Introducing the FUS Faculty: Kate Roy

Coordinator of Digital Pedagogy Initiatives and the WLC
Adjunct Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Ph.D., University of Manchester, UK
M.A., University of Otago/Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou, Aotearoa-New Zealand
B.A. (Double Hons), University of Otago/Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou, Aotearoa-New Zealand

Office: Lowerre Academic Center, Office 1
Phone: +41 91 986 36 31
Email: kroy@fus.edu

Kate Roy holds a BA (Double Hons) in German and French and an MA in German Literature from the University of Otago, and completed her PhD, a comparative project focusing on a Deleuzian reading of the works of Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar and French writer Leïla Sebbar, at the University of Manchester in 2008. Before joining Franklin University Switzerland, she was a postdoctoral researcher and recipient of small grants from the Universities of London (School of Advanced Study), Tübingen and Innsbruck, and from the DAAD, the Berlin State Library and the Leverhulme Trust, the latter a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Liverpool, where she also co-taught a module on Turkish-German writing and film. From 2013-2014 she was a Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, where she taught modules on contemporary literature, and she was, until 2018, an Honorary Research Fellow of Leeds' School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. Her research interests include diasporic writing, especially Turkish-German and Arab-German writing, postcolonial traces in (and of) the former German East Africa, translation, rewriting, and the strategic manipulation of difference, literary challenges to Orientalism, Deleuzian theory, text/image assemblages, and comparative studies in postcolonial literatures and cultures.

