Dr Wendy McMahon

Dr Wendy McMahon is an interdisciplinary scholar with expertise in the literatures and creative expression of the Hispanophone and Anglophone Caribbean and US and their intersections with history, colonialism, decolonial politics, politics, law, human rights, the environment, natural hazard, as well as ideas of place, belonging, and home. She joined the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Cornwall, as a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities in September 2023 to co-lead the new BA in Environmental Humanities. Prior to joining the University of Exeter, Wendy was an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, where she was in post from 2010. At Exeter, Wendy is also Co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities, which brings colleagues together from across the university community who are committed to working collaboratively to apply arts and humanities research and methods to tackle the intractable global environmental issues that we face, locally and globally, from resource extraction, ecological crises, to the climate crisis. 

Her first book, Dislocated Identities: Exile and the Self as (M)other in the Writing of Reinaldo Arenas, is a study of one of the most important and notorious Latin American authors of the twentieth century: Reinaldo Arenas. The text engages with the many extraordinary intersections created between Arenas’ writing, the autobiographical construction of the literary subject and the exilic condition. Through focusing on texts written on the island of Cuba and in exile, Dislocated Identities analyses the ways in which Arenas’ writing emblemises a complex process of identification with, and rejection of, his homeland.  The book explores the extent to which Arenas’ writing is a tortuous attempt to escape from this dominance and to free himself and his writing from the ties that bind him to the mother and the motherland, and shows that Arenas suffered the exilic condition long before his move to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel exodus. (Link to book here: Dislocated Identities - Peter Lang Verlag).

Wendy has published on Caribbean masculinities; the relationship between literature and law; human rights and torture in the War on Terror; Caribbean and US landscapes and histories of colonial and racial violence. Since 2016 Wendy has been working on representations and narratives of natural hazard in the Eastern Caribbean, particularly volcanic eruption, and is currently working on a book project which traces the literatures and histories of the Eastern Caribbean across the volcanic arc, disrupting the colonial and national borders of literary and historical studies of the region. 

Wendy's interests and expertise are wide ranging and she is currently co-editing a three-volume speacial issue, 'Wilid Possibility': American Literatures, Climate Change, and Hope in the Anthropocene and also recently published a two-volume co-edited collection Love and the Politics of Care and Love and the Politics of Intimacy (Love and the Politics of Care: Methods, Pedagogies, Institutions: Stanislava Dikova: Bloomsbury Academic; Love and the Politics of Intimacy: Bodies, Boundaries, Liberation: Stanislava Dikova: Bloomsbury Academic)