Dr Anne Wetherilt

Professional biography

I work on the politics and economics of decolonisation. My thesis – ‘Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow: Politics, Economics and the Novel’ – studied the fiction of women writers, who witnessed the end of British rule in India, Malaya and East Africa. My main objective was to examine how women writers used narrative features of the middlebrow novel to engage metropolitan readers in a debate on the politics and economics of decolonisation. My current research explores the post-war debates on economic development, covering the writings of contemporary economists and novelists. I also have an interest in the Belgian-Chinese writer Han Suyin.

I am a member of the OU’s Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group