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Staff Profile

Dr Chloe Ashbridge

Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature

Background

Background

I joined the School of English at Newcastle in 2021. Before that, I was a Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University and held teaching and research positions at the University of Nottingham, the University of Leicester, and York St John University.

I completed my AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Nottingham, where my thesis examined twenty-first-century Northern literary engagement with Britain's constitutional instability. 

Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked as a secondary English teacher and as part of an education charity. As a result of this work, I’m increasingly interested in the place of ‘English’ as a discipline in educational policy and the implications for teaching practice in HE. 

Research

Research Interests

My overarching research interest is the relationship between literary culture and centralised political power in Britain, with a particular emphasis on race, class, nation, and the literary identity of Northern England.

I am currently working on my second monograph, The Postcolonial North: Writing Race and Place After Empire, which offers the first examination of Northern England’s postcolonial literary identity from the post-war period to the present. The project examines a range of Black and Asian British cultural production emerging across the North of England since 1960 -  including novels, plays, and anthologies – alongside the work of regional publishers and diversity-led literature development organisations. In doing so, the book demonstrates how Black and Asian British writers, artists, and publishers have situated specific locations across Northern England within Britain’s colonial history and, in turn, developed a distinctively regionalised literary vision of England after Empire. 

My first book, Rewriting the North: Contemporary British Fiction and the Politics of Devolution (Routledge, 2023) situates Northern England at the centre of a new devolutionary approach to contemporary British fiction. In the book, I show how twenty-first-century writing about Northern England attempts to imagine alternative democratic futures for the region and the English nation, signalling the growing awareness of England as a distinct and variegated political formation. The 2016 Brexit vote intensified several ongoing constitutional tensions throughout the UK emerging since the creation of devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1997. In England, socio-economic and political disparities between the North and London have been at the centre of debates regarding devolution, with the question of English political representation taking on an explicitly regional dimension. At the same time, British devolution developed a distinctively cultural registration, as both a surrogate for national parliamentary representation and an attempt to disrupt the status of London as Britain’s cultural epicentre. Rewriting the North shifts this debate in a new direction by appraising the relationship between British constitutional culture and the literary North. Through close readings of six contemporary authors – Sunjeev Sahota, Sarah Hall, Anthony Cartwright, Adam Thorpe, Fiona Mozley, and Sarah Moss – I map the emergence of a political English regionalism in the North that directly challenges the tenability of the centralised British state form.


Teaching

In 2021/22, I will be teaching on the following modules:

  • Introduction to Literary Studies 1 (Year 1 – Module Convenor)
  • Close Reading (Year 1)
  • Contemporary Cultures (Year 2)
  • Fictions of Migration (Year 2)
  • Independent Research Project (Year 2)
  • Dissertation (Year 3)
  • Literary Geographies (Postgraduate)
Publications