6135 UNIVERSITY AVE. HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, B3H 4R2 | +1 (902) 494-3384
Alice Brittan
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Assistant Professor of English, Graduate Coordinator abrittan@dal.ca |
Current Research
Alice Brittan received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in postcolonial studies. She is currently finishing a book called Empty-Handed: On Secular Grace, which presents grace as a secular, crossroads concept where contemporary theories of materiality, creativity, and ethics intersect and reveal their kinship with one another. The central argument of Empty-Handed is that grace describes the coming of a gift—an object, an act, an idea—that arrives unexpectedly, as though from another world or from some hidden pocket within this one, and then changes the existing rules of perception and social behavior. Empty-Handed is a wide-ranging project that reflects Brittan’s ongoing research interests in aesthetics, materiality, ethics, the postcolonial novel, and gifts of all varieties.
Brittan has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, David Malouf, André Brink, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, and the history of looted art from ancient Rome to contemporary Iraq. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Australian Literary Studies, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde/ Journal of Literary Studies, and the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Ed. John McLeod), as well as in several book collections. Her essays on Ondaatje and Malouf were both published by PMLA.
She was a collaborator on an interdisciplinary SSHRC research/creation grant in Fine Arts (2007-2010) called The Art of Obsolescence and the Culture of Human Invention, awarded to visual artists Robert Bean (NSCAD University) and Ilan Sandler. The project brought together artists and scholars whose work considers the relationship between obsolescence and creativity, and it helped to shape the final chapter of her book Empty-Handed, which argues that all forms of grace come from death.
In her off hours, Brittan reviews contemporary fiction and scholarship for Open Letters Monthly, an online journal of arts and literature: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/
For a complete list of publications and professional activities, see Brittan’s CV.
Teaching
Alice Brittan teaches a range of undergraduate courses in world literature and postcolonial studies. Her most recent graduate seminars have focused on theories of literary representation in the 20th century, from Martin Heidegger to Edward Said and Derek Attridge. She has supervised graduate projects on the idea of cosmopolitanism; literary and philosophical depictions of the library; the meaning of the term “post-racial” in Canada and the United States; and the international reception of Nadine Gordimer’s novels.
She welcomes graduate proposals from all corners of postcolonial and contemporary studies, from the familiar to the far-flung.
Awards
Research and Development Grant, Dalhousie University
Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania
University Dissertation Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania
Jolliffe Gold Medal in English, Victoria College, University of Toronto Lucy Ingram Morgan Gold Medal, Victoria College, University of Toronto