Department of English

Bio:

Vanessa Evans (she/her) is a settler scholar and Assistant Professor specializing in contemporary Indigenous literatures and theory. Her current research aims to advance scholarly understandings of how comparative approaches to diverse and distinct Indigenous literatures can further illuminate how Indigenous Peoples and nations are enacting Indigenous resurgence. While completing her PhD, Evans was a visiting lecturer at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies and the Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Evans’s research has appeared in venues such as Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers (2024), Studies in the Novel (2022), and The International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design (2022). Her co-edited book, Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2023, with Transcript Press. 

Evans’s teaching, like her research, is centrally concerned with how to respectfully engage the stories we study and those we bring to the classroom as individuals. She is always working to be more inclusive of Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing and, as such, takes a holistic approach to pedagogy. This approach works to recognize the network of relations in which students and educators exist by affirming the key role each person plays in sustaining our classroom communities and the broader communities we return to when class ends. Consequently, her teaching centers four key commitments: knowledge diversity, (ii) self-determination, (iii) process, and (iv) collaboration.

Academic Specialties:
Contemporary Indigenous literatures and theory
Pedagogy
Transnational American studies
Cultural studies
Citizenship studies
Postcolonial literature and theory
World literature and theory

Education:
PhD, English, York University (2023)
MLitt, Modernities, University of Glasgow (2011)
BA, English, University of Calgary (2009)

Articles and Book Chapters:

• Evans, V. “Toward a ‘most subtle and fluent self’: Indigenous Englishes and the Pursuit of Self-Sovereignty in The Translation of Dr. Apelles.” Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers, edited by Pavan Malreddy and Frank Schulze-Engler, Routledge, pp. 280–95.
• Evans, V. “‘Other languages, other landscapes, other stories’: Reading Resurgence in the Contemporary Indigenous Novel.” European Journal of American Studies, “Placing Ghanaian and Indigenous North American Literatures in Conversation” Special Issue. Publication expected Summer 2025.
• Evans, V. and Banerjee, M., editors. Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept. Transcript, 2023.
• Evans, V. “‘You’ve Heard it Now’: Storytelling and Acts of Citizenship in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.” Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept, edited by Vanessa Evans and Mita Banerjee, Transcript, 2023, pp. 111–130. 
• Samuelson, A. and Evans, V. (equal authorship). ‘“Real old-timey’: Storytelling and the Language of Resurgence in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.” Special issue on Indigenous Young Adult Literature, Studies in the Novel, vol. 54, no. 3, 2022, pp. 274–292.
• Whitfield, A., Evans, V., and Simpson, B. “Structured Engagement and Learning in Discussion Forums: The Worksheet Video Walk Formula.” The International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design, vol. 12, no. 2, 2022, pp. 1–11.
• Quinn, K., Canossini, E., and Evans, V. “Carceral Imaginaries in Science Fiction: Toward a Palimpsestic Understanding of Penality.” The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture, edited by Barbara Harmes et al., Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 473–85, 2020.