Jess Roberts

PhD Candidate, Queen’s

Contact Information

Office:
Office Hours: By appointment
Extension:
E-mail: 8jr6@queensu.ca

Research Interests

Memoir and life writing, African literatures, childhood studies, violence and conflict, feminist theory and gender studies, women’s literatures, ecocriticism and animal studies, transnational literatures, popular culture and media, marketing and reception, paratextual studies, and film.

Remarks

I am currently writing my dissertation that examines contemporary African child soldier narratives. This project considers fictional narratives, memoirs, and films by and about girl and boy soldiers, as well as the transnational movement of these texts, their marketing to and reception by Western readerships, and how Western and International discourses of childhood and child soldiery impact the production and circulation of child soldier narratives. I am fascinated by the relations, intersections, and dialogues between these narratives (and other literary texts) and popular culture. In my spare time, I continue work on a book chapter about human and animal relations in Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild.

My scholarly activities also reflect the diversity of my interests. I have presented at conferences ranging from MLA, NEMLA, and ACCUTE to Cinema and Media Studies, Childhoods, and “Under Western Skies: Climate, Culture, and Change in Western North America.&8221; I was also a roundtable facilitator for Art of Critique: Writing, Communal Difference and Different Communities; a co-organizer of Animals and Animality across the Social Sciences and Humanities; and the organizer of a department workshop on Academic Integrity.