Caoimhe Harlock
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and US Literatures
Caoimhe Harlock received her Ph.D. in English from Duke University, her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and her B.A. in English and philosophy from the University of Texas Austin.
Harlock's creative writing explores the lives of marginalized subjects, particularly trans women living and making community in the rural south, with fiction and comics appearing in venues such as the Evergreen Review, Foglifter, A Gathering of Tribes, and Honey Literary. She’s a Fellow of Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Sundress Academy of the Arts, and is currently finalizing her debut novel, Take Up the Serpent.
She teaches courses in the craft of fiction, emphasizing an approach to workshops rooted in inclusivity, anti-racism, and the foregrounding of marginalized voices. As a writing teacher, she is interested in literary and genre fiction, creative nonfiction, character, place, embodiment and trauma, formal representations of time, and more. She also offers seminars that examine 20th- and 21st-century American cultural productions such as novels, short fiction, comics, films, games, and zines, particularly as they intersect with marginalized subcultures and offer a means of contesting hegemonic traditions of power and culture.
Her research interests include 20th-century and contemporary American literature, film, and comics; trans studies; queer theory; feminist theory; and critical theory more broadly, including Marxist and psychoanalytic schools of thought. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Trans/Super/Natural: Fear, Trembling, and Transsexuality in American Literature that explores canonical U.S. writers’s reliance on magic and monstrosity to represent gender-variant subjects—representations that draw on a deep body of scientific writing trafficking in the same mythos and symbology.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
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This course examines the wave of trans fiction and film created following the so-called "transgender tipping point" of 2014, from authors such as Akwaeke Emezi, Camila Sosa Villada, Imogen Binnie, Torrey Peters, and others. We'll interrogate questions central to the Time & Narrative Learning Collaborative, including the aesthetic and political implications of a literature centered on identity, how the notion of a "trans tipping point" reconciles with the rightward vectors of American politics in the last decade, and where we can locate revolutionary/liberatory potential in art and the communities surrounding it. Besides developing a community to practice close-reading and literary analysis, we'll also learn to develop research or creative projects that give a generative direction to our interests. This course will also intersect with the Race & Power requirement by foregrounding the works of non-white trans creators to help reorient our notions of transness, transmisogyny, and literary community and analysis. Keywords:Trans, literature, film, queer, cultural studies
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This intro-level workshop is for students interested in pursuing all types of narrative/prose fiction, whether literary fiction or genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc). We'll spend some time as a community critically examining short fiction from authors such as Carmen Maria Machado, Octavia Butler, Lauren Groff, Anita Desai, Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges, and others, in order to understand how they make use of character, form, structure, place, voice, and other fundamental tools of fiction-writing. The heart of the class, however, will be developing our own original works of fiction and then learning how to workshop, iterate, revise, and improve our creative writing in the context of a supportive community of artists. By the end of the class, students will have a small portfolio of creative work as well as a strong foundation of writing skills they can carry on into future workshops and other creative courses Keywords:Creative writing, fiction, workshop, genre fiction, literary fiction