Paul Barrett
Terminated
Department: English
Faculty: Arts and Science
Expertise:
Canadian literature, race in Canada, digital humanities, black writing
Languages spoken:
English
My research is situated at the intersection of Canadian literature, critical race studies, and digital humanities. I am the author of Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015). This work studies the work of Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Tessa McWatt, and George Elliott Clarke as they simultaneously engage the politics and poetics of diaspora, race, and multiculturalism.
I am currently a co-investigator on a project that studies the online, public reception of "Canada Reads" and thinks about the transformation of concepts of public discourse and the public sphere as they occur online. As part of this project, I am co-editing a collection of essays that imagine the future of digital humanities work in Canada. I am also editing a forthcoming collection of essays on the life and writing of Austin Clarke as well as a critical edition of Clarke's first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing.
My next book will be a study of the discourses of humanism, and the relationship between notions of human and the humanities, in Canadian Literature. This work attempts to bring the insights of Sylvia Wynter's work on the human to bear on Canadian literary and public culture.