Scholarly articles by McVicker to be published

Department of English Professor Jeanette McVicker, who is also coordinator of Ethnic and Gender Studies, has two scholarly articles accepted for publication this year, both stemming from research done during her recent sabbatical.

The first paper continues her extensive work on Virginia Woolf. "Woolfian Ethics, Heterotopias and Nonviolence" will appear in the “Selected Papers,” from the 2022 annual conference on Virginia Woolf, published by Clemson University Press online. The paper explores the way Woolf expressed her pacifist ethics in the 1930s in part through narrative strategies that disrupted conventional thinking regarding patriarchy, war and characters' relation to social and public space.

The second will appear in “Women’s Studies Quarterly,” published by the Feminist Press, in a special issue on "Pandemoniums." The article expands the idea of heterotopia – a space of material and textual transition – and links it to interdisciplinary spaces within the university.

"Contesting post-truth chaos through interdisciplinary heterotopias” draws on feminist theory and literature as part of its critique of populist efforts to subvert democracy through assaults on knowledge, so-called "experts" and claims that truth is irrelevant. Such efforts contribute to the erosion of institutional support for creating new knowledge that challenges hierarchical thinking, as interdisciplinary programs generally do.