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Robert Zacharias

Robert Zacharias is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from the University of Guelph (2011), where he was the inaugural Fellow of TransCanada Institute, as well as an MA (2006) and a Bachelor of Education (2001) from the University of Manitoba. Before returning to academia in 2004, he taught secondary English, Fine Arts, History and Law at Linden Christian School in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Robert’s dissertation, Narrative Strains: Tracing the Russian Mennonite Migration Narrative through Canadian Literature, examines discourses of displacement in Canadian literature, taking Mennonite Canadian writing as a case study in what is at stake in the re-writings of a key migration experience in a given community’s history. Beyond a primary focus on migrant and minoritized Canadian literature, his research interests include diaspora studies, historical fiction, critical race theory, 18th century imperialism, academic collaboration, sovereignty, and contemporary critical theory.

Robert’s project at CDTS considers the form and function of the return journey, along with the complex politics of the idea of “home” in Canadian literature, with an initial focus on work by Sandra Birdsell, Rudy Wiebe, M.G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, Dionne Brand, and Lawrence Hill.  He is also currently revising his dissertation into a manuscript, as well as revising essays on the relationship between capital, empire, and romance in Francis Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769), and the function of academic tone in the field of diaspora studies.

Publications

Shifting the Ground: Nation-State, Indigeneity, Culture. Co-editor, with Smaro Kamboureli. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP. Forthcoming March 2012.

“‘Some Great Crisis’: Awaiting the Origin of Canada.” Shifting the Ground: Nation-State, Indigeneity, Culture. Ed. Kamboureli and  Zacharias.Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP. Forthcoming March 2012.

 “Citizens of the Exception:  Obasan Meets Salt Fish Girl.”  Narratives of Citizenship: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples Unsettle the Nation-State. Ed. Aloys N.M. Fleischmann, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Cody McCarroll. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011: 3-24.

“‘What else have we to remember?’: Mennonite Canadian Literature and  the Strains of Diaspora.” Embracing Otherness: Canadian Minority Discourses in Transnational Perspective. Ed. Eugenia Sojka and Tomasz Sikora. Torun, Poland: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2010: 186-209.

“A Desire for the Real: The Power of Film in The Englishman’s Boy.”  Studies in Canadian Literature 34.2 (2009): 245-263.

“Rafe’s Rebellion:  Reconsidering The Knight of the Burning Pestle.”  Renaissance and Reformation 31.3 (Summer 2008): 103-126.

“‘And yet’: Derrida on Benjamin’s Divine Violence.” Mosaic:  a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature 40.2 (June 2007): 103-116.

Articles in Process:

“Empire and Capital in The History of Emily Montague.” Revising for invited resubmission to The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

“The Guelph Speaks! Anthology: Storytelling as Praxis in Community-Facing Pedagogy.” Co-authored with Ashlee Cunsolo Willox and Paul Danyluk. Under consideration as part of Class Action. Ed. Ajay Heble. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

“Worlds Within or In Between Worlds? Returning Home in the fiction of
 Neil Bissoondath and M G Vassanji.”

“On a Newly Arisen Tone in Diaspora Studies.”

Contact

I always enjoy connecting with those with similar interests – feel free to contact me at r.zacharias@uotoronto.ca, or visit me at the following websites:
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertZacharias
http://robertzacharias.wordpress.com/