Joy M. Leighton, Assistant Professor, received her
PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo and
a BA in English and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in American literature, Asian American
literature, history, and culture, nineteenth-century African American
literature, and critical theory.
Her book project, "Exile in the Promised Land: Peregrinations
in American Literature," examines four seemingly disparate American
writers: Herman Melville, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, and Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha. Tracing the representation of exile in their works,
she argues that exile - political, racial, gendered, and metaphysical
- is fundamental to the development of an American self, a subjectivity
that privileges home but finds its "origins" in exile. Ultimately,
she asserts that rethinking exile entails that critics must also reconceptualize
the logic of citizen and foreigner, self and other, native and non-native.
Influenced by the difficult ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, her project
rethinks the alterity of exile and its relation to an "American"
self. In addition to her book manuscript, she is also working on a
project about the South from an Asian American's perspective.
Joy has taught graduate and undergraduate level classes in Asian American Literature, Post-Civil War Literature, and Race in American Literature. She is the faculty advisor to the Auburn Asian Association, an undergraduate organization. She is also a member of the Women Studies Program.
Representative Publications
"' A Chinese Ishmael': Sui Sin Far, Writing, and Exile."
MELUS 26.3 (Fall 2001): 3-29.
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Last updated April 12, 2005