Cynthia Wallace
Associate Professor; Department Head, English
- Address
- STM 213
Research Area(s)
- Catholic writers
- Postcolonial literature
- Women writers and feminist theory
- Religion and literature
- Ethical theory
Education
- Ph.D., Loyola University Chicago, May 2012
- M.A., Loyola University Chicago, August 2007
Research Projects
Professor Wallace is currently at work on a creative manuscript on embodied suffering and attention as well as a scholarly book manuscript on the surprising influence of philosopher-mystic Simone Weil on twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist writers' ethical and political ideals.
Selected Publications
Book
- Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering. Columbia University Press, 2016. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/of-women-borne/9780231173681
Book Chapters and Journal Articles
- “Reading in the Wake: Empathy Debates, “The Reader,” and Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.” University of Toronto Quarterly 90:4 (Fall 2021): 713-735. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.90.4.03.
- "Attention, Representation, and Unsettlement in Katherena Vermette’s The Break, or, Teaching and (Re)Learning the Ethics of Reading." Humanities vol. 8, no. 4, 2019.
- ""passionate reverence / active love": Levertov and Weil in the Communion of Struggle." In this need to dance/this need to kneel: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith, edited by Michael P. Murphy and Melissa Bradshaw. Wipf and Stock, 2019.
- "A Cloud of Unknowing: Anticolonial Ethics in Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse." Contemporary Literature, vol. 59, no. 4, 2018.
- "To the World: Ana Castillo's The Guardians and Literature after Vatican II." In Turning to the World: Social Justice and the Common Good Since Vatican II, edited by Carl N. Still and Gertrude Rompré, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018, pp. 125-139.
- "’Whatever Else We Call It’: The Great Price of Secular Sainthood in Mary Gordon's Pearl." Religion and Literature, vol. 48, no. 3, 2016, pp. 1-25.
- "L as Language: Love and Ethics." African American Review, vol. 47, no. 2-3, 2014, pp. 375-390.
- "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Redemption." Christianity and Literature, vol. 61,no. 3, 2012, pp. 465-483.
- "In the Beginning: Beloved and the Religious Word of Psychoanalysis," Literature and Theology, vol. 25, no. 3, 2011, pp. 268-282.
Teaching Responsibilities
- ENG 215: Life Writing
- ENG 282: Introduction to Feminist Theory and Literature by Women
- INTS 203: Cultivating Humanity
- CTST 200: Introduction to Catholic Studies
- ENG 209: Transnational Literatures
- ENG 383: Decolonizing Theories and Literatures
As well as Honours seminars and graduate courses in postcolonial literature and theory, women writers and feminism, and literary ethics