Heike Härting received her doctoral degree from the University of Victoria and joined the department in August 2003.

Heike Härting specializes in Canadian literature and criticism, postcolonial literary studies, and diaspora and globalization studies. She has also worked on narrative theory and rhetoric, focusing on the development of a postcolonial practice and politics of metaphor in contemporary Canadian fiction.

Currently, her research evolves around histories, epistemologies, and representations of violence, warfare, and humanitarianism in contemporary film and literature in English. She received a SSHRC research grant for her work on postcolonial narratives of civil and global war and was a co-investigator in the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Globalization and Autonomy (McMaster University). She holds an FQRSC grant for her project on "The politics of corpses in Rwandan and Sri Lankan Narratives of Global War" and has co-edited a special issue on "Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East" of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Together with Smaro Kamboureli, she is presently editing a special issue on "Canadian Peacekeeping Narratives, Security and the Canadian Imaginary" of University of Toronto Quarterly (78.3 ; Summer 2009). She published "Global Civil War and Postcolonial Studies," in the Working Paper Series of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition (McMaster U., globalization.mcmaster.ca/wps.htm). Her essays "Global Violence and Political Legitimacy in Sri Lankan Narratives of Ethnic Civil War" and "Culture, Race, and the Global Imaginary in Roméo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil" are forthcoming with the University of British Columbia Press. She has finished her book manuscript Unruly Metaphor: Nation, Body, and Diaspora in Contemporary Canadian Fiction and published articles on, amongst others, Michael Ondaatje, Austin Clarke, David Dabydeen, and Jeannette Armstrong. She is also the editor of Postcolonial Text (http://postcolonial.org).

Combining her research interests with her commitment to teaching and pedagogy, Heike Härting enjoys supervising a number of doctoral research projects. She also co-founded the Department's inter-university graduate research colloquium with the University of Guelph and the TransCanada Institute (see Guelph-Montreal Exchange Colloquium at www.transcanadas.ca). A three-year pilot project, the Colloquium is designed to bring together graduate students from both universities to collaborate on issues of Canadian literatures and criticism in various cultural and linguistic contexts.

Härting won a Government of Canada Award from the International Council for Canadian Studies and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. She is presently a SSHRC Co-investigator for the Major Collaborative Research Initiative Globalization and Autonomy / Mondialisation et Autonomie based at McMaster University. Her research will contribute to the project's various editorial and publishing ventures.

She has published on Maragaret Atwood, Anita Rau Badami, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Wole Soyinka in such journals as ARIEL, Third Text, and Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en Littérature Canadienne. Two of her articles are forthcoming in Postcolonialism and Pedagogy: Canadian Literatures in the Classroom, edited by Cytnhia Sugars and in La Troisième Solitude: Écriture Minoritaire Canadienne / The Third Solitude: Canadian Minority Writing, edited by Lianne Moyes. She is also an editor of Canada's first online journal on postcolonial literatures, Postcolonial Text.