Saint Mary's

English Language and Literature
Professor
Phone: 902-420-5690
Office: MN329
Email: renee.hulan@smu.ca

Overview

Renée Hulan studied at Acadia University and the University of Guelph and earned her PhD from McGill University.  Before moving to Halifax in 1997, she was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia.  Dr. Hulan’s research focuses on literary representations of the North, and in recent years, she has studied the influence of climate change on literature and visual culture, working in collaboration with the Arctic Modernities and Arctic Voices research groups at the University of Tromsø, Norway and with the Laboratoire international d’étude multidisciplinaire comparée des répresentations du Nord at UQÀM.   From 2020-2021, she was the Craig Dobbin Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at University College Dublin.

She is the author of Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic (Palgrave, 2018), Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains (Palgrave, 2014) and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (McGill-Queens, 2002).  Other single author publications can be found in academic journals such as Acadiensis, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Northern Review and in reference works such as The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature and The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature.  In the 1990s, she was active in Indigenous literary studies, publishing a collection of scholarship by Indigenous and settler scholars, Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives.  In 2005, she and Renate Eigenbrod organized a gathering of writers, scholars, and elders that led to Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics (Fernwood, 2008). 

Dr. Hulan currently serves on the advisory boards of the Halbert Centre for Canadian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the British Journal for Canadian Studies.  From 2005-2008, she and Donald Wright co-edited the Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes.  She has also served as vice-president of Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures/Association des littératures canadiennes et québécoises (ACQL-ALCQ), and president of the Canadian Studies Network-Réseau d’études canadiennes (CSN-RÉC). 

At Saint Mary's, Dr. Hulan teaches a variety of courses, including among others Literature and the Environment, Literary Traditions, Imagining the North, and Canadian Drama.  

She received the President's Award for Excellence in Research in 2018.

Publications:

Selected Recent Chapters and Articles:

• “Alnayah’s People: Archival Photographs from West Greenland, 1908-1909,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Volume ahead of print (9 Feb 2023), pp. 1-22.
• “Alnayah nunaqqataalu: Assit toqqorsivimmeerut Kalaalit Nunaata avannaani assilisat ukiuni 1908-mit 1909 tikillugu.” Kalaallisut allaqqiisoq Axel Jeremiassen.  Kalaaleq NR. 6,7 (2022), pp. 32-36.  [“Alnayah’s People: Archival Photographs from West Greenland, 1908-1909” translated by Axel Jeremiassen into Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic)]
• “Caring for the Future: Climate Change, Kinship and Inuit Knowledge,” in Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change.  Ed. Russell MacDougall, John C. Ryan and Pauline Reynolds.  Leiden: Brill, 2022, pp. 311-333.
• “‘The Poetry of the Aeroplane’: Arctic Flight in Twentieth-Century Canadian Poetry.” Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday. Ed. Anka Ryall and Heidi Hansson.  Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017.  87-111.
• “‘Indigenizing’ the Bush Pilot in CBC’s Arctic Air.” Northern Review 43 (2016): 139-162.