Maggie O'Leary

Biography

Having received my undergraduate degree from UND, I am returning to Grand Forks following graduate school to work in the Honors Program where I teach courses in the humanities, with an interdisciplinary emphasis in my research and my classes in Honors and Women and Gender Studies. My published work and teaching affirm the mutually-productive relationship between the humanities and sciences. My research focuses on literature's role in the development and proliferation of human rights language, as this language assumes a global aspirational grammar in part via literary representations. I position my work within postcolonial literary and disability studies to survey the still-unevenly realized "project" of human rights, showing how this aspirational language seems to interact uneasily with ideas of medical autnonomy and bodily incapacitation.

My work demonstrates that there are more "covert" moments wherein the conceptual grammar of human rights fails to support the rights of those humans deemed pathologically exempt from the protections human rights claim to confer and preserve. This approach emphasizes the violence and violations of rights inherent to some forms of medical intervention and treatment, but also argues that there are other more affirming ways of expressing necessary medical care. This changed approach to care would better address all registers of ability, and support the flourishing of different people in accordance with their needs and desires for their future. My published work examines the bodily impacts of grief and trauma in contemporary Irish poetry, and in how different forms of "care" and "healthcare" are distributed unevenly amongst different bodies. I am also developing a longer project exploring hunger, metabolic failure, and eating disorders in the contemporary postcolonial novel.

My teaching underscores the necessity of the humanities as an essential (not indulgent or pointless) dimension to training caring, thoughtful, and adaptable future STEM professionals--particularly for students pursuing careers in healthcare. I have taught courses in disability and postcolonial studies and hope to continue developing courses in human rights and the medical humanities. I am also greatly looking forward to teaching in Women and Gender Studies.