2024-2025 Courses

CLCS 100W	The Stories We Live By	FALL 2024
Stories are everywhere. We use them, consciously or unconsciously, to make sense of identities, experiences, and desires. And, at the same time, we are shaped by the stories that we absorb and interpret. This course explores how storytelling both reflects and shapes our lives. It introduces students to keywords and terms for reading and reflecting upon stories, both in the pages of books and in everyday life. The course considers a variety of narrative forms, including short stories, novels, fairy tales, self-help manuals, comics, films, podcasts, and political discourse. The course introduces students to fundamental questions about the nature of storytelling, while developing the vocabulary and critical skills for analysing and discussing stories. This is a writing intensive course in which students read as they learn to write. Students practice applying a critical vocabulary to textual forms as well as becoming familiar with the skills of drafting and editing. The course also introduces students to some of the professional pathways open to writers and storytellers.(This writing-intensive course counts towards the Academic Writing requirements).
CLCS 247T	French Cultural Institutions: Power and Representation (France)	FALL 2024
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French authors and artists were instrumental in shaping the imaginary of the “Orient”, with a myriad of paintings and texts housed for public consumption in national cultural institutions. Students will use the French case to explore the politics of representation: the creation and objectification of an Oriental “Other”. On-the-ground field study in museums, archives and galleries of Paris (the former colonial capital) and Marseille (the “Gateway to North Africa”) will help students to investigate the ties that bind the visual arts and literature with the exercising of knowledge and power, and to read literary and artistic works as shaped by their cultural and historical circumstances. The strong Arab and Berber presence in both cities today, in particular from France's former colonies in North Africa, will provide the impetus to question how contemporary writers and artists explicitly and implicitly engage with and renegotiate these “cultural artifacts”, and what broader significance this might have for questions of representation and identity, Self and Other, in the (not only French) present. Students will read contemporary texts by authors such as Leïla Sebbar and Assia Djébar and explore work by visual artists including Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, using their, and our own, “encounters” in the Louvre, the Pompidou Center, the Arab World Institute, MuCEM and smaller galleries to consider the significance of reappropriating the gaze and of the relationship between visual pleasure and politics, while questioning who art is “for” and where the “representation business” takes us. (The course may count toward the French Studies major in consultation with the coordinator of the French Studies program.)
HON 499	Honors Senior Capstone Experience Preparation Workshop	FALL 2024
The advanced non-credit bearing Senior Capstone Preparation Workshop is open only to Honors students and is required in the student's senior year.
CLCS 236T	Prague on the Page	SPRING 2025
The literature of Prague lies in the city's complex web of identities, a web created by social upheaval through the ages. Beginning with sixteenth-century tales of the Golem, the clay figure animated by Rabbi Loew to protect the city's Jewish community, students will investigate how Prague's writers have responded to the politics of their times by embracing the surreal and the ambiguous. In particular, this class will look at how these authors have found inspiration in the city itself. Reading includes Franz Kafka's evocation of the early twentieth-century city and a selection of works by more recent writers such as Weil, Kundera, and Hakl. Studying the way these writers repeatedly draw on each other through the idea of the city as a text, students will visit their haunts in Prague and its surroundings, and map their works onto the city's landscape and onto its history, with the surreal Kafka museum as a starting point.
CLCS 330	The Politics of Mobility: Exile and Immigration	SPRING 2025
Beginning with the post-colonial theory of Edward Said, this class will examine the ideas of exile and immigration in a colonial and post-colonial context. This course will explore exile vs. expatriatism, language and power, movement across cultures, narrative agency and authority, and voices in the new immigrant narrative. By approaching the topic from a comparative perspective, students will be exposed to a polyphony of voices and the variety of experiences associated with exile and the construction of identity. Students will examine, in particular, contemporary fiction as a window to the context of this experience.
ENV 220W	Ecocritical Approaches to Literature	SPRING 2025
This interdisciplinary, writing-intensive course will introduce students to environmental literary criticism, more commonly known since the 1990s as “ecocriticism.” As a theoretical approach to literature, eco-criticism provides a secondary lens through which to analyze primary sources; an eco-critical approach focuses on how these primary sources have “constructed” our relationship to the natural world through writing and narrative. In applying eco-critical theory to a selection of primary fiction, students will examine some of the major environmental themes found in literature, among others: land use, speciesism, climate change, environmental apocalypse, and the post-human. Students will explore these themes using some of the basic critical tools and methodologies of ecocriticism, not only to explore how authors write about the environment, but also to examine how the environment itself is constructed through aesthetic discourse. Students should leave the course with improved critical environmental literacy skills that will enable interdisciplinary reflection about our interactions with the natural environment. (This writing-intensive course counts towards the Academic Writing requirements.)
CLCS 275	Literature and the Land: Aotearoa-New Zealand	SUMMER 2025
(This course must be taken in conjunction with ENV 280T) It seems almost a cliché to say that the literature of New Zealand feeds off its often wild and varied landscape. And yet - from the Māori creation narrative to Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Man Booker Prize-winning novel "The Luminaries" the ideas that define New Zealand's literary history are built around and shaped by the land. Against the backdrop of the narrated landscapes themselves, this course will draw on short and longer texts by authors such as Katherine Mansfield, Keri Hulme, Janet Frame, Owen Marshall, Hone Tuwhare, Catton and Kapka Kassabova, as well as on related visual culture (e.g. work by filmmaker Jane Campion), to explore the relationship between humans and the environment in New Zealand literature, focusing particularly on the central South Island and its East and West Coasts. How does this relationship negotiate notions of belonging and a "place to stand" in a postcolonial country where land is symbolic not only of internal, but also of external conflict? How do more recent migrants make critical use of these ideas (Kassabova)? How do the sharp edges and isolated spaces of the landscape convey the "small violences" of rural New Zealand (Mansfield, Frame, Marshall)? And how does literature raise the bigger questions about the destructive power of humankind (Tuwhare)?

Publications:

Edited volumes:

Marven, Lyn, Andrew Plowman and Kate Roy (ed). 2020. The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House).

