Our People

Dr Ben Grant

Fellow, Ordinary Fellow

Departmental Lecturer

Department for Continuing Education

BA (Open University), MA, PhD (University of Kent)

benjamin.grant@kellogg.ox.ac.uk

Dr Ben Grant, is a Departmental Lecturer in English Literature at the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford, where he teaches Weekly Classes on the Foundation Certificate in English Literature. His research interests include postcolonial and world literature, the theory and practice of the aphorism, travel literature, psychoanalysis, and translation studies. His first book, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Routledge, 2009), was about the iconic Victorian explorer and translator, Richard Francis Burton. He is also interested in all forms of brevity in literature; his second book, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge New Critical Idiom, 2016), provides a consolidated picture of the exciting and often marginalised genres of the aphorism and related short forms, such as the proverb and the fragment. He has contributed the entry on Richard Francis Burton to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, and an essay of his appears in the catalogue of a major international exhibition on the Kama Sutra held in Paris in 2014. He is currently working on the contemporary British writer Jenny Diski.

Publications

Books
The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge New Critical Idiom series, 2016).

Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Routledge, 2009).

Articles and Book Chapters

‘Richard Francis Burton’ entry in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

‘Kâma-Sûtra’, in Marc Restellini (ed.), Le Kama-Sutra: Spiritualité et érotisme dans l’art indien (Gourcuff Gradenigo and Pinacothèque de Paris, 2014), 19-23.

‘ “Inhuman Voices”: Reflections on the Place of Ancestors in the Work of Frantz Fanon’, Textual Practice 28:4 (2014), 593-610.

‘Ex-Patriotism’ in Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai (eds) Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) [co-authored with Kaori Nagai]

‘ “Interior Explorations”: Paul Belloni du Chaillu’s Dream Book’, Journal of European Studies 38:4 (2008), 407-19.

‘On the Margins of Beau Travail’, Journal of European Studies 34:1-2 (2004), 60-81.

‘Translating / ‘The’ Kama Sutra’, Third World Quarterly 26:3 (2005), 509-16 (reprinted in Emma Bainbridge (ed.) Connecting Cultures (Routledge, 2007).