Dr Veronica Barnsley

My research explores diverse and contradictory constructions of the child and childhood across postcolonial cultures and neocolonial borders, focusing principally on writing from South Asia and West and Southern Africa. My work is cross-disciplinary, combining postcolonial and decolonial thinking with explorations into Childhood Studies, International Development and Medical Humanities in order to understand changing concepts and practices related to birth, infancy, motherhood and the role that literary and cinematic narratives play in framing them.

I am completing a monograph on childhood in postcolonial literatures that approaches representations of childhood in the global South comparatively, paying attention to how the idea of a ‘good’ childhood promoted by international development discourse is complicated and resisted in postcolonial texts. The book engages with familiar narrative forms such as the bildungsroman as well as feature and documentary films, short stories and graphic fiction. 

I have a longstanding interest in global modernisms, developed during my PhD project, which concentrated on Indian and British fiction in the period 1880-1935. I am currently writing on the relationship between childishness and gender in Jean Rhys’s short fiction.

My research on arts and well-being as part of Material Stories led to my participation in a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project. I am working with an interdisciplinary team looking at community-based mental health interventions in northern Uganda. We are partnering with the department of health, local government and UNICEF to develop screening and awareness raising tools and creative activities aimed at adolescents and young adults. I have also conducted research on gender and education in West Africa in collaboration with the University of Ghana and funded by the World Universities Network (WUN).