JONATHAN HIGHFIELD

risd connection: Associate Professor, English; at RISD since 1995

courses:
Postcolonial Literature I: Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America
Postcolonial Literature II: Ireland, Oceania and the Indian Subcontinent
Irish Literature
Australian Poetry and Prose
Contemporary African Literature
Appalachian Literature and Culture
Colony and Ecology
Postcolonial Film

about his work: Though it’s tempting to label his field simply “postcolonial literature,” Highfield urges his students to question the term ‘postcolonial’ “because it obscures the fact that many of the regions still face colonial or neocolonial pressures from the US, Europe and Northern Asia.” In his research and writing he examines how colonialism affects people’s perceptions of their world, from an ecological perspective and, in his current investigations, through relationships between cultures and animals. Imagined Topographies (a manuscript currently under review for publication) looks at attempts by writers, architects and artists in former colonial countries to “repossess the land and transform it from commodity to homeland” following liberation; the project he’s working on now explores how colonialism, and the capitalism and tourism that succeed it, have “altered the role of animals in the local imagination.”

selected publications:
The State of the Art(s): African Studies and American Studies in Comparative Perspective, co-editor with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang. US Embassy/Ghana, Public Affairs Division, Spring 2004
Voicing the Mountains: The Poetry of Contemporary Appalachia in The State of the Art(s) (above)
Archaeology of Reconciliation: Ciaran Carson’s Belfast Confetti and John Kindness’s Belfast Frescoes in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Fall 2003
“Relief Data Unreliable”: Mapping Amazonia in Passages: Interdisciplinary Journal of Global Studies 2:2, 2000
Faerielands and Peonies: Imaginative Reconnections and Resistances in Working Title: Intercultural Studies 1:1, Fall 1994

published poetry:
Radio Amazon and The Good Cup of Tea in The New Review, Spring 1999 Hitchhiking near Cassano, Learning to Smoke and Carwash Werewolf in The Transylvanian, 1987-88

education:
University of Iowa, PhD, MA in English, 1995
Transylvania University, BA in English, 1988

selected honors + awards
Fulbright Scholar to Ghana, 2001­02
RISD Faculty Development Grant, 2001, 1998 + 1996
Thomas Jefferson Scholar, Transylvania University, 1984­88