Associate Professor
Department of English
Research keywords: Indigenous writing and art; environmental humanities; spatial theory, mobility, and gender.
current research
I am working on a SSHRC-funded book, Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America (Routledge 2018). This project explores racialised and gendered experiences of mobility through a selection of writing and art by Marie Clements, Marilyn Dumont, Tomson Highway, Leanne Simpson, Richard Van Camp, Kent Monkman, and Louise Erdrich. Bringing spatial theory into conversation with Indigenous histories and vernacular practices, this book and its associated archive will provide a larger audit of mobility, risk, land use, territory disputes, and the social and cultural impacts of industry on First Nations communities.
monograph
My book, From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Literature (2008), examines the prison’s role in post-contact Indigenous history. Drawing on prison memoirs, residential school narratives, prison serials, and collections of prisoners’ writing, this book looks at Indigenous authors’ re-inflection of a Western autobiographical tradition. Working within a theoretical framework of life writing, this work emphasizes the power of self-narration to re-make a sovereign self, a self that resists colonial discourses of guilt.
