Christy Wensley
Contact
Name and title: Christy Wensley
Workplace: Department of English Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Universitetsvägen 10 E, plan 8
Postal address Engelska institutionen106 91 Stockholm
About me
I'm a visiting lecturer in 19th century literature for the 2026/27 academic year. From 2023-2026, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Oxford after receiving a PhD from University College London, an MPhil in American literature from Cambridge University, and BA from Columbia University.
I lecture on Victorian literature and teach across the 19th-21st centuries.
I have supervised undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations on Henry James and Edith Wharton; John Steinbeck; Kurt Vonnegut; James Baldwin; and Kendrick Lamar and Black poetics.
My research, writing and teaching broadly encompass literature, film, and culture from a global perspective drawing primarily on the intersections of race, gender, form and imperialism/capitalism in the transatlantic imaginary. Guided by a multilayered and multidirectional sense of the transatlantic, my work engages with notions of exile, diaspora, and movement, as well as with questions of literary influence.
I’m completing a monograph, Henry James's Hidden Slave, which argues that Blackness is a crucial ‘hidden subject’ in James’s fiction, requiring sustained attention for its political as well as aesthetic relevance in his work and influences. To recontextualize his work, I draw on previous scholarship on James and race as well intersectional Black studies, critical race, queer, and feminist theories to highlight a historically contingent relationship between race and sexuality.
I'm developing a project based on my postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford: Deliberate Strangers: Cross Currents of Transatlantic Influence, explores the ways in which influence is refigured across, beyond and through literary anxieties and shared places, identities, or histories, in the work of James Baldwin, Stuart Hall and Caryl Phillips. I argue that their use and interrogation of broader literary criticism and methods that developed out of modernist critique and theory have radically upended literary and cultural studies which have been historically limited to or by whiteness. My ambition is to theorize the “stranger” in and through their work and consider the potential for “strange(r)ness” as a generative literary and cultural form of critique.
Recent and forthcoming publications:
Overrunning the capacity of the ‘narrative “I”’: Stuart Hall writes himself; Textual Practice, April 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2026.2663431.
Freedom as perfect, rounded and lustrous as a pearl: fugitive subjectivity in The Golden Bowl; Novel: A Forum on Fiction (forthcoming, August 2026)
War, with art, transformed: the influence of Wilkie and Bob James in Henry James’s work; Henry James Review (forthcoming, Autumn 2026)