As a literary comparatist with an interest in contemporary literatures I have been working across several national contexts, languages, and disciplines. Most of my research has been social justice driven with a focus on Indigenous-settler relations, diaspora, war and genocide, racism and Islamophobia, and environmental crises. I am particularly interested in exploring intersections and relations between these issues. 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)
“'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.
"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 49.1 (2024).
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, Sarah Rose (co-supervision), Wendy Li, Nicole Flores, Ozlem Atar, Susan Olding
MA theses successfully defended: Natalia Equihua, Christine Shu, Zhi Lei, Jocelyn Kinnear, Karin Haelssig, Sylvia Bukow, Brigitte Bachmann, Matthias Mueller, Andreanne Roy, Maria Irchenhauser
PhD theses successfully defended: Safa Moussoud, Sebastian De Line (co-supervision), Yiyi He, Margaret Maliszewska, Maria Irchenhauser, Ruba Turjman, Ellie Kennedy, Robert Lawson
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.
