Jak Peake

Jak Peake, Fulbright scholar and Senior Lecturer in literature, is a scholar of Caribbean and African American writing in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. His first book, Between the Bocas: A Literary Geography of Western Trinidad, examines writing of and about Trinidad from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, placing works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall, and Yseult Bridges. His current research focuses on the New Negro, Black Modernism (or the Harlem Renaissance) and Caribbean-U.S. print culture networks in the 1910-1940 period. Recent publications include: “Cyril Briggs: Guns, Bombs, Spooks and Writing the Revolution”, in Revolutionary lives of the Red and Black Atlantic since 1917 (Manchester University Press, 2022); “Island Relations, Continental Visions, and Graphic Networks” in The Cambridge History of Harlem Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021).