melanie Otto, Artists and Exile: Sam Selvon, Cyril Dabydeen, and Kamau Brathwaite , ICAS 2021, Diaspora in the 21st Century, Virtual Conference, Southern Regional College, Newry, 28 - 30 January 2021, 2021, Invited Talk, PRESENTED
Reading the Colonial Archive through Joscelyn Gardner's Creole Portraits I-III in, editor(s)Evelyn O'Callaghan, Timothy Watson (volume editors) Alison Donnell (general editor) , Caribbean Literature in Transition, vol 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp409 - 425, [Melanie Otto], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
"Other Ways of Being": Ray Bradbury's 'The April Witch' in Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid's 'In the Night' and Leonora Carrington's 'The Seventh Horse' in, editor(s)Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, Miranda Corcoran , Exploring the Horror of Supernatural Fiction: Ray Bradbury's Elliott Family, New York , Routledge, 2020, pp91 - 107, [Melanie Otto], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Melanie Otto, To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet": The Truth Behind the Mask in the Work of Lorcan Walshe, NeMLA 51st Annual Convention, Boston, 5-8 March 2020, 2020, Oral Presentation, PRESENTED
"I'm a believer in the dance of change" - Metamorphosis and Mutation in Keri Hulme's Short Fiction in, editor(s)Ashmita Khasnabish , Postcoloniality, Diaspora and Globalization: What's Next?, New York, Rowman & LIttlefield, 2019, pp71 - 86, [Melanie Otto], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
  

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Awards and Honours

Award Date
MA (jure officii) 2009