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Modern Languages and LinguisticsPart of Humanities
Phone:
(023) 8059 3981
Email:
E.K.Jones@soton.ac.uk

Dr Eleanor K. Jones BA, MA, PhD

Lecturer in Portuguese and World Literatures

Dr Eleanor K. Jones's photo

Dr Eleanor K. Jones is a Lecturer in Portuguese and World Literatures within Modern Languages at the University of Southampton.

Following a BA and MA focused on Portuguese-speaking cultures, I specialised in one of the countries of Portuguese-speaking Africa – Mozambique – for my doctoral research. During and after my doctorate, completed at the University of Manchester, I also taught courses on cultures from around the Portuguese-speaking world at both Manchester and at the Universities of Sheffield and Birmingham, before joining Southampton in September 2016.

I published the book Battleground Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Mozambican Literature, in 2017. It explores the representation and use of the body in Mozambican cultural history and literature. My current research focus is on disability, white supremacy and colonialism in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. In general, my research centres on comparative African literatures and histories; critical theory; disability, white supremacy, sexuality & colonialism; and the history of colonial science, especially psychiatry.

I am always keen to hear from potential postgraduate students looking for supervision along these thematic lines, including in collaboration with colleagues from my own department and others in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Research interests

My research interests range across the literatures, cultures and social histories of Portuguese- and English-speaking Africa and the Portuguese-speaking world more broadly, with a particular focus on subjects relating to the body and mind. These have included gender and sex, white supremacy, violence, health, and mortality; more recently, I have focused on disability, colonial psychiatry and eugenics. A large part of my work is concerned with the critical theorisation of those themes, both within my regions of specialisation and beyond.

My 2017 monograph, Battleground Bodies: Gender and Sexuality in Mozambican Literature, drew on theory from a range of disciplines to explore and compare the myriad representations and uses of the body in Mozambican cultural history, through poetry and prose by six Mozambican authors: José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Paulina Chiziane, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and Suleiman Cassamo. I have also worked on uses of ‘deviant’ sexuality in Portuguese modernist literature, and on the use of pathologisation as a means to marginalise political dissent in post-independence Mozambique.

My current focus is on the discursive construction and use of mental disorder and intellectual disability in colonial southern Africa. I seek to explore how the symbiotic relationship between white supremacy and constructions of mental 'normality' was engendered within and between colonial Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and the implications of this for regimes of Blackness, madness, intellectual disability and white racial capitalism. I draw here on theories of disability, madness, Blackness and colonial extraction, putting these into dialogue with medical, legal and political archives.

I currently act as the Assessments Officer for Modern Languages & Linguistics, and as the Programme Lead for our MA Languages & Cultures  and the MLang.

Previously I have served as PGR Admissions Coordinator, Director of the Centre for Transnational Studies and undergraduate dissertation coordinator.

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At undergraduate level, I convene and teach the three PORT modules, which are all concerned with the histories and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world: PORT1001 'Introduction to the Portuguese-speaking World'; PORT2001 'Culture, Power and Resistance in the Portuguese-speaking World'; and PORT3006 'Encounters with Bodies in Lusophone Cultural Narrative' . I also contribute to first-year cultural studies module LANG1004 'Reading Culture' and teach advanced Portuguese-to-English translation.

At postgraduate level, I convene our interdisciplinary MA Languages & Cultures programme, which offers a global perspective on world cultures and societies. Within this programme, I co-convene and teach the cultural and critical theory module LANG6023 'Nation, Culture, Power' and skills module LANG6022 'Approaches to Languages & Cultures', and contribute to the world literature, film and theory module LANG6028 'Narrative, Place, Identity'. My units on these modules include gender and queer theory, disability studies, postcolonialism, critical race theory and Black diaspora literatures.

Dr Eleanor K. Jones
Room 3037
Avenue Campus
Building 65
SO17 1BF

Room Number: 65/3037

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