Faculty Profile

M.A., Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
B.A., Carnegie Institute of Technology

Christine Sizemore joined the Spelman faculty in 1978. Since her Penn dissertation was in the Renaissance, she taught “Shakespeare” and “History of the English Language,” throughout her career at Spelman, but her research interests and publications moved to modern and contemporary British literature, including her first book on contemporary British female urban novelists, and then after a 1998 NEH seminar in London, moved to postcolonial literatures in English by women and included her second book, "Negotiating Identities in Women’s Lives." She also taught senior seminars in both these areas. Her recent articles focus particularly on women’s novels and make use of feminist, postcolonial and cultural theory. 

BOOKS
Negotiating Identities in Women’s Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels , Greenwood Press, 2002.

A Female Vision of the City: London in the Novels of Five British Women, Univ. of Tenn. Press. 1989.

SELECTED ARTICLES
“‘One Half the World Was Hungry’: The Evolution of Doris Lessing’s Critique of Global Hunger in In Pursuit of the English, The Summer Before the Dark, and Alfred and Emily.” Food, Culture and Society: an International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 18.4 (Dec. 2015): 629-643.

“After the ‘Colour Bar’: Doris Lessing’s Analysis of Contemporary Racism in ‘Victoria and the Staveneys.’” Doris Lessing Studies 33 (2015): 13-18.

 “Cosmopolitanism From Below in Mrs. Dalloway and ‘Street Haunting’”.Woolf and the City: Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Elizabeth Evans and Sarah Cornish. Clemson, S.C.: Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2010. 104-110.

 “The Return to Hijab in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pick-Up and Leila Aboulela’s  Minaret­.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 15.2 (2008): 70-83.To be reprinted in Gale/Cengage Publications Fall 2017.

“In Pursuit of the English: Hybridity and the Local in Doris Lessing’s First Urban Text.”  Journal of Commonwealth Literature .43.2 (2008): 133-144.

“Willesden as a Site of ‘Demotic’ Cosmopolitanism in Zadie Smith’s Postcolonial City Novel White Teeth.” Journal of  Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. 12.2 (2005): 65-83.

"When Everything Else is Done and Dusted’: An Interview with Barbara Burford, Scientist And Writer, Bradford, England August 6, 1998." Macomère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. 2 (1999): 23-35.

"The London Novels of Buchi Emecheta." Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Ed. Marie Umeh. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996: 367-385.