Edited journal issues:

Ferrari, Fabio and Kate Roy (ed.). 2020. Academic Travel: Departures. intervalla, Volume 8

Roy, Kate (ed.). 2018. Beyond Borders? Interrogating Boundaries in our Twenty-First Century World. intervalla, Volume 6

Journal articles:

Roy, Kate. 2020.'"Postcolonial" Travel: Of Empires and the Empirical', intervalla, Volume 8: 62-82

Roy, Kate. 2018. 'Fragment, Reassemble, Repeat: Productive Border-Perforations in Works by Leïla Sebbar, Farah Khelil, and Martina Melilli', intervalla, Volume 6: 34-59

Roy, Kate. 2016. '"Unsere Schatten [mischten sich] mit Totenschatten, Ameisen kamen, setzten sich auf unsere Beine": Narrative and narrator as a Body without Organs in Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei', 'Emine Sevgi Özdamar at 70', ed. by Frauke Matthes and Elizabeth Stewart, Oxford German Studies, Volume 45, Number 3: 275-289.

Roy, Kate. 2015. 'Only the "outward appearance" of a harem? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian Princess as material text', Belphégor. Littérature Populaire et Culture Médiatique, Volume 13, Number 1 ('Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material Culture', ed. by Anthony Enns and Bernhard Metz): http://belphegor.revues.org/611.

Roy, Kate. 2013. '"So ähnlich könnte es gewesen sein, aber […]": Unethical narrations of Emily Ruete's "Große Wandlungen"', Edinburgh German Yearbook, 7 ('Ethical Approaches in Contemporary German-Language Literature and Culture', ed. by Frauke Matthes and Emily Jeremiah): 115-138.

Roy, Kate. 2010. 'In der Mitte fließt es immer schneller: Grenzen und ein "politisierter Ortsbegriff" in den Werken Emine Sevgi Özdamars und Leïla Sebbars', Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Volume 129, Special Issue (Grenzen im Raum - Grenzen in der Literatur/ Topographical Borders - Borders in Literature, ed. by Eva Geulen and Stephan Kraft): 147-159.

Roy, Kate. 2009. 'Writing Back: Letters Home, "European Impressions" and Discourse Subversion in Emily Ruete and Zeyneb Hanoum', International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 6, Number 11: 61-70.

Roy, Kate. 2007. 'Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar: Mapping Global Intertexts in "Local" Texts', International Journal of the Humanities, Volume 4, Number 8: 73-82.

Book chapters:

Roy, Kate. 2020. ‘Cramped Spaces, Creative Bottlenecks: Sudabeh Mohafez’s das zehn-zeilen-buch and the Short-Short’. In: The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 76-96.

Roy, Kate. 2016. "Hinter dem eisernen Gitter ihres Fensters": the harem window as active frame in nineteenth-century narratives of Emily Ruete's "Entführung,"' in The Window: Motif and Topos in Austrian, German and Swiss Art and Literature, ed. by Heide Kunzelmann and Anne Simon (Munich: iudicium) pp. 55-84.

Roy, Kate. 2013. '"Das Herz läßt [...] die Verfasserin mehr sprechen, als es den Leser zu fesseln vermag": Emily Ruetes Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin als gezielter Tabubruch', in Zwischen Ritual und Tabu: Interaktionsschemata interkultureller Kommunikation in Sprache und Literatur, ed. by Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich, Aleya Khattab and Siegfried Steinmann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), 265-285.

Roy, Kate. 2011. 'Yadé Kara, Cafe Cyprus: New Territory?', in Emerging German-Language Novelists of the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven and Stuart Taberner (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 195-213.

Roy, Kate. 2011. 'Die U-Bahn als "unterirdisches Babel" im London von Yadé Karas Cafe Cyprus sowie im Paris von Leïla Sebbars Métro: Instantanés', in Metropolen als Ort der Begegnung und Isolation: Interkulturelle Perspektiven auf den urbanen Raum als Sujet in Literatur und Film, Cross Cultural Communication Vol. 20, ed. by Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich, Nilüfer Kuruyazıcı, Şeyda Ozil and Mahmut Karakuş (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), 473-489.

Roy, Kate. 2010. 'Re-membering heterogeneous histories: how the writing of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Leïla Sebbar re-inscribes the Other in a "European" past', in The Poetics of the Margins: Mapping Europe from the Interstices, ed. by Rossella M. Riccobono (Oxford: Peter Lang), 101-117.

