Full Academic CV  January 2013 

Research Interests

Conflict Resolution

Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Social Dynamics of Mourning & Grief

Transitional and Restorative Justice
Law and Literature

Indigenous Legal Traditions

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) 

Refrence: C. Susan Fostaty Young, Robert J. Wilson Assessment and Learning: The ICE Approach. Winnipeg: Portage & Main

Current Research Project 

Project summary

Storying Justice:

Narrating, Generating and Restoring Justice through Literary and Cultural Texts

This program of research emerges against the backdrop of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This pivotal moment in the history of Canada’s relations with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples presents a unique opportunity to harness the national imagination to tell new and different stories about ourselves and to reinvent our histories and our futures. While Storying Justice is informed by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is not principally about this or other truth commissions. Rather, my project reads these and other quasi-judicial processes as well as narrative and cultural responses to them in order to deepen our understanding of the ways in which advanced democracies can attend to colonial legacies and historical oppression and find new beginnings for repair of Indigenous-settler relations.

Storying Justice harnesses the passion of stories and storytelling to expand and complicate discourses on restorative justice. The central claims are three-fold:

1)      narrative practices can function as restorative measures and generate new and as yet unimagined forms of justice;

2)      literary and cultural texts can reveal important insights about restorative justice; and

3)      employing literary critical methodology to analyse restorative processes can further enhance our understanding of restorative justice.

The corpus of Storying Justiceis diverse both in terms of media—including literary texts, testimony, judicial decisions, and commission reports, as well as material culture projects and practices—and in terms of the cultural and geographical contexts it examines—including Ancient Greece, post-war and post-unification Germany, and Indigenous peoples and Indigenous knowledge systems in Canada. I make the case for including Indigenous and non-Indigenous stories and cultures side by side, and suggest that thinking through these epistemological challenges can in itself constitute a poetic practice of repair (Mathur et al 2011). I also argue that responses to large-scale human rights abuses in advanced democracies—like Germany and Canada— require new models of restorative justice.

I understand research, and this project in particular, not as an end product but as opening up a dialogue that aims to benefit people and communities through active engagement, collaboration and knowledge sharing, through traditional scholarly forms and informal interactions. In addition to the publication of a monograph, an edited volume, and scholarly articles, I am committed to sharing the results with larger and more diverse audiences through a wide variety of means, including media work, workshops for professionals in the fields of criminal justice, law, and education, consulting with local non-profit mediation services, curricular innovations, course development, graduate training, and research partnerships (see KMb). My previous work at the intersections of forgiveness and reconciliation studies and literary studies in diverse cultural contexts, A Poetics of Forgiveness (2010), has equipped me with the knowledge and skills to carry out this program of research. I will continue to seek out scholars and engaged citizens with relevant expertise to assist me in sharpening my articulation of the larger questions that underpin this study.  

While I am at the beginning stages of developing my methodological frameworks of narrative justice and generative justice, I strongly believe that these concepts can help us to understand justice in new ways, not as a means to get even or even to achieve equality, but rather as a never-ending collaborative practice of generating value from the stories of humanity.

Research on the Academic Profession:

Mobilizing Knowledge: Re-visioning Research Dissemination

OR "Don't yell at the TV: Be on TV!"

Research on Teaching and Learning:

From Twitter to MicroWriting

Queen's News Centre: "A 'Tweet' Experiment in Undergraduate Course"

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.