Clarkson University President Tony Collins has announced that Lisa Propst has been granted tenure and promoted from assistant professor to associate professor of literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the School of Arts & Sciences.
She received her bachelor of arts degree in English literature and classics from McGill University, earning first class joint honors.
She received her master of philosophy in English literature from 1880 to the present day and her D. Phil. in English literature, both from the University of Oxford.
Her general research interests lie in the areas of contemporary British and postcolonial literature, women’s writing, and the ethics of representation. Her research focuses on the roles and limits of storytelling as a means to combat silencing and social divisions. In the monograph Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020) she analyzes narrative strategies for negotiating the ethical and political challenges of telling stories that have been silenced or ignored. Her current project focuses on South African fiction that addresses the transition from apartheid to democracy. She asks what narrative strategies and ethics of reading (or listening) can push readers to assert responsibility for people and stories they did not think of as “theirs” and to confront their entanglements with conditions that underpin ongoing injustice.
Prior to her appointment as assistant professor in 2015, Propst was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson. Before that, she was a limited-term assistant professor for six years in the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia.
Along with her 2020 monograph, she has also written articles about literature, humanities, and teaching for professional journals and has made numerous presentations at literature conferences.
Her professional affiliations include the Modern Language Association, Northeast Modern Language Association, African Literature Association, and British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies.