Janelle Rodriques (she/her/hers)

I have been a faculty member at the UW since 2022, having taught English at Auburn University, Alabama, following a research fellowship at the University of Bremen, Germany.

I received my PhD in English from Newcastle University in 2016, with the thesis ‘Representations of Obeah in Twentieth-century Anglophone West Indian Literature.’ That became my first monograph, Narratives of Obeah in West Indian Literature: Moving Through the Margins, published by Routledge in 2019.

I am a contributing author in the Routledge Handbook of Caribbean Studies (2025) and Cambridge University Press’ Caribbean Literature in Transition, Vol. 1: 1800s-1920s (2021). I am also published in Cultural Dynamics, Caribbean Quarterly and the Journal of West Indian Literature. 

I have served as vice chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies (UK), a community of which I've been a member for over a decade. I also serve on the executive council of the Caribbean Studies Association. 

I specialise in anglocreole Caribbean literature of the long twentieth century, particularly expressions of spirituality/religion, and what I see as the literature’s ‘quarrel with humanity’ – dissatisfaction with Caribbean people’s various exclusions from the category of ‘human.’  I am taking up this quarrel in my current research. My areas of teaching include Caribbean, 'postcolonial,' and Black Atlantic prose fiction and literary criticism+philosophy.

I welcome students interested in multiethnic, queer Caribbean critique. I am interested in exploring slavery's various afterlives through spiritual praxis, literary tricksters, speculative fiction, creolisation, hybridity, migration and diaspora.