Ph.D. Brown University (2011)

M.A. Middlebury College/Bread Loaf School of English

M.A.T. Brown University

B.A. Bates College

Chris received his PhD from Brown University in 2011 where he was awarded the Presidential Excellence in Teaching Award, a distinction given to one graduate student at the university each academic year. He joined the English Department at Ithaca College in 2011, and teaches introductions to postcolonial and contemporary literatures, as well as upper division courses on the South African novel, and on the emergent genre of the global novel and its relationship to the terrorist imaginary. 

Chris's primary research field is contemporary postcolonial literature, especially those texts and authors that cross borders, geographic and otherwise. Chris is particularly interested in the recent re-exploration of theories of world literature as applied to novels concerned with postcolonial politics. His research investigates translation as a conceptual model that explains how novels consider the world, and as well, how those same novels unwind the limitations that the world sets upon them.  Chris is currently writing articles on the theoretical and philosophical concept of the limit in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and on the impossibility of translating the contemporary in Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket. Chris is also revising his dissertation, “Translation, the Hoax, and the Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age” into a book manuscript.

Recent Publications:

"Ready-Made Translations: The Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age," Literature, Geography, Translation: Studies in World Writing. edit. Cecilia Alvstad, Stefan Helgesson and David Watson. 2011.

"The Leftovers," (Review) NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. (Forthcoming).

"The Novel's Third Way: Zadie Smith's 'Hysterical Realism'," Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade & Beyond. Edit. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury (Forthcoming 2013).

Courses:

Spring 2013: Approaches to Literary Studies (The Agony and Ecstasy of Theory)*; Honors Program Seminar: The Novel and the Terrorist Aesthetic*

Fall 2012:  Approaches to Literary Studies (The Agony and Ecstasy of Theory)*; In the Age of the Global Novel*

Spring 2011:  Faking It: The Hoax and the Novel; Studies in World Literature:  The Post-Apartheid South African Novel*

* selected courses have class blogs. Click on the class title to go to the website.