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Education Background

English Literature D.Phil. - University of Oxford
English Literature M.Phil. - University of Oxford
First Class Joint Honours, English and Classics B.A. - McGill University

Courses Taught

• The 91����Ƶ Seminar
• World Literature
• Modern Fiction
• Monsters in the House
• Gender and Pop Culture
• Violence and Reconciliation
• Postcolonial Literature

Research Interests

My general interests lie in the areas of contemporary British and postcolonial literature, women’s writing, and the ethics of representation. My 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) I analyze narrative strategies for negotiating the ethical and political challenges of telling stories that have been silenced or ignored. My current project focuses on South African fiction that addresses the transition from apartheid to democracy. I ask 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.

Publications

MONOGRAPH

• Propst, L. Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

• Propst, L. and Robinson, C.C. (2021). “Pandemic Fiction Meets Political Science: A Simulation for Teaching Restorative Justice.” PS: Political Science and Politics, 54(2), 340-345.
• Propst, L. (2017). “Truth Commissions and Unspoken Narratives in Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust and David Park’s The Truth Commissioner.” The Comparatist, 41, 287-307.
• Propst, L. (2017). “Information Glut and Conspicuous Silence in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53(4), 414-426.
• Propst, L. (2017). “Reconciliation and the Self-in-Community in Post-Transitional South African Fiction.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 52(1), 84-98.
• Propst, L. (2016). “From Vogue to the Virgin Mary: Marina Warner and Constructions of Female Agency in 1970s Feminism.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 45, 1-17.
• Propst, L. and Loicano, J. (2016). “Paradoxes in the Classroom: When Strategies to Empower also Constrain.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 16(2), 368-375.
• Propst, L. (2014). “Redefining Shared Narrative in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light and Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift.” Studies in the Novel, 46(2), 197-214.
• Propst, L. (2014). “Promoting Local Community and Global Citizenship through Collaborative Curriculum Building.” Radical Pedagogy, 11(2), 104-113.
• Propst, L. (2012). “Shimon Attie’s Site-Specific Installations as Enigmatic Monuments to Survival.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 11(3), 319-338.
• Propst, L. (2011). “ ‘Making One Story’? Forms of Reconciliation in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 36(1), 37-60.
• Propst, L. (2009). “Unsettling Stories: Disruptive Narrative Strategies in Marina Warner’s Indigo and The Leto Bundle.” Studies in the Novel, 41(3), 329-47.
• Propst, L. (2008). “Bloody Chambers and Labyrinths of Desire: Sexual Violence in Marina Warner’s Fairy Tales and Myths.” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies, 22(1), 125-42.