Jack Rondeau

Jack Rondeau acquired his PhD from the School of English at the University of Leeds. His doctoral research examined aerial violence in contemporary postcolonial literature and focused on the largely overlooked importance of air in literary and postcolonial studies. Jack developed a chapter of his doctoral research into a journal article, which was published in Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. His interests broaden in the relationship between psychoanalysis and postcolonial literature, a topic on which he has also published, and is often interested in finding points of convergence between critical theory and literary studies. To this end, Jack is engaging in forthcoming research that turns its attention to the creative medium of cinema and its relation to intellectual developments in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Dr Rondeau's LAHRI Visiting Fellowship research sets out to consider how we conceptualise atmosphere as form. It does so by advancing an interdisciplinary textual approach to fiction that bridges the environmental humanities with literary studies, postcolonial criticism, and recent theoretical interventions in what he terms the aerial humanities.  

This work emerges out of and develops his doctoral thesis, which examined aesthetic representations of aerial violence in four postcolonial novels. Jack's forthcoming project turns its attention to a wider historical timeframe, ranging from fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through to contemporary publications, including online short stories, blog posts, and magazine articles. Across these examples, his work considers how the formal function of literary atmospheres, especially in the context of violence, provides a fresh model for thinking through the ontological and planetary consequences of technological innovations in warfare over the previous 150 years.

Publications:

• Rondeau, Jack. ‘Breath and belonging: Atmospheric violence in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses’, Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, 61(3), 2026, pp. 549-564. 
• Rondeau, Jack. ‘“False teeth too, eh? … False identity too, eh?”: Postcolonial identifications in Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 61(2), 2024, pp. 163-175.