Louise Harrington, PhD and MA (SOAS, University of London), BA (Trinity College Dublin)
Contact
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Arts - English & Film Studies Dept
- lmharrin@ualberta.ca
Overview
About
I'm an assistant professor in postcolonial studies and world literatures in English and in translation with an emphasis on South Asia, Ireland and Palestine. My research lies at the intersection of cultural & literary studies and ethno-religious-national conflict & peace studies in the 20th and 21st centuries. In my study of Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and South Asia I am interested in exploring border poetics and border aesthetics in a comparative framework.
My current book project on these three regions takes up aspects of critical border studies and geocriticism to examine how literary and cinematic mediations of 20th century partitions map spaces of conflict and their legacies.
I am working on two additional projects:
- Locating Kurdish Culture in Canada studies cultural identity in exile and the concept of Kurdishness in Canada
- Cultural Peace Work in "Post-Conflict" Northern Ireland (SSHRC-funded) is multidisciplinary research that studies how literature as a form of cultural peace work serves an essential function in mobilizing creative modes of peacebuilding
I have previously published on topics including the railway in Indian literary imagination; narratology and the Partition of Bengal; South Asian Irish cultural production; Bengali and Bangladeshi resistance writing; the militant body in Northern Ireland and Palestine; and the anxiety of post-partition Irishness.
Research
Supervisory and Research Interests
Postcolonial and comparative literatures; South Asian literatures and cultures; Irish literature and culture; the Arab-Israeli conflict; Palestinian writing; war, (post-)conflict and partition studies; literature and religion; spatial literary studies and theory; critical border studies.
Teaching
Recent and upcoming courses include:
ENGL 103 Case Studies in Research: Language Politics in Irish Literature
ENGL 150 Intro to English Studies: Narratives of Migration
ENGL 210 Conflict and Literature
ENGL 222 Reading Race and Ethnicity
ENGL 305 Topics in Literature and Religion
ENGL 315 South Asian Literatures in English
ENGL 367 Contemporary Literature and Culture
ENGL 426 The Short Story in South Asia
ENGL 481 Borders, Lines and Walls
ENGL 569 Borders as Methodologies
Courses
ENGL 315 - South Asian Writing in English
Selected works from the Indian context. Content and period focus may vary. Prerequisite: *6 of junior English, or *3 of junior English plus WRS 101 or 102.
ENGL 426 - Studies in Literary and Cultural Histories
Prerequisites: *6 of junior English or *3 of junior English plus WRS 101; and *12 of senior-level English, *6 of which must be at the 300 level. Note: variable content course which may be repeated.