Terri Tomsky, PhD

Email

tomsky@ualberta.ca

Address

4-87 Humanities Centre

11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW

Edmonton AB

T6G 2H5

Terri Tomsky works in the field of postcolonial, de-colonial studies, trauma studies, cultural memory, surveillance studies, human rights, and contemporary literatures. She is currently completing a book manuscript about human rights advocacy and the cultural narratives about the Guantánamo prison. And she has a blogged a bit about it here: 

https://medium.com/centre-for-international-and-defence-policy/reflections-on-guant%C3%A1namo-how-do-we-deal-with-willed-amnesia-4acf89e588eb

She is also working on another project, "Imagining Justice After Globalization" about the cultural mediations of the International Criminal Tribunals at The Hague, funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2017-2020). 

My research looks at lots of different fields. Key among them: 

Postcolonial literary studies; anti-colonial theory & theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism

Cultural Memory studies and trauma theory

The Global War on Terror, especially the Guantanamo Military Complex 

Human Rights literary culture, life narratives and testimonies

Genocide studies

Surveillance studies

Migration Studies 

Contemporary British literature

20th century critical social theory 

Post-socialist Europe

Feminist thought--all the waves

Select Publications 

Books

With Eddy Kent, ed. Negative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship After Globalization. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017. 388 pages. 

Overview: From climate change, debt, and refugee crises to energy security, environmental disasters, and terrorism, the events that lead nightly newscasts and drive public policy demand a global perspective. In the twentieth century the world sought solutions through formal institutions of international governance such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the World Bank, but present-day responses to global realities are often more provisional, improvisational, and contingent. Tracing this uneven history in order to identify principal actors, contesting ideologies, and competing rhetoric, Negative Cosmopolitanism challenges the Kantian ideal of cosmopolitanism as the precondition for a perpetual global peace. Uniting literary scholars with researchers working on contemporary problems and those studying related issues of the past – including slavery, industrial capitalism, and corporate imperialism – essays in this volume scrutinize the entanglement of cosmopolitanism within expanding networks of trade and global capital from the eighteenth century to the present. By doing so, the contributors pinpoint the ways in which whole populations have been unwillingly caught up in a capitalist reality that has little in common with the earlier ideals of cosmopolitanism.

https://www.mqup.ca/negative-cosmopolitanism-products-9780773550971.php

Journal Articles

“Citizens of Nowhere: Cosmopolitanisation and Cultures of Securitization in Dionne Brand’s Inventory” Journal of Intercultural Studies 40.5 (October 2019). 564-79. 

“Toward A Realistic Utopia: Literary Representations of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.” Australian Journal of Human Rights 22.2 (2016): 123-42. 

“The Guantánamo Lawyers: Life Writing for the ‘Courts of Public Opinion.’” Biography 38.1 (Winter 2015): 23-40.

“From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy.” parallax 17.4 (October-December 2011): 49-60.

“Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The Hungry Tide.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.1 (March 2009): 53-65.

“Theorising the Disparities of Diaspora.” Canadian Literature 196 (Spring 2008): 194-198.

“Fifty Years On: Melancholic (Re)collections and Women’s Voices from the Partition of India.” Life Writing 5.1 (April 2008): 61-78. 

Book Chapters  

“Seeking Asylum: Mapping the Hidden Worlds of Migrant Detention Centers in Recent Literary Representations.” Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights and Literature. Ed. Alexandra S. Moore and Samantha Pinto. Palgrave, 2020. 

“Legal Appeal: Habeas Lawyers Narrate Guantánamo Life.” Doubling the Voice: Survivors and Human Rights Workers Address Torture in a Globalized World. Eds. Alexander S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson. Amsterdam: Republic of Letters, 2018. 211-29.

With Eddy Kent. “Introduction: Negative Cosmopolitanism.” Negative Cosmopolitanism: Culture and Politics of World Citizenship After Globalization. Ed. Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017. 3-26. 

“Cosmopolitan Testimony: Engaging Radical Alterity on The Road to Guantánamo.” Security and Hospitality: New Literary Perspectives, eds. Jeffrey Clapp, and Emily Ridge. London: Routledge, 2016. 258-74.

“Iguanas and Enemy Combatants: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism Through Guantánamo’s Creaturely Lives.” Cosmopolitan Animals. Eds. Kaori Nagai, and Karen Jones. London: Routledge, 2015. 201-215. 

“Collective Loss and Commemoration after the Yugoslav Wars: Dubravka Ugresić’s Museumizing Gaze.” The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Eds. Lucy Bond, and Jessica Rapson. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 191-208.