Janice Ho grew up in Malaysia and Australia, received her BA (First Class Honours) from the University of Queensland, and her MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. She has research and teaching interests in twentieth- and twenty-first century British literature and culture; British and transnational modernisms; postcolonial and world Anglophone literatures; contemporary fiction; histories and theories of the novel; human rights studies; and infrastructure studies. Before coming to UBC, Janice taught at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Her monograph, Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, and explored the changing definitions of citizenship in response to a range of sociopolitical events over the course of the century, including the women’s suffrage, the expansion of the welfare state, the onset of the security state during war, and the rise of overseas immigration. She also has essays on modernist and contemporary literature published in a variety of journals and edited collections, including Modern Fiction Studies; NOVEL; Journal of Modern Literature; Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature; The History of 1930s British Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, and PMLA. She has also co-edited, with Nadine Attewell, a special issue of English Language Notes on In/Security. And together with Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, she is co-editor of a new book series with Oxford University Press on “Literature and Politics.”

Her current book project, titled Culture, Empire, and Development at the Midcentury, traces transnational genealogies of welfare—based on welfare policies articulated by the British empire for governing its colonies—and argues that these shaped international and postcolonial conceptions of development in the postwar era.

Books and Editorial Projects:

Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel (New York: Cambridge UP, 2015).

In/Security, special issue of English Language Notes 54.2 Fall/Winter 2016 (Duke University Press), co-edited with Nadine Attewell.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

“Embodied Subjects and Infrastructural Failure in Chris Abani’s GraceLand,” in The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment, eds. Kelly Rich, Nicole Rizzuto, and Susan Zieger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022).

“Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-State” in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, eds. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

“Afropolitanism and Social Class,” PMLA 136.5 (October 2021): pp. 770-77.

“Europe, Refugees, and Nineteen Eighty-Four” in The Cambridge Companion to ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, ed. Nathan Waddell (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020): pp. 141-154.

“The Colonial State and Transnational Welfare during the 1930s Depression,” in The History of 1930s British Literature, eds. Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019): pp. 285-298.

“Nationalism and Globalization in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford UP, Feb. 2019. DOI: <10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.416>

“The Human and The Citizen in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent” in Around 1945: Literature, Citizenship, Rights. Ed. Allan Hepburn (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2016): pp. 107-128.

“Jewishness in the Colonies of Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle.” Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies 59.4 (Winter 2013): pp. 713-741.

“The Satanic Verses and the Politics of Extremity.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 44.2 (Summer 2011): pp. 208-228.

“The Crisis of Liberalism and the Politics of Modernism.” Literature Compass 8.1 (January 2011): pp. 47-65.

“The Spatial Imagination and Literary Form of Conrad’s Colonial Fictions.” jml: Journal of Modern Literature 30.4 (Summer 2007): pp. 1-19.