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Staff Profile

Dr Hayley Toth

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

Background

Hayley G. Toth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. Before joining Newcastle in 2023, Hayley worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant to Professor Merve Emre at the University of Oxford (2021-23), and held a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the Leeds Arts & Humanities Research Institute (2020-21). She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds (2016-2020) under the supervision of Professor Brendon Nicholls.

Hayley has published essays and reviews in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Post 45 Contemporaries, Modern Language Review, Comparative Critical Studies, African Identities, and Journal of Political Ideologies. Her first monograph Reading Postcolonial Literature: From Professional to Non-Professional Practices is contracted to Liverpool University Press for publication in 2024.


Qualifications

PhD, English Literature (University of Leeds)

MA by Research, English Literature (University of Huddersfield)

BA (Hons), English Language and Literature (University of Huddersfield)

Research

I work at the intersections between postcolonial studies, literary sociology and book history, and am broadly interested in postcolonial literature as a social, historical and institutional form. My work to date has explored practices of reading postcolonial literature, the relationship between reading and ideology, apartheid literary activism, and the politics of literary pedagogies.

My first book, Reading Postcolonial Literature: From Professional to Non-Professional Practices (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming) places non-professional reading practices in dialogue with received academic wisdom to debunk common-sense assumptions about non-professional readers as ‘western’ or ‘neo-colonial’ consumers. Drawing on reading practices recorded in academic books, journal articles and on online book-reviewing platforms like Amazon and Goodreads, the book draws attention to important continuities between professional and non-professional practices of reading postcolonial literature. At the same time, I highlight that non-professionals often have little desire to emulate the practices of professional postcolonial critics. Precisely by not adopting the established protocols and methods of postcolonial studies, non-professional readers call attention to the limits of dominant approaches to reading in the discipline.

My current project, 'Collective Form: Cultural Collaboration in Black Liberation Struggles, 1976-82,' investigates the proliferation of collective forms of literary production, consumption, and performance between 1976 and 1982. It analyses how Black activists theorised and exercised cultural collaboration as a practice of organised resistance against systems of cultural, material, and political dispossession. The project's aim is to clarify the role of print and performance cultures in instantiating political change, and reassess the paradigmatic status of individual authors, texts, and readings in postcolonial studies. This research is funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2023-2026).

In June 2024, I organised a two-day, interdisciplinary symposium at Newcastle University titled COLLECTIVE FORM AND NATIONAL LIBERATION. Its aim was to bring together scholars interested in the role of collaboration, cooperation and collectives in struggles for racial justice, national liberation and decolonisation, and to ask how the perspective of collective form changes the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw in postcolonial studies. You can read more about the symposium on the following website.

Teaching

I am not currently undertaking any teaching in the School.

I hold Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA), and have previously taught at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Leeds.

Publications