Role
Professor Nahem Yousaf joined Nottingham Trent University in 2000. He was appointed to the role of Head of English in 2007, and Head of English, Culture and Media in the School of Arts and Humanities in 2010. He is also the School's Director of Research. Professor Yousaf's research interests include postcolonial, black British and immigrant American writing and film and he has published extensively in these fields. He is co-series editor of MUP's series Contemporary American and Canadian Writers.
Research areas
Professor Yousaf's research interests span British and American writing (19th to 21st-century); US cinema; postcolonial literatures and film (e.g. South African, Nigerian, and Kenyan). His research focuses predominantly on concepts of place and of cultural and historical identity with regard to regions (South Africa and the American South) and diasporas (African and Asian) and issues of race, ethnicity and immigration.
Professor Yousaf has been awarded funding from the AHRB and the British Academy. He is an experienced external examiner across British and American and postcolonial literatures from BA to PhD level.
Current projects:
Professor Yousaf's current research combines interests in contemporary and postcolonial fiction. He is working on the writing of immigrant groups who are under-represented in studies of Southern (US) literature and history and whose representations contribute to an ongoing conversation about the global south and transnational contexts.
Professor Yousaf welcomes PhD students who wish to work in any of his research areas and specifically on contemporary fiction. He has supervised and examined PhD topics in the UK and Europe on:
- The baroque and postmodern in Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and Peter Ackroyd
- Environmentalism, trauma theory and Tim O'Brien
- Materialist readings of works by Amitav Ghosh, Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi, Kamila Shamsie and Salman Rushdie
- Anger in British working-class fiction
- Postcolonial theory and J M Coetzee
- Anti-assimilation and Native American Writers
- Athol Fugard
- Masculinity and Ford Maddox Ford
For further information please contact the NTU Doctoral School.
External activity
Professor Yousaf is a:
- Member, Peer Review College, Arts and Humanities Research Council (2006- )
- English Panel Member, Arts and Humanities Research Council (2009)
- English Panel Member, Arts and Humanities Research Council (2008)
- Fellow of the English Association
- Elected member of the International Association of University Professors in English
- Fellow of the Advance HE
- Series Editor of Manchester University Press' Contemporary American and Canadian Writers series
- Trustee of the Joseph Banks Archive Project
- Former member of the CCUE Executive (Treasurer)
- Assessor for promotions and appointment committees for European HEIs
- Regular invited speaker at universities in UK and abroad
Sponsors and collaborators
Professor Yousaf has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Memphis and works with national and international partners. Recent collaborations include working with the Universities of Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, De Montfort and BCU as part of the AHRC’S Doctoral Training Partnership, the Midlands 3 Cities DTP. Professor Yousaf is the NTU lead for the DTP and is happy to discuss opportunities for postgraduate research and funding with prospective doctoral applicants.
Publications
Professor Yousaf has authored three books and edited or co-edited another four. His recent publications include:
- Immigrant Writers: Transnational Stories of a 'Worlded' South. Yousaf N in (ed) S Monteith, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South, 2013, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
- Once Upon A Doctor’s Life: Abraham Verghese’s Coming of Age in East Tennessee in the Era of AIDS. Yousaf N in (ed) C Gonzales, Southern Destinations: the South in Motion, 2013, Valencia, University of Valencia Press
- Michael Ondaatje’s New Orleans in Coming Through Slaughter. Yousaf N in (ed) W Zacharasiewicz, Cultural Circulation: Canadian Writers and Authors in the American South, 2013, Austria, Austrian Academy Press
- Regeneration Through Genre: Romancing Katrina in Crime Fiction from Tubby Meets Katrina to K-Ville. Yousaf N, Journal of American Studies, 2012, 44 (3), 553-571