Heather Snell

Title: Associate Professor; Coordinator, MA in Cultural Studies
Phone: 204.786.9354
Office: 2A41
Building: Ashdown
Email: h.snell@uwinnipeg.ca

Biography:

My research straddles two fields of critical inquiry, postcolonial cultural studies and young people’s texts and cultures. Accordingly, I am interested in postcolonial children’s literature and representations of young people in literary, performance, filmic, and other visual texts that engage histories and legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, ongoing colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalization. The two monographs I am currently in the process of researching and writing include Reading Urban Poverty: Children and Youth, Global Visual Culture, and Postcolonial Counter-Imaginaries, a book that explores primarily texts about children and youth, and Outward Bound: Seeing, Reading, and Acting across Borders in Youth Texts, which takes as its primary objects of analysis texts produced for and marketed to young adult readers.

Teaching Areas:

Postcolonial cultural studies; young people’s texts and cultures; research methods.

Courses:

(W) ENGL-2185-001 Literary Communities

(W) ENGL-2710-001 Literature in Translation

(F) ENGL-3725-001 Topics in Cultural Studies

(W) ENGL-4730-001 Postcolonial Literature & Culture

(F) GENG-7103-050 Research Methods & Practice

Publications:

BOOKS

Co-edited (with Lorna Hutchison), Cultural Memory in Texts for and about Children. New York: Routledge, 2014.

SELECTED ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

*”Ready Made for the Market: Producing Charitable Subjects in Dystopian and Voluntourist Young Adult Novels.” Spec. issue of Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature on Charity and Children’s Literature 24.2 (2016): 96-126.

*”Uses and Abuses of the Child Figure in Slumdog Millionaire and Vikus Swarup’s Q&A.” Adaptation 9.2 (2016): 234-48.

(with Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer). “Juvenile Fiction.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The World Novel to 1950. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016.

*“Outward Bound: Adventures in Cross-Cultural Reading and Global Citizenship in North American Young Adult Literatures.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39.2 (2014): 252-74.

*“’Toward a Giving and a Receiving’: Teaching Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki.” Journal of African Cultural Studies. 26.2 (2014): 127-39.

“The Postcolonial Fantastic as New Ground of Invention: Reading Carole McDonnell’s ‘Lingua Franca.’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 20.3 (2009): 350-362.

“’White, Foreign, But So Within Reach on the Page’: Exoticist Modes of Fantasy in Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy.” South Asia and Its Others: Reading the “Exotic.” Ed. V.G. Julie Rajan and Atreyee Phukan. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars P, 2009. 149-171. Print.

“Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.” Postcolonial Text 4.4 (2008): 1-15.