Availability

By appointment May through August.

Area of Study / Keywords

American Literature & Culture Children's Literature Popular Culture

About

Education

SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University

PhD, Queen's University

MA, University of Saskatchewan

Major Awards

Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Chair, Vanderbilt University

Teagle Foundation Grant

SSHRC Insight Development Grants

Augustana Teaching Leadership Award

McCalla University Professorship

Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund Project Grant

SSHRC Standard Research Grant

I teach and research American literature and culture. Though my original field of specialization was American literature to 1865, my work on American women writers from the colonial, revolutionary, ante- and post-bellum periods has led me to work on a disparate variety of American texts and cultural moments. My interest in children's and young adult literature has been grounded by my earlier career as a children's librarian. I have worked on and taught Indigenous texts and contexts for nearly twenty years, and now blend those interests in a project on Indigenous children's books. My theoretical approaches combine new historicism and feminist cultural materialism as I uncover how the texts I study work to reform the society that produced them. My current projects include a examination of date/acquaintance rape narratives written for young adults, a study of the strategies of decolonization in contemporary Indigenous texts for children, and an ongoing project on singer-songwriters working in the Americana genre. Alongside my disciplinary research, I also engage in the scholarship of teaching, and have published on my classroom practices.

Research

Forthcoming Publications

• Consumption and the Literary Cookbook. Scholarly collection edited with Janet Wesselius. Routledge. Under contract. 320 pp. manuscript.
• “‘I found your words, Grandpa’: Speaking Back to History in Indigenous Picturebooks.” International Research in Children’s Literature. Forthcoming. 25 pp. typescript.
• “‘You doesn’t know magic. … Plus, you children’: Growing Ecocitizens in Three American Children’s Novels.” The Lion and the Unicorn. Forthcoming. 27 pp. typescript.
• “‘She wished someone would help them”: Building Empathy for the Mentally Ill in YA Fantasy Fiction.” Kelly Keus and Roxanne Harde. Children’s Literature in Education. 23 pp. typescript.

Recent Publications

• The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture. Ed. Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola. Routledge Series in Children’s Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017.
• “‘Seeds blowin’ up the highway in the south wind’: Woody Guthrie’s Angry Sons & Daughters.” BOSS: The Biennial-journal of Springsteen Studies, vol. 3, pp. 7-37.
• “‘Are you preparing for another war?’: Un/Just War and The Hunger Games Trilogy.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Culture, vol. 11, no. 1. (2019), pp. 59-83.
• “‘Like Alice, I was Brave’: The Girl in the Text in Olemaun’s Residential School Narratives.” Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 1.3 (2017): 121-36. (Reprinted in The Girl in the Text. Ed. Ann Smith. Transnational Girlhoods series. Berghahn, 2018.).
• “‘The discussions with my team’: Team-Based Learning and Young Adult Literature.” Modern Language Association Options for Teaching Young Adult Literature. Eds. Roberta Seelinger Trites, Karen Coats, and Mike Cadden. MLA. Pp. 280-286.
• “‘No accident, no mistake’: Acquaintance Rape in Recent YA Novels.” Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Literature. Eds. Rebekah Fitzsimmons and Casey Wilson. University Press of Mississippi. Pp. 171-186. 
• “‘Consuming themselves endlessly’: Women and Power in Livi Michael’s Short Story Cycle.” Constructing Coherence in the Contemporary British Short Story Cycle, edited by Patrick Gill and Florian Kläger. Routledge Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Series. Routledge, 2018, pp. 219-231.
• “It’s my skin that’s paid most dearly”: Katniss Everdeen and/as the Appalachian Body. The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017. 57-69.
• With Samantha Christensen (PI). “‘Little Cooks’: Food, Gender, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature.” The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017. 213-226.

Teaching

Senior Courses

AUENG441: “Reform Writing for Children.”

AUENG292/392: “Feminist Critical Theory and Women’s Writing.”

AUENG271/371: “American Literature since 1865.”

AUENG270/370: “American Literature to 1865.”

AUENG268/368: “Women’s Environmental Literature.”

AUENG207/307: “Aboriginal/Indigenous Literature.”

AUENG206/706: “Native Children’s Literature.”

AUENG205/305: “Children’s Literature.”

AUENG202/302: “Feminist Theologies and Women’s Writing.”

Recent Directed Readings

Sarah Preston: Feminism and Religious Doctrine in Women’s Writing

Crystal Labrecque: Slut Shaming in Young Adult Fiction (Winner, Augustana Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award)

Kelly Keus: Portrayals of PTSD in Adolescent Fantasy Fiction (Winner, Augustana Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award)

Kate Gael: “They were just women”: Semiotic Collapse in Paradise

Stephanie Gruhlke: Finding Liberation within Religion: The Role of Kinship and Love in the Lives of Faithful Women

Hope Menary-Dianocky: Home as the Seat of Identity and Belonging in Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark House Series

Jessica Stambaugh: Gaining Control: Self Harm to Combat Social Harm in YA Fiction

Kristie McLaughlin: War, Women, and the Hunger Games Trilogy

Graduate Supervision

I regularly supervise or serve on the examining committees of graduate students at the University of Alberta and other institutions.

AUENG 271 - American Law, Literature and Justice

Representative works of American literature since the American Civil War (1861-1865). The course will focus on themes of law and justice in works by canonical and lesser known American writers. Prerequisites: AUENG 102. Note: Not to be taken by students with credit in AUENG 371 (2021).

AUENG 368 - Women and Environmental Literature

Study of women's writing about nature and environment focusing on various themes relevant to environmental literature, primarily the various ways that the natural world is represented in literature, and the relationship between cultural constructions of nature and cultural constructions of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Works include fiction, poetry, and/or nonfiction. An introduction to several ecofeminist theorists provides a critical framework for exploring images and themes in women's environmental literature. Prerequisites: Two of AUENG 102, 103, or 104, and *6 in English at the 200 level (excluding AUENG 215). Note: Credit may be obtained for only one of AUENG 268, 368, AUENV 268, 368.

AUENV 368 - Women and Environmental Literature

Study of women's writing about nature and environment focusing on various themes relevant to environmental literature, primarily the various ways that the natural world is represented in literature, and the relationship between cultural constructions of nature and cultural constructions of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Works include fiction, poetry, and/or nonfiction. An introduction to several ecofeminist theorists provides a critical framework for exploring images and themes in women's environmental literature. Prerequisites: Two of AUENG 102, 103 or 104, and *6 in English at the 200 level (excluding AUENG 215). Note: Credit may be obtained for only one of AUENV 268, 368, AUENG 268, 368.

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