Michael Griffiths

Michael R. Griffiths is a scholar of colonisation and literature whose most recent work is on the history of anticolonial thought. Before that, he had focused principally on Indigenous, settler colonial and postcolonial literatures. He joined the School of The Arts, English, and Media in 2014. He received his PhD in English from Rice University in 2012, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society from 2012 to 2014. Griffiths's latest book is The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Pivot, 2025). This monograph details the debates about authorship in anticolonial, decolonial and postcolonising thought that responded to Roland Barthes's declaration that "the author is dead," with a particular attention to the thinkers Edouard Glissant and Edward Said. Griffiths' first monograph was released in 2018: The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP) and details the genealogy, history and legacy of appropriation in representations of and by Aboriginal people in Australian literature. He has also published articles on numerous related but distinct topics, including: poetics and intention in postcolonial literature following the work of Édouard Glissant, whiteness in the settler colonial public sphere, and the decolonisation and the Bildungsroman in the work of Tsitsi Dangarembga. This work has appeared in such venues as Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, Textual Practice and Humanimalia, as well as in numerous edited books. He is an editorial board member of Antipodes and of Australian Literary Studies. According to Google Scholar, his H-Index is 9. Griffiths has also intervened into debates about the political vicissitudes of the doctrine of freedom of speech. With Tanja Dreher, he co-edited a special issue of Continuum which offered an account of freedom of speech debates in the late liberal world. This collection of essays received a notable amount of attention and was reprinted as a book from Taylor and Francis called Unsettled Voices. Literary studies, Other language, communication and culture, Cultural studies