Professor Michèle Barrett, BA MA DPhil (Sussex)
Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8545
email: m.barrett@qmul.ac.uk
Research interests:
Michèle Barrett studied artistic and literary responses to the First World War as a graduate student, and completed a doctorate on modernism and Virginia Woolf. She then moved into a detailed engagement with Marxist ideas and their vexed relation to feminism, whilst teaching humanities and social science at City University in London. From the 1970s on, she became a noted social and cultural theorist, with expertise in ideology, aesthetics, gender, and post-structuralist ideas. Her recent work has focused again on the literature and art of the First World War period, and these interests are reflected in her teaching at Queen Mary. She was recently awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to study shell shock, and a British Academy grant to research the colonial politics of commemoration.
Michèle Barrett currently supervises five PhD students working on literary and cultural historical projects. They and their predecessors have worked on authors such as Woolf, Eliot, Kipling and Huxley and on topics that include war, violence, spectrality, propaganda, eugenics, shell shock, and British perceptions of Mesopotamia/Iraq.
Publications:
Casualty Figures: Five Survivors of the First World War (Verso, forthcoming)
'Subalterns at War: Colonial Forces and the Politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission', Interventions: International Journal of Post-colonial Studies, 9:3 (forthcoming)
Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life, edited with Bobby Baker (Routledge 2007)
'Virginia Woolf and Pacifism', in Virginia Woolf in the Real World, ed by K Kukil (2005)
‘The Great War and Post-modern Memory’, New Formations, 41 (2000)
Editor of Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (new editions for Penguin Modern Classics, 2000)
Star Trek: The Human Frontier,co-authored with Duncan Barrett (Polity Press, Blackwell, Routledge, 2000)
Imagination in Theory: Essays on Writing and Culture (Polity Press, New York University Press, 1999)
Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, edited with Anne Philips (Polity Press, Stanford University Press, 1992)
The Politics of Truth: from Marx to Foucault, (Polity Press, Stanford University Press, 1992)
The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism, edited with Roberta Hamilton (Verso, 1986)
Editor of and author of introduction to Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Penguin Classics, 1986)
The Anti-social Family, co-authored with Mary McIntosh (New Left Books and Verso, 1982)
Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist-Feminist Analysis (New Left Books and Verso, 1980)
Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing,essays by Woolf, compiled, edited and introduced by Michèle Barrett (Women’s Press, London, and Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, New York, 1979; Quadrant Books, Toronto, 1980)