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Alice Brittan

Previous and Ongoing Research Results

Dalhousie Research Development Fund (RDF) Research Grant ($2872.00) Dalhousie University, 2003-2006. Traffic: Loot and Postcolonial Violence (NB: Grant extended by one year to accommodate maternity leave, Jan. 2005 - Jan 2006)

This grant allowed me to study the connection between radical transformations in the political and cultural identity of nations and the seizure, desecration, or destruction of a particularly culturally significant mobile object: the work of art. This research studied the history of looting, particularly under colonialism and in circumstances of civil war, with particular attention to Nadine Gordimer’s short story “Loot” and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost. I did research at the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania and presented two conference papers:

• “Loot: National Violence and the Art Object.” The University of Munich. “Perspectives on Endangerment.” November 2003. A revised and slightly expanded version was subsequently published in a volume of selected conference proceedings: “Loot: National Violence and the Art Object.” Perspectives on Endangerment. Ed. Graham Huggan and Stephan Klasen, Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005. 151-159.
• “Nadine Gordimer and the Imagination of Scale.” The University of Pennsylvania. Ethnohistory Workshop. "Transforming Materialities: Beyond The Social Life of Things." March 2004.

Money from the RDF also helped me to research (via interlibrary loan) and write the following articles during the term of the grant:

• “Australasia.” The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Ed. John McLeod. London: Routledge. (Forthcoming)
• “A Ghost Story in Two Parts: Charles Dickens, Peter Carey, and Avenging Phantoms.” Australian Literary Studies. 21.4 (2004): 40-55.

I used money from the same grant to prepare the following manuscripts for publication:

• “War and the Book: The Diarist, the Cryptographer and The English Patient.” PMLA. Special Issue: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. 121.1 (2006): 200-213.
• "Reading Sex and Violence in André Brink’s Rumours of Rain and A Dry White Season" Tydskrif vir Letterkunde/Journal of Literary Studies. 42.1 (2005): 55-77.

In the spring of 2006, I gathered research materials via interlibrary loan to write the following conference paper, also with financial assistance from the RDF. In this paper I begin to think about the relationship between grace and death in Disgrace:

• “Empathy and Disgrace.” Princeton University. “The Human and Its Others.” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association. March 2006.

Career Interruptions
I was on maternity leave from Dalhousie University from January 1, 2005 until January 1, 2006.