Ph.D. Brown University (2012)
M.A. Middlebury College/Bread Loaf School of English
M.A.T. Brown University
B.A. Bates College
I received my PhD from Brown University in 2012 where I was awarded the Presidential Excellence in Teaching Award, a distinction given to one graduate student at the university each academic year. I joined the English Department at Ithaca College in 2011, and I teach introductions to postcolonial and contemporary literatures, as well as upper division courses on the South African novel, literature and surveillance, and on the emergent genre of the global novel. Since 2013, I have been the co-director, with the novelist Eleanor Henderson, of Ithaca's New Voices Festival, a three-day celebration of talented, early career writers. Now in its ninth year, New Voices brings eight writers of poetry, fiction, drama, and essay to campus each Spring for a series of readings and workshops.
My book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is currently under contract with Bloomsbury Press. My primary research field is contemporary postcolonial/Anglophone literature, especially those texts and authors that cross borders, geographic and otherwise, and become, willingly or not, works of world literature. I've recently published research articles on the theoretical and philosophical concept of the limit in Literature Compass, corporate personhood and Kazuo Ishiguro's novels in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Zadie Smith's novels of style in The Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature, and on genre in Ishiguro's canon in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, with Kelly Mee Rich (Harvard), I edited a special issue on "Kazuo Ishiguro After the Nobel" for the journal Modern Fiction Studies. My research on The Man Booker Prize and post-imperial British fiction appears in Oxford University Press's ORE Literature Research Encyclopedia. With Thom Dancer (U Toronto), I edited a special issue on "The Novel at its Limits" for the journal Critique. I am currently contracted to write an article on the controversies surrounding JM Coetzee's novel Disgrace for The Bloomsbury Companion to J. M. Coetzee. I am a member of the Editorial Board at the journal ARIEL, a Johns Hopkins University Press journal of international literature in English.
In 2018, I received the Faculty Excellence Award at Ithaca College for distinction in Teaching, Scholarship, and Service.
Recent Publications:
Holmes, Chris & Thom Dancer (2021) "The Novel at the Limit," Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62:4, 374-385, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2021.1904816
Homes, Chris & Thom Dancer (2021) Editors. Special Issue: The Novel at the Limit, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62:4
Holmes, Chris. (2021) "The Booker Prize and Post-Imperial British Literature." Oxford UP ORE Literature.
Holmes, Chris and Kelly Mee Rich. "On Rereading Kazuo Ishiguro." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 67 no. 1, 2021, p. 1-19. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/786756.
Holmes, Chris and Kelly Mee Rich. "Ishiguro After the Nobel." Editors. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 67 no. 1, 2021.
Holmes, Chris. (2019) "Out of Place: Ishiguro's World Literature." A Companion to World Literature. Edit. Venkat Mani. Wiley Blackwell (10/2019)
Holmes, Chris (2019) “Ishiguro at the Limit: The Corporation and the Novel.” Novel: Forum on Fiction. (1 November 2019)
Holmes, Chris (2019) "Exercises in Style: Zadie Smith and the Novel After Form."The Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature. Edit. Richard Bradford, Stephen Butler, Madelena Gonzalez, James Ward. London: Wiley-Blackwell Press.
“The Limits of World Literature.” Literature Compass. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 13, 9 (2016): 572–584.
“Transition as Form in the Work of Ivan Vladislavić.” States of Transition in South African Fiction: Temporality, Modernity, Futurity. Edit. Rita Barnard and Andrew van der Vlies. Bloomsbury (Feb. 2019).
“The Novel’s Third Way: Zadie Smith’s ‘Hysterical Realism’.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade & Beyond. Edit. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 141-153.
“Global Special Delivery,” (Review. Contemporary Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 55(1): 182-191.
“The Nation After the Age of the Global.” Diaspora 18, 3 (2015): 392–403. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
“What the World Leaves Behind: Ready-Made Translations and the Closed Book in the Postcolonial Novel.” Literature, Translation, and Geography: The New Comparative Horizons. Ed. Stefan Helgesson. London: CSP, 2011: 40-53.
“An Interview with Patrick Flanery.” Contemporary Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 54(2): 427-458.
“The Leftovers,” (Review). NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. 46(2): 313-318.
Courses:
Fall 2021: "The End of Privacy: Surveillance and Modern Literary Culture"
Fall 2021: Ithaca Seminar, "The Cruelty and Salvation of School: Campus Novels"
Spring 2018: Senior Seminar: "Theory Now!!"; Eyes on the Prize: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Booker Prize
Fall 2017: First Year Seminar: "Gun"; Faking It: Reality Hunger and in Age of Artifice
Spring 2017: In the Age of the Global Novel; Senior Seminar: Global Modernism
Fall 2015: Introduction to Contemporary World Literatures; Writing the Contemporary: Kazuo Ishiguro and JM Coetzee
Fall 2013: Prizing the Postcolonial: Novels of the Booker Prize; Studies in World Literature: The Post-Apartheid South African Novel*
Spring 2013: Approaches to Literary Studies (The Agony and Ecstasy of Theory)*; Honors Program Seminar: The Novel and the Terrorist Aesthetic*
Fall 2012: Approaches to Literary Studies (The Agony and Ecstasy of Theory)*; In the Age of the Global Novel*
Spring 2011: Faking It: The Hoax and the Novel; Studies in World Literature: The Post-Apartheid South African Novel*
* selected courses have class blogs. Click on the class title to go to the website.