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:

1. Locating Kurdish Culture in Canada studies cultural identity in exile and the concept of Kurdishness in Canada
2. 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.

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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.

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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

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.

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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.

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Browse more courses taught by Louise Harrington

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