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Στέλλα Μπολάκη

I joined the University of Kent in September 2011 as Lecturer in North American Literature, having previously taught at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. I have also held a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and served as Co-Director of the Scottish Universities' International Summer School (SUISS) that offers courses in Literature and Creative Writing.

Research Interests

My interests lie primarily in contemporary American literature and culture, with a particular focus on multi-ethnic and transnational writing. More recently, I have developed an interest in illness narratives and Medical Humanities. My first book Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Rodopi, 2011) offers a cross-ethnic approach to the tradition of the American coming-of-age narrative drawing on trauma theory, border studies, translation theory, postcolonial studies, and disability studies. I have also published on such topics as feminist transformations of fairy tales, Caribbean writing, queer diasporas, race and disability, textual and photographic breast cancer narratives, and artists’ books in the medical community. I am currently working on two projects: a new monograph provisionally entitled The Politics of Illness Narratives: Aesthetics, Identity, and Witnessing and a co-edited volume about Audre Lorde’s transatlantic relations with black diasporic communities in Europe.

Research Supervision

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research in any aspect of multi-ethnic American literature (especially with a focus on migration/diaspora and transnational approaches), the Bildungsroman, gender theory, life writing and illness/disability, and Medical Humanities.

Professional Activities

I am a member of The Collegium for African American Research (www.caar-web.org/), The Feminist and Women’s Studies Association (fwsa.org.uk/), and the Association for Medical Humanities (www.amh.ac.uk).

 

Selected Publications

In progress:

  • (Monograph)The Politics of Illness Narratives: Aesthetics, Identity, and Witnessing
  • (Edited volume, with Sabine Broeck) Audre Lorde’s Transatlantic Sisterhoods

Books and edited volumes:

  • Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (CAEAL). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011.
  • (Forthcoming, 2012, with Derek Ryan) Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-first Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference, Clemson University Digital Press.
  • (With Julia Boll) Northern Light: New Writing 2008-09. Edinburgh: Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, 2009.

Journal articles:

  • “‘New Living the Old in a New Way’: Home and Queer Migrations in Audre Lorde’s Zami.” Textual Practice 25.4 (2011): 779-798.
  • “Re-Covering the Scarred Body: Textual and Photographic Narratives of Breast Cancer.” MOSAIC 44.2 (June 2011): 1-17.
  • “‘It translated well’: The Promise and the Perils of Translation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” MELUS 34.4 (Winter 2009): 39-60.
  • “‘What the Book Told’: Illness, Witnessing, and Patient-Doctor Encounters in Martha Hall’s Artist’s Books.” Gender Forum 26 (2009) Special Issue on Literature and Medicine, http://www.genderforum.org/issues/literature-and-medicine-ii/
  • “More Room to Play in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” The Journal of American Studies of Turkey 23 (2006): 65-74.

Book Chapters:

  • (Forthcoming in 2012) “‘When the lights of health go down’: Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics and Contemporary Illness Narratives.” Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-first Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference. Ed. Derek Ryan and Stella Bolaki. Clemson University Digital Press.
  • “Challenging Invisibility, Making Connections: Illness, Survival, and Black Struggles in Audre Lorde’s Work.” Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions. Ed. Christopher M. Bell. Münster and East Lansing: Lit Verlag and Michigan State University Press, 2011. 47-74.
  • “‘This Bridge We Call Home’: Crossing and Bridging Spaces in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street. Ed. María  Herrera-Sobek. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2010. 205-217.
  • “Four Times Upon a Time: ‘Snow White’ Retold.” Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works. Ed. Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2010. 181-193.
  • “Weaving Stories of Self and Community through Vignettes in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” Narratives of Community: Women’s Short Story Sequences. Ed. Roxanne Harde. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 14-36.
  • “‘Mourning Remains’: The Poetics and the Politics of Loss in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River and Lucy.” Come Weep with Me: Loss and Mourning in the Writings of Caribbean Women Writers. Ed. Joyce C. Harte. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 164-180.

Review essays and reviews:

  • Review of Alan Radley’s Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing, and the Social Response to Serious Disease. Med Humanities 2011, doi:10.1136/jmh.2011.007658
  • Review of La Vinia Delois Jennings’ Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Special Toni Morrison issue, MELUS 36.2 (Summer 2011): 203-205.
  • Review of Dean Franco’s Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing. Callaloo 31.3 (Summer 2008): 966-969.
  • (With Alan Rice) “American Literature: The Twentieth Century. Section 3: African American Writing.” The Year’s Work in English Studies 87 (2008): 1049-1077. doi: 10.1093/ywes/mam017, Oxford University Press.
  • (With Alan Rice) “American Literature: The Twentieth Century. Section 3: African American Writing.” The Year’s Work in English Studies 86 (2007): 932-953. doi: 10.1093/ywes/mam016, Oxford University Press.
  • Review of Thomas L. Jeffers’s Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana. Genre XXXIX (Spring 2006): 165-171.

Other publications:

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