My research explores how literary innovation is spurred by new scientific theories and discoveries, especially in modernist and contemporary fiction. Given my background in biology, I focus mainly on life sciences (evolution, genetics, embryology, ecology), but I'm also working on smaller projects on literary engagements with statistics and with quantum mechanics. My book project, Ontogeny, Phylogeny and Narrative Structure in the Modernist Bildungsroman, examines formal experiments with the coming-of-age plot by James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf. Drawing on turn-of-the-century work by biologists like Walter Garstang, William Bateson and Julian Huxley, I link the non-linear, anti-progressivist dynamics of their novels with the scientific rejection of recapitulation theory (the very influential notion that individual development literally replays species evolution). Some of my other research projects include work on the tradition of experimentation with narrative voice in Irish fiction from James Joyce to Nuala Ní Chonchúir; on narrative ethics; and on unnatural narratology.
I have published poems and short fiction in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Wascana Review and Contemporary Verse 2.
Education
PhD University of Toronto
MA & M.Sc. University of Toronto
BA Concordia University
BSc Trent University
Research and teaching interests
Modern and contemporary literature
Modernism
Science and Literature
Narratology
"Heredity, Kin Selection and the Fate of Characters in E.M. Forster's The Longest Journey." Fact and Fiction: Literature and Science in the German and European Context. Ed. Christine Lehleiter. Toronto: U of Toronto P (forthcoming 2015).
"Flaubertian Aesthetics, Modernist Ethics and Animal Representation in Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa." Style 47.4 (Winter 2013): 509-24.
Burkle, L.A., R.E. Irwin, & D.A. Newman. "Predicting the Effects of Nectar Robbing on Plant Reproduction: Implications of Pollen Limitation and Plant Mating System." American Journal of Botany 94 (2007): 1935–43.
Newman, D.A. & J.D. Thomson. "Interactions among Nectar Robbing, Floral Herbivory, and Ant Protection in Linaria vulgaris." Oikos 110 (2005): 497–506.
Newman, D.A. & J.D. Thomson. "Effects of Nectar Robbing on Nectar Dynamics and Bumblebee Foraging Strategies in Linaria vulgaris." Oikos 110 (2005): 309–20.
