Dr Rachael Gilmour, BA MA PhD (Manchester)
Lecturer
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8534
email: r.h.gilmour@qmul.ac.uk
Research interests:
- Colonial and postcolonial literature and theory
- African literary and cultural studies
- Cultural theory and the politics of language
- Colonialism and linguistic thought
Rachael Gilmour's research focuses primarily upon issues of language, translation, and linguistic encounter in colonial and postcolonial contexts - from 18 th - and 19 th -century South Africa, to contemporary multilingual Britain. Her book Grammars of Colonialism is a study of the complex relationship between colonialism and linguistic ideas in South Africa, focused upon 19 th -century European representations of the Bantu languages Xhosa and Zulu. Her current project addresses the figure of the interlingual interpreter in colonial and postcolonial literatures from 1800 to the present day; she is also co-editing a volume on the end of empire and the English novel with Bill Schwarz. She is a member of the Executive Committee and Editorial Board for the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, and recently guest-edited a special issue of the Society's Bulletin , on 'Colonialism and Linguistic Thought' (November 2006).
Publications:
'Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa' by Rachael Gilmour
(Recent publications)
Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)
'Missionaries, Colonialism and Language in Nineteenth-Century South Africa', History Compass 5:6 (November 2007), 1761-1777
'"A nice derangement of epitaphs": missionary language-learning in mid-nineteenth century Natal', Journal of Southern African Studies 33:3 (September 2007), 521-538
'Colonization and linguistic representation: British Methodist grammarians' approaches to Xhosa, 1834-1850'. In Missionary Linguistics/ Lingüística Misionera: selected papers from the First International Conference in Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13-16 March 2003, ed. by Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen(Amsterdam/ Philadephia: John Benjamins, 2004), pp 113-140
'Heteroglossia in Lewis Grout's The Isizulu : critical theory and missionary linguistics', Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas 41 (November 2003), 3-10