About Ben
Ben Etherington is an associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. Broadly, he works in postcolonial and world literary studies; his areas of specialisation are primitivism in literature and theory, and Caribbean poetry and poetics. He holds honours in Musicology and English from the University of Western Australia and an MPhil and PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. He is a past president of the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies, and has recently held fellowships at the Heyman Center, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. He was a Chief Investigator of the ARC Discovery Project, Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature (2017-2022), alongside J. M. Coetzee, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, Anthony Uhlmann and Alexis Wright. He is currently the Chief Investigator of another Discovery Project, ‘Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation’, for which he is working with the Sydney-based Jamaican novelist Sienna Brown. Publications include Literary Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2018), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (edited with Jarad Zimbler, Cambridge UP, 2018), and an essay on world literature as a ‘speculative literary totality’ with Modern Language Quarterly (2021). His current project is a history of poetry in Anglophone Caribbean creole languages in the period between the abolition of slavery and decolonisation.
