The end of summer marks many beginnings at the University of Saskatchewan, from the first day of classes to the start of another Huskie Athletics season. This year, these beginnings also include the addition of a new professor to the department of English.

Joanne Leow, the English department’s new professor, hope to marvel over text and visuals with her students.

The department welcomed Joanne Leow to its faculty at the end of the 2015-16 academic year. Leow comes to the U of S after earning her doctoral degree from the University of Toronto and completing a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. She also holds degrees from Brown University and the National University of Singapore and worked for many years as a broadcast journalist in Singapore prior to entering academia.

Leow specializes in transnational and postcolonial literature. She will be teaching three English courses related to these subjects in the upcoming terms, including the course Eng 207: Decolonizing Literatures in term one. For Leow, these courses are all about making connections between the reader and the places and perspectives different from their own.

“I’m hoping to sort of explore with the students the fact that a city is such an intersection of people … and colonial cities are special because they have that inequality of power between the colonizer and the colonized,” Leow said. “A lot of the texts that we’ll be reading in the decolonizing literatures class will be about that.”

Leow is no stranger to teaching classrooms full of students, having taught courses at both the U of T and McMaster. However, she points out that each new classroom brings its own individual set of challenges.

“One of the challenges I always face when teaching is the class always comes in with a huge variety of perspectives and backgrounds,” Leow said. “You have to be able to hook on to something that interests or piques the interest of everybody [so that] everyone can come into the class and take away something that’s useful for them … It’s the most challenging and the hardest part, but it’s also what makes it new every year. That sort of challenge I enjoy.”

When not teaching classes, Leow conducts research related to intersectionality, transnationalism, postcolonialism and literature. This research includes her postdoctoral project “Nature Capitals: Urban Ecologies and Literary Speculations,” as well as the manuscript of a book entitled Counter-Cartographies: Literary Wayfinding in Transnational Cities.

“I’m doing a lot of research that’s transnational, which at first glance doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with Saskatoon — I mean, I’m talking about Singapore and Dubai and Vancouver and Hong Kong, and so at first glance it’s like, where do Saskatoon and my students and the  U of S come into this?” Leow said.

Although the connection might not be immediately clear, Leow emphasizes the links she is able to make between her research and her role as a professor at the U of S.

“I’m really looking forward to meeting my students and getting to know them — that’s the other part of my job that I really like, is getting to hear their perspectives on what it’s like encountering a city for the first time, or maybe they’ve grown up in the city but every city is different,” Leow said. “It’s that conversation in the classroom that enriches my reading of the text and their reading of the text, and those moments in the classroom are what I really appreciate.”

Ultimately, Leow says that it is a love of close analysis of literature that keeps her passionate about her field of study — a love that she seems intent to share with her students.

“I’m hoping they will take a walk with me through these books and come with me and pause on pages, pause on lines and really explore the intricacies of a sentence or a line of poetry … having that kind of communal encounter with this object that we’re all looking at, trying to question ourselves a little bit. How are we thinking? Why are we thinking that? … How can we, by this communal experience of reading the text together come out kind of different?”

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Emily Klatt

Photo: Jeremy Britz / Photo Editor