Grant, Alyth, and Kate Roy. 2010. 'Between Mother Tongue, Grandfather Tongue and Foreign Tongue: A Turk in Translation', in Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age, ed. by Vijay Devadas, Henry Johnson and Chris Prentice (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi), 73-103.

Roy, Kate. 2009. 'German-Islamic Literary Interperceptions in Works by Emily Ruete and Emine Sevgi Özdamar', in Encounters with Islam in German Literature and Culture, ed. by James Hodkinson and Jeffrey Morrison (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 166-180.

Roy, Kate. 2009. 'A Multiple Otherness: Beginning with Difference in the Writing of Leïla Sebbar', in Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts, ed. by Helen Vassallo and Paul Cooke (Oxford: Peter Lang), 265-288.

Other peer-reviewed contributions:

Roy, Kate. 2020. ‘Thinking intersections and what remains’, Position Statement in ‘Outside the Nation: Taking Stock of a Sense of Duty and Diversity in German Studies Abroad’, by Benjamin Nickl. In Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues, ed. by Benjamin Nickl, Stefan Popenici and Deane Blackler (Cham: Springer), 83-84.

Magazine articles:

Roy, Kate. 2015. 'Feridun Zaimoglu: Wordsmith', New Books in German, Issue 38, 3.

Roy, Kate. 2011. '"What transformations I'd been through over the years…": Memoirs of an Arabian Princess turns 125', New Books in German, Issue 30, 36.

Online exhibition:

'Von Sansibar nach Berlin und weiter: 125 Jahre Emily Ruetes Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin' / 'From Zanzibar to Berlin and beyond: 125 years of Emily Ruete's Memoirs of an Arabian Princess.' Co-curator (with Ursula Jäcker, Berlin State Library)

Translations:

Hesse, Hermann. 'The Poet', trans. by Kate Roy, (Washington: Nawakum Press), forthcoming 2023.

Leutenegger, Gertrud. 2022. 'Late Guests', trans. by Kate Roy, no man's land Issue 17 (Winter): https://www.no-mans-land.org/article/late-guests/

Buch, Hans Christoph. 2021. ‘Zanzibar Blues, or: How I Found Livingstone’, trans. by Kate Roy, Comparative Critical Studies, 18.1: 76-85.

Mohafez, Sudabeh. 2020. ‘Selection of Short-Shorts’, trans. by Kate Roy. In The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Lyn Marven, Andrew Plowman, and Kate Roy (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 305-314.

Berg, Sibylle. 2019. ‘Exit stage left’, trans. by Kate Roy, no man's land Issue 14 (Winter): http://www.no-mans-land.org

Mohafez, Sudabeh. 2012. 'Desert Sky, Land of Stars', trans. by Kate Roy, Comparative Critical Studies, Volume 9, Number 1: 114-118.

Çırak, Zehra. 2011. 'Books', trans. by Kate Roy, no man's land Issue 6 (http://www.no-mans-land.org/).

Mohafez, Sudabeh. 2009. 'Sediment', trans. by Kate Roy, no man's land Issue 4 (http://www.no-mans-land.org/).

Future Projects:

Kate Roy's current research project (working title: '1001 Re-tellings: Emily Ruete's Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin in a literary context') focuses on the transnational figure of Emily Ruete, born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, who lived for much of her life in Germany. Ruete's Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian Princess), written in German, were first published in 1886, and are considered to be the earliest full and extant autobiography by an Arab woman. The project's pertinence lies in its investigation of the 'translation' of Ruete's life story for various audiences through space and time, its re-reading of the memoirs as literature, and its analysis of their retellings and translations in order to map the transformations of Orientalist discourse down to the present day. Taking a Cultural Studies approach, the project investigates the interplay of 'book' and 'world', interrogating the ways in which the textual and paratextual dynamics of the memoirs (and their retellings and translations) interact with their colonial, Orientalist and postcolonial contexts.

Coordinator of Digital Pedagogy Initiatives and the WLC Adjunct Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures

2024-2025 Courses

Publications:

Future Projects:

Coordinator of Digital Pedagogy Initiatives and the WLC
Adjunct Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures