After growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa, I studied for my BA at Oxford and my MPhil and PhD at Cambridge, before taking up a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, where I finished work on my first book, J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (2014). My first permanent job was in the English Department at the University of Birmingham, where I spent a decade, before joining King’s in 2024. I have also had two spells in the US, first as an Anglo-California Foundation Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (2006-07), and then as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2017-19). 

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Poetry, drama and fiction of the mid-twentieth century
• Literatures of Africa and the African diaspora
• Colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonization
• Approaches to literary form (poetics, narratology and stylistics)
• Bibliography, book history, print culture, and the sociology of literature
• Theories of comparative, postcolonial and world literatures.

I work across the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a special interest in the middle decades of the twentieth century (1930s to 1970s). My research is concerned with the ways in which literary cultures come into being and interact, and how they shape particular authorships and particular writing practices. The book I am now completing – based on research funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (2017-2020) and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2021-2023) – is a study of mid-twentieth century American literature and its place in the world. Tracing the arrivals of three literary migrants, Denise Levertov, Stefan Heym and Vladimir Nabokov, it explores conditions of literary belonging and literary making. Supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant/ UKRI Frontier Research Grant, I am also beginning work on LITAID, a new project focused on the transnational dimensions of literary decolonization in Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s.

Selected publications

Zimbler, J 2024, ‘Denise Levertov’s Mexican Sojourn: Poets of the North, Materials of the South’, Interventions.  

Zimbler, J 2022, 'Kamau Brathwaite's poems from Ghana: making sense of rhyme', Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 30, no. 2.  

Etherington, B & Zimbler, J 2021, 'Decolonize practical criticism?', English: Journal of the English Association, vol. 70, no. 270, pp. 227–236.

Zimbler, J (ed.) 2020, The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge University Press.

Etherington, B & Zimbler, J (eds) 2018, The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge University Press.