Background

Research Websites

• BBC Scripting Empire - http://research.ncl.ac.uk/bbcscriptingempire
• Out of Bounds Poetry Project - http://www.outofbounds.digital
• Devolving Diasporas - http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com

Background

I joined the School of English at Newcastle in 2006 after 7 years at the University of Stirling. Before that I was a postgraduate in the School of English at the University of Leeds.

School Roles

I am currently Postgraduate Senior Tutor.

I was Director of Research between 2015 and 2021.

I was Postgraduate Director between 2010 and 2014.

External Roles

I am currently External Examiner on UG literature programmes at the University of Warwick. I have previously served as external examiner on undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes at the Universities of Birmingham, Nottingham, Stirling, Leeds, QMUL and Essex. I was Chief External Examiner at the Arab Open University (2017-2021).

I was Chair of the External Evaluation Committee for Language and Literature programmes (BA and PhD) at University of Cyprus (May 2018) and a Member of the External Evaluation Committee for the evaluation/ accreditation process of Higher Education programmes of study in the field of English Language (September 2017)

I was Team Leader of the Quality Assurance Review of the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies (Mona) in November 2013

I have been an external examiner for PhD and MA candidates at 11 different institutions in the UK, Luxembourg, Australia and India.

Recent and upcoming activities (selected 

February 2022 'Scripting Empire', University of Southampton

January 2020 ‘Print, Orality, and Readerships in New Postcolonial Contexts’, NYU, Abu Dhabi

February 2019 Invited paper, UEA

October 2018 ‘Empire on Air’, Oxford University

October 2017 ‘Caribbean Voices: Una Marson at the BBC’ panel at the 2017 Arts and Humanities Festival, King’s College London marking move to Bush House

September 2017 ‘Empire of Air’, SOAS

April 2017 'Pneumatic Print: Late Colonial Writing on Air', Postcolonial Print Cultures Workshop, New York University

January 2016 - 'Wireless Empire: Radio Literature and the Sonic Imagination', Perne Club, University of Cambridge

November 2015 - Seminar in the 'Diasporic Trajectories: Transnational Cultures in the 21st Century' series', IASH, University of Edinburgh

October 2015 - Keynote at 'Interpreting Communities: Minority Writing in European Literary Fields', Institute of Modern Languages (IMLR), London

October 2014 - Plenary paper at L'Universite Paris-Sorbonne, symposium on Caribbean Literary Magazines

September 2014 - Plenary paper at University of Warwick conference, 'Long Waves and Global Frequencies'

November 2013 - 7th Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture, University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Research

Research Interests

My research to date has focused on what the Jamaican intellectual Stuart Hall once called ‘the outside history that is inside the history of English’. My overarching interest is in how literary and cultural production in Britain since the 1940s handles the period in which its empire comes home to roost. My work encompasses British and black British literature, including migrant and diasporic writing from the Caribbean, African and South Asia.

My current research interests are in radio literature and empire between the 1930s and late 1960s. I am particularly interested in recovering the neglected archive of literary production at the BBC by West African and West Indian writers. I started this work in 2009, and was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete it in 2013-14. Hundreds of writers in this archive are now forgotten. Many others have become canonical names of world literature: V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Amos Tutuola.

I am interested in how the recuperation of the radio script allows for a rethinking of the literary oeuvre of many of these figures during the critical decades of decolonisation and mass migration. More broadly, I am interested in the overlaps between radio and other dominant technologies of communication during the mid-twentieth century, including magazines and newspapers. How, for instance, did seriality and the short, segmented spaces associated with air time and the magazine column shape West Indian and West African writing at the end of empire? In turn, how were these mass media shaped by that pioneering generation of post-colonial writers?

My previous (and ongoing) research interests are in readership and reception within the context of migration, transnationalism and diaspora. Between 2007 and 2010 I was Principal Investigator on a large AHRC-funded project 'Devolving Diaporas' (http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com). This project worked with reading groups in public libraries, British Council offices and homes right across the UK (from Penzance to Glasgow), in the Caribbean West Africa, India, and Canada.

PhD Supervision

I currently supervise 6 PhD students, 4 of them AHRC-funded. Their projects cover the areas of black British literature, postwar British literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary literature and diaspora literature. I welcome applications from students in any of these areas.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Fictions of Migration (stage 2)

Postwar British Fiction (stage 3)

Postgraduate

I teach on the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature

PhD Supervision

I currently supervise 6 PhD students, 4 of them AHRC-funded. Their projects cover the areas of black British literature, postwar British literature, Caribbean literature, contemporary literature and diaspora literature. I welcome applications from students in any of these areas.

Publications

• Procter JR. Transnational Cultural Exchange: The BBC as Contact Zone. In: S. Nasta & M. Stein (Eds.), ed. The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp.148-162.
• Procter J. ‘Wireless Writing, the Second World War and the West Indian Literary Imagination’. In: Gill Plain, ed. British Literature in Transition, 1940–1960: Postwar. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp.117-136.
• Procter J, Benwell B. Reading Across Worlds: Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Procter James. Recalibrating the Past: the rise of black British historical fiction. In: Osborne D, ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp.129-143.
• Procter J. Una Marson at the BBC. Small Axe 2015, 19(3), 1-28.
• Kay J, Procter J, Robinson G, ed. Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2012.
• Benwell B, Procter J, Robinson G, ed. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012.
• Procter J. Introduction: Reading After Empire. New Formations 2011, (73), 5-10.
• Benwell B, Procter J, Robinson G. Not Reading Brick Lane. In: Benwell, B., Proctor, J., Robinson, G, ed. New Formations, Special Issue: Reading After Empire. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2011, pp.90-116.
• Procter J. The Return of the Native: Pat Barker, David Peace and the Regional Novel After Empire. In: Gilmour, R., Schwarz, B, ed. End of Empire and the English Novel Since 1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, pp.203-217.
• Procter J. 'To see oursels as others see us!': Seepersad Naipaul, Modernity and the Rise of the Trinidadian Short Story. In: Evans, L., McWatt, M., Smith, E, ed. The Caribbean Short Story. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2011, pp.163-176.
• Keown A, Murphy D, Procter J, ed. Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2009.
• Keown A, Murphy D, Procter J. Introduction: Theorizing Postcolonial Diasporas. In: Keown, A., Murphy, D., Procter, J, ed. Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp.1-15.
• Fuller D, Procter J. Reading as 'Social Glue': Book Groups, Multiculture, and Small Island Read 2007. Moving Worlds 2009, 9(2), 26-40.
• Procter J. Reading, Taste and Postcolonial Studies: Professional and Lay Readers of Things Fall Apart. Interventions 2009, 11(2), 180-198.
• Procter J. "A Limited Situation": Brevity and Lovelace's A Brief Conversion'. In: Schwarz, B, ed. Caribbean Literature After Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2008, pp.130-145.
• Procter J. New Ethnicities, the Novel and the Burdens of Representation. In: English JF, ed. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp.101-120.
• Procter J. 'The Ghost of Other Stories' : Salman Rushdie and the Question of Canonicity?. In: Low, G., Wynne-Davies, M, ed. A Black British Canon?. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp.35-49.
• Procter J. The Postcolonial Everyday. New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 2006, 58, 62-80.
• Procter J. Cultural Studies into Francophone Postcolonial Studies: towards a "disciplined" interdisciplinarity. Francophone Postcolonial Studies 2004, 47-52.
• Procter J. Stuart Hall. London, UK: Routledge, 2004.
• Procter J. Dwelling places: Postwar black British writing. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003.