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MA, PhD (Cant)

Emailchris.prentice@otago.ac.nzPrentice

Mail English and Linguistics
University of Otago
PO Box 56
Dunedin 9054
New Zealand


Expertise

New Zealand literature, postcolonial literatures and theory, cultural studies and cultural theory, indigenous literatures in English.

Current research

Honorary Associate Professor Chris Printice is the current Chair of the Commonwealth Association of Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS).

Her research has focused on the politics of culture and cultural difference in settler postcolonial societies such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and specifically on the implications of mobilising culture as a basis for political intervention. She also researches in areas of postcolonial ecocriticism, postcolonial disaster studies, and memory.

As well as chapters on authors Janet Frame and J.M. Coetzee, Chris has published on biculturalism, culture and decolonisation, culture and Māori television, as well as on postcolonial perspectives on disaster.

She co-edited a special issue of Sites (12:1, 2015) on "Neoliberal Culture" with Associate Professor Jenny Lawn (Massey University), and a special “Oceanic Memory” issue of Pacific Dynamics: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, with Dr Alan Wright (Canterbury), Dr Allen Meek (Massey), and Professor Paul Millar (Canterbury).

She has a chapter on the Māori Novel in English for the Oxford History of the Novel in English (2017), and a forthcoming chapter on Gender in Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Australian writing co-authored with Associate Professor Anne Brewster (UNSW) for the Routlege Key Concepts in Indigenous Studies series volume on gender.

Recent journal articles include an essay on postcolonial cultural politics published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2017) and on gendered violence in Māori and Pacific women's literature, published in Australian Humanities Review (2019). A chapter on Indigenous ecopoetics is forthcoming in The Two Canaries of Climate Change, to be published by Brill in its Cross/Cultures series.

Postgraduate supervisions

  • Sevket Sarper Dorter, 'Reading Ruinscapes of Africa: Imperial Sedimentations and Competing Temporalities.' (2018-)
  • Elizabeth Wilson, “Regendering Settler Colonialism” (PhD in progress).
  • Loveday Why, “Meltwater: The Poetics of Water in an Age of Climate Change” (PhD awarded in 2018).
  • Rajdeep Guha, “Family in Diaspora in the novels of Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai” (MA awarded 2014).
  • Abid Vali, “Transcultural Collaborations in Modernism: Swami and Yeats, Fellenosa and Pound” (PhD awarded 2014).
  • Anne Begg, “Nationhood and Affect” (PhD awarded 2013).
  • Hugh Carthew, “Fantasy and Sociality in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield” (MA awarded 2012).
  • Christina Matteotti, “The Politics of Indigenous Cultural Property in Canadian Native and Māori Writing” (Commonwealth Scholar) (MA, Indigenous Studies, awarded 2008).
  • Ulrika Andersson, “The Child in Postcolonial Literature,” Göteborg University, Sweden (PhD awarded 2008; External consultant supervisor; Primary supervisor Prof. Gunilla Florby, Göteborg University).

Recent publications

“'Who Speaks for Culture?' Challenging Gender and Sexual Violence in Māori and Pacific Island Literature in English.'” Australian Humanities Review 64 (May 2019), 139–157.

"'Fractured Light': From Globalization's Hyper-illumination to Culture as Symbolic Exchange." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 19:7 (2017), 996-1010.

'Māori Novels in English' in Oxford History of the Novel in English. Vol XII: The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the South Pacific Since 1950. 436–451. Ed. Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, Gerry Turcotte. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2017.

'Neoliberal Culture/The Cultures of Neoliberalism': special issue of Sites: Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Vol 12 No. 1 (2015) co-edited and Introduction with Jenny Lawn, Massey University.

Publications

Prentice, C. (2013). The shaking of New Zealanders. Journal of New Zealand Literature, 31(2), 53-73.

Prentice, C. (2013). The Māori Television Service and questions of culture. In B. Hokowhitu & V. Devadas (Eds.), The fourth eye: Māori media in Aotearoa New Zealand. (pp. 181-200). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Prentice, C. (2013). Reorienting culture for decolonization. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 27(1), 4-17. doi: 10.1080/10304312.2013.737196

Prentice, C. (2010). Terms of ambivalence: Cultural politics and symbolic exchange. Australian Literary Studies, 25(4), 33-54.

Prentice, C., Devadas, V., & Johnson, H. (Eds.). (2010). Cultural transformations: Perspectives on translocation in a global age. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 347p.

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