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Staff Profile

Dr Hayley Toth

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

Background

Hayley G. Toth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. Before joining Newcastle in 2023, Hayley worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant to Professor Merve Emre at the University of Oxford (2021-23), and held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Leeds Arts & Humanities Research Institute (2020-21). She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds (2016-2020) under the supervision of Professor Brendon Nicholls.

Hayley has published essays and reviews in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Modern Language Review, Comparative Critical Studies, African Identities, and Journal of Political Ideologies. Her first monograph Reading Postcolonial Literature: From Professional to Non-Professional Practices is contracted to Liverpool University Press for publication in 2024.


Qualifications

PhD, English Literature (University of Leeds)

MA by Research, English Literature (University of Huddersfield)

BA (Hons), English Language and Literature (University of Huddersfield)

Research

My current project, 'Collective Form: Cultural Collaboration in Black Liberation Struggles, 1976-82,' investigates the proliferation of collective forms of literary production, consumption, and performance between 1976 and 1982. It analyses how Black activists theorised and exercised cultural collaboration as a practice of organised resistance against systems of cultural, material, and political dispossession. The project's aim is to clarify the role of print and performance cultures in instantiating political change, and reassess the paradigmatic status of individual authors, texts, and readings in postcolonial studies.

I work at the intersections between postcolonial studies, literary sociology and book history, and am broadly interested in postcolonial literature as a social, historical and institutional form. My work to date has explored practices of reading postcolonial literature, the relationship between reading and ideology, apartheid literary activism, and the politics of literary pedagogies.

Teaching

I am not currently undertaking any teaching in the School.

I hold Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), and have previously taught at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Leeds.

Publications