Sarah Phillips Casteel

Biography

My research interests are in diaspora and postcolonial literatures with a particular emphasis on Caribbean and Jewish writing. My most recent book, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia UP, 2016), broadens our understanding of Black-Jewish literary relations beyond the U.S. national frame and enriches the cross-cultural project of Caribbean literary criticism. In order to further advance the emerging conversation between postcolonial and Jewish studies, I am currently co-editing with Heidi Kaufman an essay collection entitled Caribbean-Jewish Crossings: Atlantic Literature and Culture and developing a project on cultural representations of Black victims of the Holocaust. My earlier research engaged the field of hemispheric American studies, in particular the problematic absence of Canadian writing from such discussions. To this end, I co-edited with Winfried Siemerling an essay collection entitled Canada and its Americas: Transnational Navigations (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010). My first book, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (U of Virginia P, 2007), examined interconnections between nature writing and the construction of postcolonial and diasporic identities. In Second Arrivals, I showed how rural and wilderness spaces function as sites of diasporic emplacement in contemporary writing and visual art of the Americas. I am a co-founder and co-director of CTCA: the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (www.carleton.ca/ctca), a Carleton University Research Centre whose purpose is to foster the development of transnational approaches to the study of culture. I am cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture and I serve on the Steering Committee of Carleton’s Migration and Diaspora Studies initiative.

Research Interest

diaspora and postcolonial literatures