Full Academic CV December 2011

Research Interests

Conflict Resolution

Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Social Dynamics of Mourning & Grief

Transitional and Restorative Justice
Law and Literature

German and Austrian Literary Modernism
History and Culture of Psychoanalysis
Myth and Adaptation

Courses taught since 2001
Undergraduate

INTS 322* Conflict and Culture: Literature, Law & Human Rights (2011)
GRMN 252* Conflict and Culture: From Nietzsche to 9/11 (2009-10)
GRMN 221* Early German Film: Inventing Nation on Screen (2005-7) 
GRMN 431* Krise und Kunst: Imagining German Identities (2007)
GRMN 331* Modernity and the German Psyche: From fin-de-siecle Vienna to Weimar (2003)

Graduate 
GRMN 896* Sound Matters: Form, Sinn und Sonorität in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik der Moderne (2010)
GRMN 886* Law and Literature: (Quasi)Juridical Discourses from Nuremberg to Now (2009)
GRMN 884* From Baroque to Broken: Rethinking the Habsburg Legacy (2009) 
GRMN 884* Vienna and the Orient: Women, Jews & Others around 1900 (2007)
GRMN 884* Between Mourning and Forgiveness: Responses in Twentieth-Century Literature (2006) 
GRMN 896* Freud's Vienna: Literature, Culture, and the Psyche (2004)
GRMN 896* Freud and Beyond: Literature, Culture, Theory (2003) 

Current Research Project 

The Quasi-Judicial Imagination:

Cultural Reflections on Restorative Justice and the Ambiguities of the Law 

Project summary

This program of research begins with three assumptions,

a)   that literary texts and other creative works contain valuable reflections on legal, quasi-legal and extralegal structures;

b)  that interpretation of these texts using the tools of literary analysis reveals imaginative quasi-judicial frameworks;

c)   and that these frameworks can help us think through the ways in which the legal landscape is shifting to accommodate restorative models of justice.

The objectives of this research are

1.     to broaden the field of Law & Literature beyond the focus on representations of specific legal processes;

2.     to expand the field of Restorative Justice by engaging with literary texts that attend to questions of redress;

3.     to bring literary texts into conversation with judicial and quasi-judicial contexts to further develop theories of Restorative Justice;

4.     to enhance theories of Restorative Justice by engaging with Indigenous legal traditions;

5.     to use this knowledge to contribute to community development, public policy, and higher education.

There are two principle aspects to the program of research. The first is located in the field of Law and Literature and involves analysis of properly legal processes in literary texts and narrative traditions; the second, which participates in discourses of Restorative, Transitional, and Indigenous Justice, investigates quasi-legal processes and redress measures in literary texts and other creative works. I want to make the case that placing these two analytical frameworks adjacent to one another helps us to more thoroughly understand the relations between narrative forms and legal and quasi-legal structures and to more effectively connect and complicate the discourses of Law and Restorative Justice.

The program of research will look to Indigenous legal forms, Indigenous modes of redress, and their representation in Indigenous literary texts to critique criminal justice procedures and expand frameworks of Restorative Justice.

The primary corpus is diverse in terms of media, cultural context, and historical period, including, but not limited to, Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Kafka’s The Trial(1925), Stanley Kubrick’s Judgment at Nuremberg(1961),Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem(1962), South African plays, Athol Fugard’s Orestes (1972) and Yael Farber’s Malora(2008), and Canadian works, Daphne Marlatt’s The Gull(2008), Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes(2009), Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen(1998) and Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach(2000).

Detailed analysis of these texts and contexts will show that legal structures are far from stable and that the seeds of quasi-judicial processes are already present in the linguistic and literary ambiguities of these texts.

Publications:
A Poetics of Forgiveness: Creative Responses to Loss and Wrongdoing.  New York: Palgrave, 2010.     

 
In the post-9/11 era, mourning seems to dominate our collective consciousness. But what of forgiveness? We hear about public rituals of mourning, monuments and memorials in the wake of September 11, but is there room in our current age of terror and revenge to engage with the work of forgiveness? The aim of this study is to analyse cultural responses to loss and wrongdoing in order to gain greater insight into the circularity of suffering in our present age and to investigate how and if forgiveness and reconciliation can offer opportunities to move beyond this stasis.

Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

 
Almost everyone knows about Oedipus and his mother, and many readers would put the Oedipus myth at the forefront of Western collective mythology. In Electra after Freud, Jill Scott leaves that couple behind and argues convincingly for the primacy of the countermyth of Agamemnon and his daughter. Through a lens of Freudian and feminist psychoanalysis, this book views renderings of the Electra myth in twentieth-century literature and culture.

Scott reads several pivotal texts featuring Electra to demonstrate what she calls “a narrative revolt” against the dominance of Oedipus as archetype. Situating the Electra myth within a framework of psychoanalysis, medicine, opera, and dance, Scott investigates the heroine’s role at the intersections of history and the feminine, eros and thanatos, hysteria and melancholia. Scott analyzes Electra adaptations by H.D., Hofmannsthal and Strauss, Musil, and Plath and highlights key moments in the telling and reception of the Electra myth in the modern imagination.