Dr Joanne Clement

Assistant Professor

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

I am an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing specialising in poetry, the recipient of an AHRC Northern Bridge-funded Creative Writing Poetry PhD and a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry (New Writing North). In my roles as the Managing Editor of independent literary magazine Butcher’s Dog and a Collections Selector for The Poetry Book Society’s book club, I contribute to literary discourse and help shape contemporary poetry culture.

My research lives in the intersections of race, class, climate emergency, and the cultures of care. I move between archive, people and place to interrogate and imaginatively explore the ways absence and presence can manifest in language.

My international profile as a poet is best demonstrated by ‘Listen’, a lyric adaptation of Lidija Krylova’s Holocaust survival testimony which has been translated into German and is now one of nine animated pieces permanently installed at the open-air exhibition that accompanies the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin’s Tiergarten. I have a strong collaborative relationship with the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture and am a co-signatory founder of a forthcoming transnational Romani PEN International Centre in Berlin.

As an early-career Gypsy, Roma and Traveller scholar in the emerging field of Romani Literature – a branch of postcolonial literature – I offer in-depth knowledge across literary periods and critical contexts. Outlandish (Bloodaxe, 2022), my debut poetry collection, takes ekphrastic starting points to confront Romantic impressions of Gypsy ethnicity and invites readers to consider notions of otherness, trespass and craft. Shortlisted for the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre’s John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book, it was a Poetry Society Book of the Year, with reviews and poems featured in Living North, Poetry Review, The School Librarian, The Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement.

Email Joanne

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

contemporary poetry & poetics; practice-led research; postcolonial & diasporic literatures; ekphrastic writing in response to archives & galleries; 18th-21st century literary developments & history; Romanticism; etymology; translation (esp. Romanes); representations of race, gender & class in print & material culture; interdisciplinary collaboration, including digital & sonic texts; literatures of place, accessibility & trespass.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Outlandish, Clement, J. 26 May 2022
The power to represent, Stone, D., Clement, J., McCabe, R., Nomo-Ongolo, A. 16 Feb 2023, Whose Heritage?, London, Routledge
Chicken Blood: Placing my Traveller Ethnicity in North East England: An illustrated lyric essay, Clement, J. 11 Aug 2023

Professional Activity

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Invited talk: Invisible pasts, invisible people? Gypsy, Roma, Traveller collections and heritage in British museums 2023
Invited talk: Roots and Routes: Celebrating The Robert Dawson Romany Collection 2023
Invited talk: Connected Communities: Reaching Out 2023
Invited talk: Exclusionary Estates: Travellers in the Thomas Bewick Archive 2022
Invited talk: Inequality Emergency Panel 2022

PGR Supervision

Caitlin Kendall Start Date: 01/10/2025 End Date: 17/10/2025
Danielle White Gaming Gawain: Creating a Queer and Neurodivergent Quest from a Medieval Source Text. Start Date: 01/10/2024
Caitlin Kendall Embodied Voices: How can eco-poetry articulate and heal contemporary experiences of maternal and ecological struggle? Start Date: 01/10/2025
Danielle White Gaming Gawain: Creating a Queer and Neurodivergent Quest from a Medieval Source Text. Start Date: 01/10/2024 End Date: 17/10/2025