HALLEMEIER Katherine
Dr Katherine HALLEMEIER
Maître d'enseignement et de recherche
CO 208
E-mail
Additional Information / Informations supplémentaires
Office and Office Hour / Bureau et Heure de réception
Research Interests / Recherches
I hold degrees from the University of Toronto (BA, Hons), the University of British Columbia (MA), and Queen’s University (PhD). Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Geneva in 2025, I was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and then Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.
My research and teaching focus on anglophone postcolonial literatures. Recent projects examine the intersections of postcolonial studies and affect theory and center contemporary anglophone African fiction. I co-edited, with Jeremy De Chavez, a special double-issue of ARIEL on “Postcolonial Affect,” which maps out current scholarship on feeling in anglophone postcolonial literary studies. My most recent book, African Literature and U.S. Empire: Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing (Edinburgh UP, 2024), shows how Nigerian and South African anglophone literature illuminates an ambivalent affective relation to the postcolonial nation and U.S. empire. I also maintain an active research profile in the work of J.M. Coetzee and cosmopolitan studies and have longstanding interests in human rights and the ethical and political limitations of the category of the human. My first book, J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave, 2013), draws on affect theory to show how Coetzee’s later fiction interrogates discourses of cosmopolitanism that center normative, gendered conceptions of humanity.
Supervision
I welcome proposals from prospective PhD students working on topics related to postcolonial literary studies, especially those that engage affect theory, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, or contemporary anglophone African fiction.
Publications
Books and Monographs / Livres et monographies
African Literature and U.S. Empire: Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
(co-editor with Jeremy De Chavez) “Postcolonial Affect,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 54.3-4 (2023).
J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Articles and Chapters / articles et chapitres
“Age of Iron.” The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, eds. Lucy Graham and Andrew van der Vlies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 127-36.
“The Empires Write Back: The Language of Postcolonial Nigerian Literature and the United States of America.” Comparative Literature 71.2 (2019): 123-38.
“Still Waiting? Writing Futurity after Apartheid.” South African Writing in Transition. Eds. Rita Barnard and Andrew van der Vlies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 77-98.
“Cosmopolitanism and Orality in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc.” The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature. Eds. Aleksander Stević and Philip Tai-Hang Tsang. New York: Routledge, 2019. 143-58.
“An Art of Hunger: Gender and the Politics of Food Distribution in Zakes Mda’s South Africa.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 53.3 (2018): 379-93.
“J.M. Coetzee’s Literature of Hospice.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 62.3 (2016): 481-98.
“‘To Be from the Country of People Who Gave’: National Allegory and the United States of Adichie’s Americanah.” Studies in the Novel 27.2 (2015): 231-45.
“Humanitarianism and the Humanity of Readers in FEMRITE’s True Life Stories.” English Studies in Africa 57.2 (2014): 57-68.
“Literary Cosmopolitanisms in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Open City.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 44.2-3 (2013): 239-50. (Appeared 2014).
“Sympathy and Cosmopolitanism: Affective Limits in Cosmopolitan Theory.” Culture, Theory and Critique 54.1 (2013): 88-101.
“Anne Brontë’s Shameful Agnes Grey.” Victorian Literature and Culture 41.2 (2013): 251-60.
“Sympathetic Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year.” Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception. Eds. Bethan Benwell, James Proctor, and Gemma Robinson. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 222-33.
“Writing Hybridity: The Theory and Practice of Autobiography in Rey Chow’s ‘The Secrets of Ethnic Abjection’ and Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing.” Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature 25.2 (2011): 123-28.
“Secular Study and Suffering: J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Humanities in Africa.’” scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 16.1 (2011): 42-52.
“Ethics and the Nonhuman: J.M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals and Disgrace.” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 24.1 (2007): 31-36.
Reviews / comptes rendus
Review of Maps of Empire: A Topography of World Literature. By Kyle Wanberg. Invited review for Comparative Literature Studies 60.4 (2023): 795-97.
Review of Approaches to Teaching Coetzee’s Disgrace and Other Works. Eds. Laura Wright, Jane Poyner, and Elleke Boehmer. Invited review for Canadian Journal of African Studies/ Revue canadienne des études africaines. 51.2 (2017): 322-24.