Balkan, Stacey
Title(s):
Graduate Student, Assistant Professor
Email:
sbalkan@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Institutional Affiliations: Bergen Community College, CUNY Graduate Center
Research Interests: Ecocriticism, Latin American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Studies
I am a professor of literature in the great state of New Jersey where I live with a philosopher, several bicycles, and thousands of books. My dissertation, entitled “Rogues in the Postcolony: The New Picaresque and the Making of Modern India,” reflects my longstanding interest in issues of environmental exploitation, economic dispossession, and the role of aesthetic forms (picaresque novels, poetry) in affecting political change. My current research focuses on postcolonial ecologies and the politics of representation in the Global South—specifically, social realist novels, whose narrative terrain is the informal sectors of late capitalism where local communities bear the brunt of rapacious extractive economies like petrol. I am particularly interested in materialist projects that attend to issues of environmental justice and have authored two recent articles toward that end: “Representing India’s ‘Suicide Economy’” in Social Text Online (2015) and “Rogues in the Postcolony: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the Petro-Picaresque” for The Global South (2016). I teach Latin American Literature and courses in the Environmental Humanities at Bergen Community College where I also co-chair our college’s Literary Arts Series: www.literaryartsseries.org.
Dissertation: Rogues in the Postcolony: The New Picaresque and the Making of Modern India
Supervisor: A.Dawson
Readers: R.Reid-Pharr, S.Ahmed, A.Vardy
