Ph.D. Brown University (2012)
M.A. Middlebury College/Bread Loaf School of English
M.A.T. Brown University
B.A. Bates College
Faculty Mentor to Ithaca College Men's Rowing
Faculty Mentor to Ithaca College Running Club
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 Kazuo Ishiguro, JM Coetzee, 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 second decade, New Voices brings seven writers of poetry, fiction, drama, and essay to campus each Spring Semester for a series of readings and workshops.
My book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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 have 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 have recently published a chapter on the controversies surrounding JM Coetzee's novel Disgrace for The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee, edit. Andrew Van Der Vlies (Adelaide), along with an essay for Public Books about Haruki Murakami's short story collection, After the Quake.
I am a member of the Editorial Board of ARIEL, a Johns Hopkins University Press a journal of international literature in English.
I am the creator and host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and I am a lead host and producer for the official podcast of the Society for Novel Studies, Novel Dialogue, which is sponsored by Duke University, in partnership with Public Books.
In 2018, I received the Faculty Excellence Award at Ithaca College for distinction in Teaching, Scholarship, and Service.
Recent Publications:
Holmes, Chris (2023) "Disgrace," The Bloomsbury Guide to J.M. Coetzee. Edit. Andrew Van Der Vlies and Lucy Graham. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
DOI: 10.5040/9781350152076.ch-13
Holmes, Chris (2023) "B-Sides: Haruki Murakami's After the Quake," Public Books.
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. (2021) "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. (2021) "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.
Courses:
Fall 2023: "Television and the Global Novel"
Spring 2022: "The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro"
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*
