Jill Lewis

Jill Lewis, professor of literature and gender studies, holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. in French literature from Newnham College, Cambridge University, England.

She teaches courses exploring the connections between culture and politics - with specific focus on questions of gender and sexual identities, militarism, post colonialism, and cultural difference. She has been teaching at Hampshire one semester a year for over 25 years, with a home base in Europe.

Her interests in cultural representation, theatre performance, educational processes and the politics of gender have linked importantly for her with HIV/AIDS prevention education in recent years, and involved work in Norway, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Estonia, Congo, and locally in Holyoke and on campus with Hampshire students.

Recent and Upcoming Courses

Crossing Lines: disturbing landscapes of racialised difference
Cultures evolved from histories of colonialism or slavery have embedded in them forms of racism and racial polarisations that haunt and are reproduced even along the arteries of struggle against them. But there have been collaborations and connections that challenged the prevailing racialised assumptions and positionings that the dominant discriminations or oppressions continue to re-invoke. This course considers the importance of seeding the imagination with analyses, argument or narratives that disturb or defy the repetition of polarised differences that racisms depend on. We will explore analyses, cultural texts and creative practices that work against repetitions of 'difference' and cross the boundaries that racism would hold impenetrable. Readings include work by Alan Goodman et al., Eula Bliss, Chimamanda Adichie, Toni Morrison, Caryll Phillips, Lemn Sissay, Robin Lewis, James Baldwin, Paul Gilroy, Farhad Dalal, Franz Fanon; and music by Muhammad Al-Hussaini and Abel Meeropol. Active student presentations involved. Prerequisite: Students must be in the last semester of Div I, or already in Div II; students must email instructor prior to enrolling in this course: jlewis@hampshire.edu
Dynamics of Displacement: the quest for asylum
2015 saw an unprecedented movement of people migrating from wars and poverty into Europe. This course will explore media reports, personal narratives, novels and films to fertilise imaginative grasp of the conditions of disenfranchisement, marginalization and survival that make people leave home. Examining the arc of social realities impacting people from North Africa and the Middle East we will explore complexities of their migrations, asylum quest, experiencing of displacement - and challenges and uncertainties of striving to reach re-anchoring in unfamiliar places and foreign cultures. We will explore blindnesses in the juxtapositions of different worlds and highly charged attitudes and conditions of reception in European contexts. We will Skype with asylum seekers, trace 2015 events as they unfolded and explore background readings from Refugee Studies. Students will write responses to media reports, films; seek experiences of migration closer to home and complete a final critical / creative project combining different mediums.