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Winkiel, Laura

Associate Professor

Positions

Research Areas research areas

Research

research overview

  • My scholarly work and teaching reflect an interest in modernist literature and its circulation within African diasporic cultures, including its impact within Africa itself. I am interested in questions of the performativity of literature, cultural exchange, cultural economies and ethics. I conceptualize twentieth century anglophone literature less in terms of finished works and ideas than in terms of their movement, exchange, and translation within transnational circuits.

keywords

  • modernism, global anglophone literature, British literature, African and Caribbean literature, cultural studies

Publications

selected publications

Teaching

courses taught

  • ENGL 1230 - Environmental Literature
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2023
    This course explores the conjunctions of literature and environments: natural, built, and/or virtual. Students consider literary confrontations with issues such as ecological crises, climate change, human impact on the planet, technics and indigeneity, non-human animals and inhuman agencies, future natures, and environmental justice. Readings may include novels, non-fiction, short fiction, poems, graphic novels, and more.
  • ENGL 2058 - Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Literature
    Primary Instructor - Spring 2020
    This course explores how literature, art, and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries responded to the social, political, and economic upheavals that have occurred since 1900. Students will read a selection of modern and contemporary writers from Anglo-American and/or global traditions to help us understand our present moment and to see what made us who we are.
  • ENGL 2767 - Race, Empire, and the Postcolonial
    Primary Instructor - Summer 2023
    When did the sun set on the British Empire? In the twentieth century, countries across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean fought for their independence and built their own literary and cultural traditions while grappling with the legacies of empire. This course explores how authors from these new nation-states wrote about racial oppression; global economic inequalities; the promise of new national identities; the lingering effects of colonialism; and the use of English as a literary language. Same as ETHN 2761.
  • ENGL 3060 - Modern and Contemporary Literature for Nonmajors
    Primary Instructor - Summer 2018 / Summer 2019 / Summer 2020 / Summer 2021 / Summer 2022
    Close study of significant 20th-century poetry, drama, and prose works. Readings range from 1920s to the present.
  • ENGL 3068 - Modernisms and Modernity, 1900-1945
    Primary Instructor - Fall 2019 / Fall 2021 / Spring 2023
    What does it mean to be modern? This course explores the aesthetic and literary experiments that flourished in the early twentieth century, as authors confronted the experience of modernity�urbanization, warfare, changing gender and sexual roles, revolutionary political ideologies, new media, anti-colonial struggles�and sought to rethink the relationship of the present to the past. Students will learn what modernisms are and how writers transformed literary conventions to capture ways of being modern.
    • ... more

Background

International Activities