As a literary comparatist with an interest in contemporary literatures I have been working across national contexts and languages. My research is social justice driven with a focus on Indigenous-settler relations, diaspora studies, and climate change. Apart from being a binge reader, I have always been an avid language learner. Languages that I have studied include Latin, Spanish, Mandarin, and Anishinaabemowin.
Indigenous literatures; Indigenous-settler relations in Canada; contemporary YA literature; climate crisis literature/environmental justice; Holocaust studies; diaspora literatures (Asian; Muslim; Jewish; Latin American)
"The Role of Warrior Girls in the Repatriation/Rematriation of Ancestors in Susan Currie’s The Mask That Sang and Angeline Boulley’s Warrior Girl Unearthed." Forthcoming in The Lion and the Unicorn
"Indigenizing the Young Adult Substance-Use Novel: Adam Garnet Jones’s Fire Song and Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter." Forthcoming in Children's Literature Association Quarterly 49.2 (2024).
“'I Need Readers to Trust That This Can Happen': Relational Realism in Catherine Bush’s and Doreen Vanderstoop’s Climate Crisis Novels." British Journal of Canadian Studies. 36.1 (Spring 2024): 29-50.
Review of Helen Olsen Agger. Dadibaajim: Returning Home through Narrative. University of Manitoba Press 2021. University of Toronto Quarterly, 92.3 (2023).
"Healing Intergenerational Trauma through Cultural Reclamation in David Alexander Robertson's Cree-Centric Retelling of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. 14.1 (August 2022): 49-64.
Reading (Re)conciliation in White Settler and Chinese Canadian Narratives: From Liberal towards Transformative Approaches.” Journal of Canadian Studies 56.1 (Winter 2022): 175-92.
“Anishinaabemowin in Indianland, The Marrow Thieves, and Crow Winter as a Key to Cultural and Political Resurgence.” Studies in Canadian Literature 46.2 (2021): 127-49.
“Colonial Violence in Sixties Scoop Narratives: From In Search of April Raintree to A Matter of Conscience,” Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) 31.1-2. (2019): 115-135.
“Recent Residential School Narratives by non-Survivor Authors and the Education for Reconciliation.” English Studies in Canada 43.4-44.1 (2019): 111-130.
“Repositioning the Narrative of the Japanese Canadian Internment through Multidirectional Memory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. 52.3 (2019): 175-92.
“Writing ‘Home’: The Healing Power of Métis Storytelling in Cherie Dimaline’s Red Rooms and The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy.” Studies in Canadian Literature 43.1 (2018): 146-67.
“Healing Relationships with the Natural Environment by Reclaiming Indigenous Space in Aaron Paquette’s Lightfinder.” Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography. Ed. Aïda Hudson. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018: 99-116.
“Writing the Canadian Pacific Northwest Ecocritically: The Dynamics of Local and Global in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Canadian Literature 232 (2017): 47-63.
Intersections of Diaspora and Indigeneity: The Standoff at Kahnesatake in Lee Maracle’s Sundogs and Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin,” Canadian Literature 220 (2014): 74-91.
Current PhD Supervisions: Rachel Fernandes (ENGL), Sarah Rose (ENGL co-supervision), Rowan Li (ENGL), Nicole Flores (ENGL), Ozlem Atar (CUST), Alison Benedict (CUST), Michelle Kennedy (CUST), Susan Olding (CUST)
MA theses successfully defended Natalia Equihua (CUST), Christine Shu (CUST), Zhi Lei (CUST), Jocelyn Kinnear, (GRMN) Karin Haelssig (GRMN), Sylvia Bukow (GRMN), Brigitte Bachmann, (GRMN) Matthias Mueller (GRMN), Andreanne Roy (GRMN), Maria Irchenhauser (GRMN)
PhD theses successfully defended : Safa Moussoud (ENGL), Sebastian De Line (CUST co-supervision), Yiyi He (CUST), Margaret Maliszewska (GRMN), Maria Irchenhauser (GRMN), Ruba Turjman (GRMN), Ellie Kennedy (GRMN), Robert Lawson (GRMN)
Other Publications:
Unpublished PhD thesis: “Counter-Discursive Strategies in First World Migrant Writing,” (focus on Australian, Canadian, and American diaspora authors); Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001); translated from English into German: Die Lebenden Gedanken des Propheten Muhammad and Handbuch des Hadit; “Poland and Postmemory in Second-Generation German Jewish Fiction.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.4; “The Making of a Terrorist: John Updike’s Terrorist and Christoph Peters’s Ein Zimmer im Haus des Krieges.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 34.4; “Narratives of Transnational Divide: The Vietnamese in Contemporary German Literature and Film.” Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in Asian-German Studies. 50-63; “Rome Seen through the Eyes of a Muslim-German Latter-Day Flâneur,” Feridun Zaimoglu. 201– 218; “India/Sri Lanka, the Holocaust, and the European Gaze in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and Jeannette Lander’s Jahrhundert der Herren.” Mapping Channels between Ganges and Rhein: German-Indian Cross-Cultural Relations.120-136. “A New Kind of Creative Energy: Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin and Fatih Akin’s Kurz und schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand. German Life and Letters; “Cultural/Culinary Ambivalence in Sara Chin’s ‘Below the Line,’ Evelina Galang’s ‘Filming Sausage,’ and Yoko Tawada’s ‘Das Bad.’” Reading Chinese Transnationalism: Society, Literature, Film. 89-102.
