Evelyn O'Callaghan
Evelyn O’Callaghan was educated in Jamaica and received her BA from University College, Cork in Ireland. She read for an MLitt in English on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, and returned to Jamaica as a junior lecturer in the English Department at UWI, Mona. She transferred to the Cave Hill campus in 1983 where she is currently Professor of West Indian Literature in the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature. She is one of the editors of the Journal of West Indian Literature, and serves on the advisory committees of several scholarly journals, including Callaloo, Postcolonial Text, Ariel, PoCo Pages, Caribbean Quarterly and The Caribbean Writer. She has served as Head of Department, Deputy Dean and Dean, and held fellowships and visiting lectureships at the University of Hull, Barnard College, La Trobe University, University of Puerto Rico and Liege University in Belgium.
Her research interests are West Indian literature (particularly early narratives and fiction by women); women's writing and feminist theory; visual and scribal representations of nineteenth and early twentieth century West Indian landscapes; constructions of sexuality in contemporary women’s prose fiction; contemporary West Indian ‘diaspora’ literature; narratives of indentured servitude; the creole language continuum in Caribbean literature and culture.
Professor O’Callaghan has published on West Indian Literature, particularly on women's writing, early Caribbean narratives and more recently, ecocritical readings of Caribbean landscapes in visual and scribal texts. Her books include: Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, The Earliest Patriots [Historical fiction], Women Writing in the West Indies 1804-1939: A Hot Place, Belonging to Us and editions of early Caribbean novels by Frieda Cassin and Elma Napier. She serves as a reader for several academic publishers and recently co-edited an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (UWI Press, 2015). She also co-edited a collection of essays examining other "altered states" in Caribbean writing, Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge (Palgrave Macmillan-New Caribbean Studies series), published in 2018.
Her research interests are West Indian literature (particularly early narratives and fiction by women); women's writing and feminist theory; visual and scribal representations of nineteenth and early twentieth century West Indian landscapes; constructions of sexuality in contemporary women’s prose fiction; contemporary West Indian ‘diaspora’ literature; narratives of indentured servitude; the creole language continuum in Caribbean literature and culture.
Professor O’Callaghan has published on West Indian Literature, particularly on women's writing, early Caribbean narratives and more recently, ecocritical readings of Caribbean landscapes in visual and scribal texts. Her books include: Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, The Earliest Patriots [Historical fiction], Women Writing in the West Indies 1804-1939: A Hot Place, Belonging to Us and editions of early Caribbean novels by Frieda Cassin and Elma Napier. She serves as a reader for several academic publishers and recently co-edited an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (UWI Press, 2015). She also co-edited a collection of essays examining other "altered states" in Caribbean writing, Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge (Palgrave Macmillan-New Caribbean Studies series), published in 2018.