Louisa Olufsen Layne

Academic interests and specialties

African American literature, Caribbean literature, Black British literature, postcolonial theory, World literature in English, modernism, theories of aesthetics, popular music, lyrics, the black radical tradition and intersectionality

Education

University of Oxford, DPhil in English (PhD)

University of Oslo, MA in Comparative Literature

Research

Postdoctoral project: “The colour distinction: subversions of high and low culture in the Harlem Renaissance”, Literature Rights and Imagined Communities, University of Oslo

Doctoral dissertation: "Critical Readings of Perceptual Models in the Poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson: Bass Culture", University of Oxford

Teaching

University of Oslo, Senior Lecturer, Comparative Literature. Courses: LIT1303, Exfac03-HUM, LIT 4380/4381, LIT4001

University of Oxford, Faculty of English: "The Harlem Renaissance" (Bachelor’s thesis)

University of Oxford, Faculty of English: "Immigrant literature in London from the 1950s and 60s" (Bachelor’s Thesis)

University of Oxford, Faculty of English and History (HENG): "Black Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance"

University of Massachusetts Amherst: Oxford Summer Seminar: «Black British writers»

Stanford University in Oxford Programme: "Caribbean and Black British women’s writing" and "Representations of Race in Britain"

Academic responsibilities

Convenor: Black Poesis (Fritt Ord and Anders Jahres fund): Lecture series, Literature, Rights and Imagined Communities

Co-Convenor 2015-2016 programme: “Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century”. The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)

Committee 2016: "Comics and Graphic Novels – The Politics of Form". The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), 2016

Other

Columnist, Samtiden

Highly active in public engagement, outreach and access work