Assistant Professor Sarah L. Townsend has published two new articles. The first article examines how contemporary British fiction conceals evidence of migration and racial anxiety in the postwar period. Focusing on Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, the article follows two nonwhite immigrant characters who appear briefly and then vanish into the texts, never to resurface. Townsend argues that the novels practice in narrative form the same racial policing developed during breakup of the British Empire and redeployed in the war on terror. Linking the novels to the racial histories of British immigration, biomedical advancement, and organ trafficking, the article reveals the narrative and historical foundations of the contemporary security state. The article appears in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, a leading journal for postcolonial literary studies. Read the article here.
The second publication describes an innovative Twitter-based assignment, titled ABQUlysses, that Professor Townsend designed and implemented in her Fall 2016 Irish Literature course. In order to help students navigate the difficult experimental style of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, the assignment prompted students to compose a tweet for each chapter in the style of Joyce but updated to reflect life in contemporary Albuquerque. Townsend describes the assignment and evaluates its learning outcomes in the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Go here to read this article.
