Kathleen Fernando has taught in the English Department since the Fall of 2006. She currently holds one of the Marilyn Yarborough Dissertation/Teaching Fellowships and is working on her dissertation titled "Cleaning-Up Their Acts: Representations of 'Dirt', the Body, and Everyday Life in Novelistic Fiction by South Asian Women Writers." Her interest in Post-colonial literatures arose from her own experiences growing up in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a tiny island off the Southern coast of India, where she was exposed to a rich literary life, performing Shakespeare, reading Austen and Dickens, Eliot and Yeats, and reciting, amongst others, the ancient Tamil poetry of the female poet, Auvaiyar. She is particularly interested in the ways in which discourses of gender, race, caste and class intersect to produce often contradictory and complex narratives in the post-colonial context.

Areas of Expertise

Post-colonial literature

Education

PhD York University
MA University of Illinois at Chicago
BA Goshen College

Courses Taught

Engl 103 Representations of Race, Class and Gender in Post-colonial Literature
Engl 292 House and Home in Post-colonial Women's Writing