https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-grant-91366316a/Ben Grant is a Departmental Lecturer in English Literature, whose research interests include postcolonial and world literature, the theory and practice of the aphorism, travel literature, life writing, psychoanalysis, and Artificial Intelligence. He has published three books: on the Victorian explorer and translator Richard Francis Burton; on the aphorism and other short forms of writing; and, most recently, on the contemporary British-Jewish writer, Jenny Diski. As well as researching and teaching, he directs the Weekly Class Programme of in-person short courses. In addition, he acts as the Academic Partnerships Coordinator, in which role he oversees Oxford Crisis Education (OxCRED), which delivers online educational resources to Higher Education students in crisis settings, and which was awarded a prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Award in 2026. He is a Fellow of Kellogg College, and a member of the English Faculty.
Dr Ben Grant
Departmental Lecturer in English Literature
Director of Weekly Classes
Academic Partnerships Coordinator
Ben has taught in a variety of areas of British, American, and postcolonial literature from the Romantic period to the present. He also has considerable experience teaching Critical Theory. He particularly enjoys tutorial and small group teaching, and loves to discover the different perspectives that people bring to literary and critical texts. In his teaching, he always encourages students to explore their own ideas, and supports them to develop their independent thinking orally and in writing.
Ben is currently supervising DPhils in British women travellers in colonial India, and nineteenth-century illustrations of The Thousand and One Nights.
Ben has a wide range of research interests. In his first book, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Routledge, 2009), he examined how the iconic Victorian explorer and translator, Richard Francis Burton, engages with the non-European world in his many writings. His second book, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge New Critical Idiom, 2016), gives a consolidated picture of the exciting and often marginalised genres of the aphorism and related short forms, such as the proverb and the fragment. Ben’s most recent book, Jenny Diski (Manchester University Press, 2026), is the first critical monograph to be published on Diski, and it brings her fiction and non-fiction together in a thematic approach to her work. As well as writing articles on a number of other subjects, including the explorer Paul du Chaillu, Frantz Fanon, and Claude Cahun alongside Diski, Ben has contributed the entry on Richard Francis Burton to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, and that on ‘Anthology’ to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. An essay of his appears in the catalogue of a major international exhibition on the Kama Sutra held in Paris in 2014, and he wrote the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Jenny Diski.
Since finishing his book on Diski, Ben has become interested in how Large Language Models work, and is exploring this subject from a literary-critical perspective.
Monographs
- Jenny Diski (Manchester University Press, 2026)
- The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge, 2016)
- Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (Routledge, 2009)
Articles and Book Chapters
- ‘Autofiction and Self-Portraiture: Jenny Diski and Claude Cahun’, in Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (eds), The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 287-307, Open Access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-78440-9
- ‘Diski [née Simmonds], Jennifer Jane (Jenny) (1947–2016), novelist and author’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (2020).
- ‘Anthology’ entry in The Oxford Encycopedia of Literary Theory (Oxford University Press) (2020).
- ‘Richard Francis Burton’ entry in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2015).
- ‘Kâma-Sûtra’, in Marc Restellini (ed.), Le Kama-Sutra: Spiritualité et érotisme dans l’art indien (Paris: Gourcuff Gradenigo and Pinacothèque de Paris, 2014), 19-23.
- ‘ “Inhuman Voices”: Reflections on the Place of Ancestors in the Work of Frantz Fanon’, Textual Practice 28:4 (2014), 593-610.
- ‘Ex-Patriotism’ in Kaori Nagai and Caroline Rooney (eds) Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 185-204. (co-authored with Kaori Nagai).
- ‘ “Interior Explorations”: Paul Belloni du Chaillu’s Dream Book’, Journal of European Studies 38:4 (2008), 407-19.
- ‘Translating / ‘The’ Kama Sutra’, Third World Quarterly 26:3 (2005), 509-16 (reprinted in Emma Bainbridge (ed.) Connecting Cultures (Routledge, 2007)).
- ‘On the Margins of Beau Travail’, Journal of European Studies 34:1-2 (2004), 60-81.
