Dr Rosemary J. Jolly

BA (Hons.) Saskatchewan; MA and PhD, Toronto


Professor, Department of English and School of Kinesiology and Health Studies


Contact Information

Office: Watson 535
Office Hours:
Extension: 77950
E-mail: jollyr@queensu.ca

Research Interests

Literature and ethics, literature and social justice; literature and the medical humanities; southern African literatures, particularly contemporary; J. M. Coetzee; applied narrative studies; literature and social suffering; literature and violence; the species boundary and environmentalism; contemporary literatures of the postcolonial world.

Recent Publications

  • “Bearing Witness to Bodily Harm: The Limits of Trauma Theory,” Australian Feminist Studies (forthcoming September 2011).
  • with Alan Jeeves, “Gender Equity, HIV/AIDS, and Democracy in Rural South Africa since 1994” Canadian Journal of African Studies44.3 (2011): 524–51. Special Issue edited by Rebecca Thiessen, Miriam Grant and Jane Parpart on Gender, AIDS and Human Security in Africa.
  • Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa, Postcolonialism across the Disciplines (Liverpool and Scottsville: Liverpool UP; U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2010).
  • with Alan Jeeves, “Sexually Transmitted Infection and Public Health in South Africa: Educational Campaigns for Prevention, 1935–1948 and 1999–2008,” Social Theory and Health 7 (2009): 264–283.
  • “What he ‘wants-to-write’: Perverse Desire, Responsibility and the Art of Fiction-Making in the Writing of J. M. Coetzee, ” J. M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eaglestone, and Katy Iddiols (New York: Continuum Books, 2008) 93–111.

Remarks

Professor Jolly, of the Department of English and the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, is author of Cultured Violence: Narrative, Social Suffering and Engendering Human Rights in Contemporary South Africa (Liverpool 2010) and Colonization, Violence and Narration in White South African Writing (Ohio 1996). She is also co-editor, with Derek Attridge, of Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge). Her current research and teaching are situated in the nexus of public health, cultural and human rights discourses. She is co-principal investigator of a program of research, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, on gender based violence (GBV) and HIV/AIDS, located in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This is the third in a series of CIHR projects on HIV and GBV in South Africa of which she has been PI. She is also a co-principal investigator on grants held by the Ontario HIV/AIDS Treatment Network to enhance interdisciplinary and collaborative training of future HIV/AIDS researchers. Dr Jolly is the first humanist to be Principal Investigator on a CIHR grant. She is a recipient of the Frank Knox Award for Teaching Excellence (1994) and has subsequently been nominated for a number of teaching awards, most recently the Alumni Award for Teaching Excellence (2011). She is co-founder of Rape Crisis Clinics in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and has held fellowships at the University of York, UK (Levehulme Visiting Professorship, 2005) and Australian National University’s Research School for the Humanities (2009).

I welcome inquiries from students working in the fields of the medical humanities, southern African literatures and Coetzee studies, applied narrative studies and ethics and literature. I have supervised theses that range from studies of specific authors, such as J. M. Coetzee and Ivan Vladislavic, to explications of themes within the postcolonial world, such as the species boundary in postcolonial literature, ideas and ideals of cosmopolitanism, and the representation of leprosy and HIV in Caribbean literatures. In my capacity as a Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, I supervise MSc and PhD theses on gender-based violence and coercion, HIV/AIDS, and the role of the creative arts in diagnosis, healing and health research, two current examples being the Forum Theatre of Augusto Boal, and bodymapping. I have employed English undergraduate and graduate students both as research assistants on the collaborative CIHR project, and in the course of my individual research. I seek to model a form of interdisciplinary work that uses the potential of narrative criticism to build integrity in contemporary explorations of extreme ethical challenges. A aim to accomplish this goal by sustaining mutually productive relations between critical theory and applied research.