Speaker: Dr Shameem Black joined ANU from the United States, where she received her PhD from Stanford University in 2004 and served as an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Yale University from 2004 to 2009. Her research and teaching focus on questions of globalization and ethics in contemporary Anglophone fiction, giving particular attention to problems of sympathy in an increasingly mediated world.

Her first book, Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010), shows how novels from different parts of the world try to represent socially diverse people and places without stereotyping, idealizing, or exoticizing them.

Her current book project, tentatively titled Fiction in the Age of Transitional Justice, explores a global body of fiction concerned with reconciliation after mass conflict. Focusing on an era of international courts, truth commissions, political apologies, and humanitarian work, this book explores how fiction at the turn of the millennium contributes to the thorny process of transitional justice.

While Dr. Black's first love is the novel, her publications have examined cosmopolitanism, sympathy, and representational ethics not only in fiction but also in nontraditional literary spaces such as cookbooks and websites.

» Dr Black's full profile.

Enquiries: Ned Curthoys ned.curthoys@anu.edu.au