Rose Casey
Rose Casey specializes in contemporary
Anglophone literature, law and literature, and the relationship between
politics and aesthetics. Her publications have appeared or are forthcoming in
journals including Novel: A Forum on
Fiction, the Journal of Postcolonial
Writing, and the Journal of
Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. She teaches undergraduate and
graduate courses on Anglophone literature, including postcolonial literature,
British women writers, African literature, forced migration, the construct of
the human, and the contemporary novel. She received her PhD in English from
Cornell University in 2016; she also holds an MA in English from Cornell, an MA
in English from the University of British Columbia, and a BA (Hons) in English
from Oxford University.
Her current book project, Aesthetic
Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, examines the construct of
property in stylistically experimental contemporary literature from a legal and
formal perspective. Aesthetic Impropriety
argues that the style or aesthetics of many postcolonial texts functions to
take on the Anglo-American property regime that facilitated the Global South's
dispossession under European colonialism. Each chapter of Aesthetic Impropriety investigates a different aspect of
legislation regulating ownership, including inheritance laws, intellectual
property rights, land law, and the institution of slavery. Chapters address marriage
and divorce laws in Arundhati Roy's The
God of Small Things, apartheid land law in J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, copyright
law in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story,
and chattel slavery and maritime insurance law in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!. The book shows how postcolonial
literature challenges unjust property laws by producing alternative models of
equitable social and political life. In doing so, it develops a new theory of
literature's ability to act upon the world.
Professor Casey also puts her research and teaching interests into practice through community engagement, including her involvement in setting up the Morgantown chapter of NOW (National Organization for Women) and serving as the chapter's president for much of its inaugural year.
Recent courses include:
ENGL 496 Capstone for Literature and Cultural Studies | Spring 2017, 2018.
ENGL 337 Major Authors | "J. M. Coetzee." Spring 2018.
ENGL 200, Foundations of Literary Study | "Unsettling the Human." Fall 2017.
ENGL 261, Brit. Lit. Survey 1 | "Britain in the World: 800-1800." Fall 2017.
ENGL 386, British Women Writers |"Rebels and Rulebreakers: British Women Writers from 1792 to the Present." Spring 2017.
ENGL 374, Postcolonial Literature | "Poetic Injustice: Law and the State in Postcolonial Literature," Fall 2016.
ENGL 226, Non-Western World Literature |"Africa is a Continent: A Brief Literary History." Fall 2016