John Docker is a well-known literary and cultural critic, and public intellectual.

He has written on contemporary theories of culture, identity, and diaspora; Orientalism and exoticism; monotheism and polytheism; and genocide in relation to both the Enlightenment and settler colonialism.

His most recent books are 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (2001) and, with Ann Curthoys, Is History Fiction? (2005).