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Professor Justin Edwards, MA, Ph.D

Enjoys Teaching

All periods of American and Canadian literature, Postcolonial writing, nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and the Gothic. I would be delighted to direct postgraduates in these areas, postcolonialism, North American writing, and literary theory or the gothic.

Research Profile

Originally from Toronto, I have taught at the Universities of Montreal, Quebec and Copenhagen.  I came to Bangor in 2006 via Cambridge, where I held a research fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge University from 2005 to 2006.

My most recent research projects have focussed on the gothic. My first published work in this area was Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, which examined how writers of the period gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a demonization of difference. In Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature , I continued to delve into the frigid, dark waters of gothicism by looking at how collective stories about national identity and belonging tend to be haunted by a fear that a shared narrative might be nothing more than an elaborate artifice. Currently, I am working on a book that examines the relationship between the gothic and the law in the early U.S. republic.

My interest in postcolonial studies has grown out of my work on travel writing. My monograph Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature  examined the place of travel writing in the rhetoric of imperial expansion and colonial ideology. This book led to a collaborative work in which I helped to compile an anthology of Asian and African travel literature, Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, which introduces contemporary readers to travel literature from the world beyond Europe.  I am further exploring some of these ideas in a book that I have recently completed Postcolonial Literature.

Major Publications:

Postcolonial Literature (Basingstoke:  Palgrave MacMillian, 2008)

editor of the ‘Canadian Section’, Historical Companion for Postcolonial Literatures (Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2008)

Understanding Jamaica Kincaid (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 2007)

co-ed., Other Routes: 1500 Years of Travel Writing by Asians and Africans (Oxford:  Signal Books, 2006)

Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (Edmontan:  University of Alberta Press, 2005)

co-ed., Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2005)

Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City:  Iowa University Press, 2003)

“‘It is the race instinct!’: Eugenics and Racial Ambiguity in William Dean Howells’s Fiction”, Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature, 1880-1940, ed. Lois Cuddy (Lewisburg:  Bucknell University Press, 2003)

“Djuna Barnes and the Urban Travel Narrative”  Journal of Urban History 29.1 (2002), pp. 6-24.

Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930 (Lebanon:  University Press of New England, 2001)

“Going Native in Robert Kroetsch’s Gone Indian”, Studies in Canadian Literature 26.1 (2001), pp. 84-97.

co-ed., American Modernism Across the Arts. (New York:  Peter Lang, 1999)

“Melville’s Peepshow: Sexual and Textual Cruises in Typee” Ariel: A Journal of International English Literature  (April 1999), pp. 234-50.

Current Support for Others' Research

2006- Advisory Board, Studies in Canadian Literature

Peer recognition 2001-2007

2005-6 Research by-fellowship, Churchill College, Cambridge