Rose Casey
Rose Casey specializes in contemporary Anglophone literature, law and literature, and the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Her publications have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Novel: A Forum on Fiction, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Anglophone literature, including postcolonial literature, British women writers, African literature, forced migration, the construct of the human, and the contemporary novel. She received her PhD in English from Cornell University in 2016; she also holds an MA in English from Cornell, an MA in English from the University of British Columbia, and a BA (Hons) in English from Oxford University.
Her current book project, Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, examines the construct of property in stylistically experimental contemporary literature from a legal and formal perspective. Aesthetic Impropriety argues that the style or aesthetics of many postcolonial texts functions to take on the Anglo-American property regime that facilitated the Global South's dispossession under European colonialism. Each chapter of Aesthetic Impropriety investigates a different aspect of legislation regulating ownership, including inheritance laws, intellectual property rights, land law, and the institution of slavery. Chapters address marriage and divorce laws in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, apartheid land law in J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K, copyright law in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story, and chattel slavery and maritime insurance law in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!. The book shows how postcolonial literature challenges unjust property laws by producing alternative models of equitable social and political life. In doing so, it develops a new theory of literature's ability to act upon the world.
Professor Casey also puts her research and teaching interests into practice through community engagement, including her involvement in setting up the Morgantown chapter of NOW (National Organization for Women) and serving as the chapter's president for much of its inaugural year.
Honors Faculty Fellow Lecture
“Extending Reality” will present students with a guided media and discussion-based tour of XR technology (virtual, augmented and mixed reality), learning about its origins, current applications and future growth potential. With the increasing merging of the digital and physical worlds, we are presented with new opportunities for interactivity and communication as well as new problems of privacy and digital identity in the metaverse. Students will learn about these concepts through lectures, class discussions and hands-on learning activities. The course will culminate in students pitching, planning and producing a meaningful XR project made to benefit a campus or community partner.
View David Smith's lecture recording at the link below.
View the Recording