ProfessorMary Gallagher

The subjects of my current research all relate to the systems of domination and oppression that turn life into death. It is striking how often these systems feed off the fact of human diversity which they are all too often diabolically programmed to destroy at every level, starting with the individual and unique human person, but also targeting anything else that might resist domination: for example, the languages, religions, cultures, political or legal representation systems, museums, schools, journalists, writers, artists and other witness of the life-worlds of the 'lesser' or 'less than' human 'other'....

• An Unheard Literary/Scholarly Voice last heard from Drancy, France's Ante-Chamber to Auschwitz: Paul Léon, friend and amanuensis of James Joyce in Paris (1928-41)
• Lafcadio Hearn's Creole Gravitation: the Caribbean, Cincinnati and New Orleans Writings
• Writing Life-and-Death Domination in the French (Post)Colony (especially the francophone Caribbean, Tunisia, Vietnam, Indian Ocean and Canada)
• Working in the Post-Critical University: New 'Reflections from Damaged Life'

I would also be happy to supervise/mentor undergraduate or postgraduate research in any of the following areas:

1. 20th/21st-century writing in French from outside France, principally the Caribbean and Canada, but also North Africa and the Indian Ocean. I am especially interested in the work of Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Saint-John Perse, g Maryse Condé, Dany Laferrière, Yanick Lahens, Edwidge Danticat, Patrick Chamoiseau, Gisèle Pineau, Emile Ollivier, Régine Robin, Anne Hébert, Colette Fellous, Marie Cardinal and Louis Hémon.

2. 20th/21st-century writing in French by women (in addition to the women writers enumerated above, the writing of Colette, Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux

3. Some publications focus on early twentieth-century introspective writing (principally Colette, Proust and Valéry (Monsieur Teste)

3. 20th/21st-century Migrant writing (in addition to the authors mentioned in (1) above, Lafcadio Hearn, Paul Morand and J.M.G. Le Clézio. 

4. The work of Edouard Glissant and Emmanuel Levinas on the Poetics and Ethics of Cultural Diversity.

5. The Poet(h)ics of (Post-)Colonial Dwelling in the work of any writers mentioned above.