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Dr Josh Weeks is a Visiting Research Fellow in 2025-26 and was an IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow in Languages of the Future in 2024-25.
I am a Visiting Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), where I research the relationship between narrative, politics and time in contemporary world literature.
Previously, I was Quirk Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the IAS – a position funded from the bequest of linguist and life peer Lord Charles Randolph Quirk (1920-2017). As part of this role, I conducted research into blurred representations of time in contemporary Latin American fiction. I also co-convened a research cluster around the theme of Languages of the Future. This research cluster brought together individuals and disciplinary perspectives from across UCL to consider the role of language in shaping the future.
Between November 2023 and January 2025, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL East's School for the Creative and Cultural Industries (SCCI), where I worked under the mentorship of the School's inaugural Director, Haidy Geismar. My project was about narrativising the work of the National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange (NCACE): a Bloomsbury-based initiative that fosters knowledge exchange between Higher Education and the arts and culture sectors. The project formed part of the AHRC-funded StoryArcs programme run by the Story Society at Bath Spa University.
Outside of academia, I work as a freelance critic, with bylines in the Observer, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Socialist, Review 31, 3:AM, and Wales Arts Review. I have also written on the relationship between creativity and mental health. My essays on living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder have appeared in the anthology of marginalised voices, Just So You Know: Essays of Experience (Parthian 2020) and Wellcome Collection Stories.
Research interests
My research interests are broad, ranging from world literature – especially contemporary Latin American narrative – to the poetics and practicalities of knowledge exchange. This interdisciplinary approach, which has more recently led to a growing interest in the Medical Humanities, is influenced by my background in Cultural Analysis.
A more extensive list of interests includes:
- Contemporary literature
- World literature
- Latin American studies
- Roberto Bolaño and Jorge Luis Borges
- The history and political economy of neoliberalism
- The relationship between aesthetics and politics
- The role of the literary in dictatorship and postdictatorship contexts
- Cultural knowledge exchange
- Affect Theory
- Spectrality and the untimely
- Walter Benjamin
- Deleuze and Guattari (especially the concept of the rhizome)
- Detective Fiction
- Rurality under globalisation
- The history, politics and philosophy of tattoos
Teaching summary
I have lectured on 'How Writing Works I: History, Society, Technology (BASC0061)' – a module that forms part of the Creative Arts and Humanities BA at UCL East. Drawing on my experience as a literary and cultural critic, I have also lectured on popular criticism.
Before working at UCL, I taught English as a foreign language at various secondary schools in Spain through the British Council's English Language Assistant programme.
Josh's postdoctoral fellowship was funded by generous support from The Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment Fund at UCL.
