Ithaca College

Chris Holmes, Assistant Professor in the Ithaca College Department of English, has been invited to deliver a lecture and guest-direct a graduate seminar at Queen Mary College in the University of London.  The lecture and seminar will take place in the spring semester of 2015, and will focus on the work of the Nobel Prize-winning South African author J.M. Coetzee.

Holmes has received a short-term appointment as a Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary College, where he will present a lecture as part of the Postgraduate Research Seminar series in February of next year.  As part of his appointment, he will also co-direct a graduate class with Dr. Andrew van der Vlies, a senior lecturer in the Queen Mary English faculty.

In accepting the appointment, Holmes will be developing his already significant body of work on postcolonial literature and on Coetzee in particular.  His first article on the postcolonial novel, "What the World Leaves Behind:  Ready-Made Translations and the Closed Book in the Postcolonial Novel," appeared in 2011 in the essay collection Literature, Translation, and Geography:  The New Comparative Horizons, and he is currently preparing a new essay on Coetzee's writing, tentatively titled "Ugly Duckling:  Coetzee's Decoys."

Holmes joined the faculty of the IC English Department in the fall of 2011.  He teaches introductory courses on world literature and the history of the novel, and upper-level courses on postcolonial writing and the literature of post-Apartheid South Africa.  With Professor Jennifer Spitzer (English), Holmes co-organized the Global Modernisms Symposium at Ithaca College in the spring of 2014, and with Professor Eleanor Henderson (Writing) is the co-director and co-founder of IC's annual New Voices Literary Festival, now entering its third year.