What can ghosts tell us about justice, history and the future? This is what Judith Tesfaye Kiros, PhD in English, has explored in her thesis Ghosts of the Black Atlantic: Hauntology and the Temporality of Justice in Black British Poetry.
Judith Tesfaye Kiros has analysed the work of four black British poets in relation to haunting as both a theme and an ethical concept. Drawing on the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology – the idea that what is no longer present, or not yet present, nevertheless shapes the present – as well as the relationship between time and ethics, she examines how the ghost functions both as a motif and as a conceptual figure in poetry.
”One could say that hauntology is about how what is present is always permeated by what is absent,” says Judith Tesfaye Kiros.
New perspectives on an established concept
One of the thesis’s key contributions is that it challenges how the concept of hauntology is used within British academia and popular culture.
”I observed that the concept is often used in a retrospective and nostalgic way, with a focus on the British Isles. This means that future-oriented and ethical perspectives are overlooked, while Britain’s former colonies and their populations are marginalised.”
The thesis demonstrates how hauntology can be used in a more critical and ethically engaged way, placing questions of power, history and justice at its centre.
Why did ghosts become central to your research?
”Through this topic, I was able to approach poetry via the ghost as both a figure and an idea, while also engaging with questions of justice and how justice can be expressed poetically in relation to the victims of colonialism and imperialism. And who isn’t drawn to ghosts?” says Judith Tesfaye Kiros.
She hopes that her research findings will help broaden the academic discussion of hauntology and highlight the future visions that poets articulate through language and form.
Judith Tesfaye Kiros defended her doctoral thesis on 6 February 2026 at Karlstad University.
- Link to the thesis in DiVA: Ghosts of the Black Atlantic: Hauntology and the Temporality of Justice in Black British Poetry
