Research Description

My primary research focuses on women of color's experiences with trauma and violence in the context of North American multi-ethnic literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Currently among my publications are critical interventions into African American, Asian American, Indigenous, and Latino/a literatures.

In my dissertation, I explored interracialism as described in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narrative collection, with particular emphasis on the sections featuring ex-slaves who served Native American masters. I also examined black-Native connections in life writing by Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. In his cumulative assessment of this thesis project, supervised by renowned literary critic, theorist, and professor Linda Hutcheon, external reader Houston A. Baker observed, “[B]y invoking a very expansive field of interdisciplinary intellectual work—history, folklore, literary theory and criticism, ethnography, anthropology, implicitly moral philosophy, [the study has] provided an engaging basis for us to read both the genre of ‘native’ autobiography and the American literature project as a whole anew.”

Much of my research is informed by postcolonial, feminist, and queer theory. In addition to nearly 50 reference articles and chapters in such publications as The Oxford Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, African American National Biography, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Politics, Law, and Social Movements, I have published or have forthcoming peer-reviewed journal articles in the following venues: Twentieth-Century Literature, African American Review, Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Journal of Lesbian Studies, MELUS Journal (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), Women’s Studies, Essays on Canadian Writing (ECW), LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, and Canadian Literature. Smaller articles have appeared in Latino Studies and Ploughshares, as well as the UN Chronicle. I have concurrently published in creative writing journals as well as scholarly venues because I understand creativity to be inextricable from the study of literature. My co-authored monograph on Dominican American poet THE ONCE AND FUTURE MUSE: THE POETRY AND POETICS OF RHINA P. ESPAILLAT (U of Pittsburgh Press) with Syracuse University professor Silvio Torres-Saillant was published in May 2018.

I am well aware of how the intersection of differences affects everyday life in the university milieu and beyond. I am committed to working toward the expansion of diversity and inclusion from my location in the academy as a scholar, mentor, and guide to students, especially women of color. At the University of Manitoba, where I am Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence, I am a humanities-focused researcher who regularly addresses issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and my coverage encompasses the comparative study of ethnically differentiated populations dealing with the violence of racist exclusion and wholesale acts of alienation, hatred, and social injustice. During my academic career thus far, I have oriented most of my instruction and writing toward questions that seek to understand, excavate, rectify, and interrogate the social and historical predicaments that fuel the literary imagination of women from historically under-served communities of color.

Teaching Description

My methodologies as an instructor and scholar are rooted in postcolonial and feminist theory, and my approach to teaching women's studies, writing, literature, and cultural studies seeks to define and evaluate a wide range of specifically minority responses within and beyond their respective historical and cultural contexts. With my complementary interests in Afro-Diaspora, Asian American, indigenous, Latino/a, feminist and queer literatures (often in combination), I hope to illuminate the layered complexities of these arenas and texts without forgetting the foundational works from the European and Euro-North American tradition that have informed the dominant ideological affinities and cultural assumptions we have today.

The onus is on scholars of all ideological stripes to question the borders and boundaries erected around knowledge and access. We need to ask questions like the following: who determines what can and should be known; what parameters of inclusion and exclusion exist when it comes to students, staff, faculty, and community members joining in on conversations that matter; who gains legitimacy and who remains excluded in our campus; what theories and practices in the classroom (and out of it) engender greater initiative in our students to question the status quo, enhance their cultural competencies, and aim for something beyond their conventional wisdom and expectations? I strive to help my students come out of my classes with a better ability to think critically, appreciate their limitations as well as their potential, and think in an informed, compassionate, and mindful way.