Columbia University

Post-Doc, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

INTERACT Fellow

Columbia University

Thesis Title: Unsettling Artifacts: Biopolitics, Cultural Memory, and the Public Sphere in a (Post)settler Colony

About

My fields of research interest include: postcolonial studies, critical theory, animality studies, and film studies. I have published in a number of these areas. 

Current Research Projects:

Settler Colonialism

Sacral Traditions and "Magical Realism" in Indigenous Literatures.

Foucault and poetics project, tentative title: "Foucault Against the Grain."


My dissertation employed intellectual historian Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—which can be most broadly parsed as the political organization of life—to examine the way the lives of Aboriginal people were regulated and surveilled in relation to settler European norms. The study is a focused investigation into a topic with global ramifications: the governance of race and sexuality and the effect of such governance on the production of apparently inclusive cultural productions within the public spheres. I argue that the way in which subaltern peoples have been governed in the past and the way their cultures have been appropriated continue to be in the present is not extraneous to but rather formative of what is often misleadingly called “the” public sphere of dominant societies.

In the second part, I analyze the legacies of this biopolitical moment and emphasize, particularly, the cultural politics of affect and trauma in relation to this (not quite) past.
Authors addressed include: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen, Rex Ingamells, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and others. I also examine Australian Aboriginal policy texts througout the twentieth century up to the "Bringing Them Home" Report (1997).

Pertinently, my dissertation project is oriented toward expansion into a broader book project. This project extends the study of settler colonial biopolitics to analysis of indigenous trauma and cultural memory in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Some work oriented in this latter direction is already published. I have also been writing about indigenous deconstructions of reconciliation discourse as a part of this cluster of research concerns.

I have published articles or have articles forthcoming on the topic of postcolonial literature in Australian Literary Studies, Antipodes, and several edited collections.

I have published articles or have articles forthcoming on other areas of interest in, for instance, Postmodern Culture, and Humanimalia.

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