Congratulations to Erina Harris

EFS’ Dr. Erina Harris has been instructing ENGL 409 - “Between World and Toy,” a process-based course in which students engage in literary and cultural criticism by exploring literary representations of toys from multiple global cultures and eras. Erina has been awarded a Research Grant and an International Artist Residency to further her creative research in this area for both her publishing practice and for further curriculum development.

Erina has recently received a grant from the Edmonton Heritage Council to research traditional Indigenous toys of Alberta this spring, which will include study with a local Cree traditional Doll Maker. Erina has also been awarded a distinguished one-month Artist Residency at HANGAR Artistic Investigation Centre in Lisbon, Portugal (2024, date TBA). During Erina’s Residency, she will conduct intensive creative research at the oldest functioning doll hospital in the world, Hospital de Bonecas, founded in 1830 by Dona Carlota. Erina will focus on the history of the hospital’s founder who is said to have healed children’s toys through a combination of physical repairs and language, “a word” with which to “treat them," (The Doll Hospital - History) while pursuing the question of just what does move people to choose to repair/recycle toys, rather than (often easier and cheaper) replacing them.

More news! Erina’s new book of lyric essays and poetry, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead will be launched in Edmonton in the Fall of 2024. This work of traditional and experimental poetics deploys the musicality and aesthetics of nonsense verse (and other populist story forms including folk tales and nursery rhymes) as "a critique of sense” (in the words of poet-scholar Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature), to trouble corrosive formulations of subjectivity, gender, anthropocentrism, and xenophobia which are so deeply embedded in the constructions of Western “childhood,” and within notions of what constitutes human “subjects."