Research Interests

My research aims at better understanding the ways in which literature engages and reframes questions of history, subjectivity, personal agency, ethics and social change. To this end, I work on a number of different projects which are interrelated in that they move toward answering questions of how the imagination and the works of the imagination intervene in our thinking on ethical practices, practices such as sustainability, for instance, and provide us with imaginative possibilities for social change.  My research is informed by critical, feminist and postcolonial theory and explores the trans-cultural deployment of ludic and deconstructive play in contemporary fiction, particularly women’s fiction. My current ongoing project is a book manuscript for Sussex Academic Press, entitled The Ludic Game: Living with Disbelief in the Fictions of Angela Carter.  Developing on this major project are other works in progress.  The first of these is my work in Trans-cultural Postcolonial Studies and the uses of ludic play in women’s literature from New Zealand/Aotearoa, the UK, South Asia and Canada. 

In 2009, I followed my research interests to South Asia, specifically India.  I am deeply interested in contemporary writing from the Sub-continent and took this opportunity to better acquaint myself with the issues pertaining to South Asian writers.  I had the opportunity to meet other faculty doing research in South Asian Studies at Jadavpur University in Kolkata (Calcutta).  This year, in fact, I hope to welcome a member of that scholarly community here to UBC Okanagan as a researcher. My understanding was greatly facilitated by actually being in India and getting to know scholars working there and the opportunity to welcome one of them to Kelowna next summer is very exciting.

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Graduate Supervisions:

Teaching Interests 

In 2010, I’m very excited about a new course I’m teaching this fall under the rubric of Major Authors:  Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson and the Feminist Critique of Postmodernism.  I’ve not been able to teach gender theory for awhile, and I really miss it. So I’ll include a few essays in the class by feminist and queer theorists, as well as some introductory articles to postmodernism.  Plus, we’ll be reading two of my favourite UK women novelists.  I think this will be a fantastic course, and it will be dealing with the “fantastic” in literature as well.  As well, I’ve again been granted the opportunity of teaching one of the graduate courses in methods:  Cultural Theory.  This is always an exciting course for me, as I am able to introduce students to cultural theory and to help those who are already versed in the theory to apply it effectively to their current work.  Cultural theory always brings insights to any project, no matter its disciplinary boundaries.  As always with a grad course, I get the pleasure of getting to know the graduate students and learning so much from them; this class is more like a “learning” opportunity, than a teaching opportunity.  Of course, that should always be the case in teaching, as a class is always at its best when the instructor is challenging her presuppositions as well as those of the students.    
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