Dr. Anna Smith
Honours Coordinator
Qualifications
- M.A., Ph.D. (Canterbury)
Contact Details
Phone: +64 3 3642987
Internal Phone: 6226
anna.smith@canterbury.ac.nz
Postal address:
English Programme
School of Humanities
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch, New Zealand
Physical address:
Room 312, English/Education Building
Office Hours:
First semester, Tuesday and Thursdays 12noon-1pm. Second semester, tba.
Research
Anna Smith teaches children’s literature and adolescent fiction, postcolonial literatures, modern drama and literary theory. She has published work on Margaret Mahy, Keri Hulme, Julia Kristeva, Ben Okri and New Zealand women artists. She has recently edited a collection of essays on cultural studies for Victoria University Press with Lydia Wevers. Currently she is working on a book on gothic and supernatural writing for teenagers. Her supervisory areas of expertise include literary theory especially psychoanalysis; and children’s literature
Teaching
- ENGL 115 Childhood in Children's Literature
- ENGL 213 Children's Classics: Popular Children's Texts and their Representation on Film
- ENGL 313 Cultures of the Supernatural
- ENGL 431 Young Adult Fiction
Supervision
MA students
- Paulette Rennie: Jeanette Winterson
- Sally Borrell: Margaret Atwood, animals, postcolonial theory
- Alana Cooke: Angela Carter
PhD students
- Creon Upton: Thomas Pynchon and theory
- Reshmi Roy: Novels by Indian women writers
Background
Having completed a book on Julia Kristeva which examined the relation between literature and psychoanalysis, I am now concentrating my interests in several areas. Firstly, I have a fascination for the way visionary experience, the imagination and language function as a "knot" that resists formal structures of knowledge. How the supernatural functions as a metaphor for adolescent experience is a second area of interest. Writing about art finds its place on a website managed with Jonathan Smart of the Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch