Rate My Professor Jini Kim Watson

Watson's research focuses on postcolonial literature and theory, decolonization and the global Cold War in Asia, urban humanities, transpacific migration, and critical theory. She authored The New Asian City: Three-Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham University Press, 2021), the latter receiving an Honorable Mention for the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek Prize (2022) and the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize (2021). Her edited volumes include The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham University Press, 2018, co-edited with Gary Wilder), The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2023, co-edited with Ato Quayson), and the forthcoming Ends of the Global City: Disaffection, Displacement, and the New Cultural Ecologies of the Urban (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, co-edited with Rashmi Varma). Key articles feature in journals such as Interventions, Contemporary Literature, Discourse, and Positions. At the University of Melbourne, she coordinates courses like Literature and the City (ENGL20037) and Literature, Adaptation, Media (ENGL20031), and participates in the History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective. Her work has shaped understandings of authoritarianism, urban form, and political modernity in postcolonial Asia.