Minna Johanna Niemi
Job description
Minna Johanna Niemi is professor in the English literature section. She received her PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2011. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial literary studies, Anglophone African literary studies, trauma studies, and ethics. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the South African Journal of Philosophy, ARIEL, Postcolonial Studies, and the Journal of Southern African Studies.
She is the author of Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited (Routledge, 2021).
She has edited, with Astrid Rasch and Amanda Hammar, The Politics of the Past in Zimbabwe (Brill, 2025).
She is currently working on her second monograph on western complicity in the postcolonial political arena.
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Research interests
Anglophone African Literatures, Postcolonial Literature, African American Literature, Ecocriticism
Research projects
Member of research project: "Literatures of Change: Culture and Politics in Southern Africa" (2019-2023)
https://www.ntnu.edu/isl/literatures-of-change
Her published work includes:
Books:
Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited. Routledge, 2021.
She has edited, with Astrid Rasch and Amanda Hammar, The Politics of the Past in Zimbabwe (Brill, 2025).
Articles:
"The Politics of Shame in Musa Okwonga’s One of Them: An Eton College Memoir." Life Writing (2025): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2025.2475301
“Picaros and shapeshifters: the postcolonial picaresque style in GauZ’s Standing Heavy.” Journal of the African Literature Association 18.1. (2024): 50–69.
“Contested political alliances in fortress Europe: migrants and Europeans in Helon Habila’s Travellers.” Continuum (2023): 1–14.
"Critical representation of neoliberal capitalism and uneven development in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body." Journal of Southern African Studies 47.5 (2021): 869-888.
“Challenging Developmentalist Narratives: Helon Habila’s Oil on Water as a Representation of the Extractivist Exploitation in the Niger Delta Region.” In Robert Ficociello and Robert Bell, eds., Eco Culture: Disaster, Narrative, Discourse. Lexington Books, 2018.
“Making The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: An Interview with Yaba Badoe.” ARIEL 49.2-3 (2018): 257-269.
"Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility." Postcolonial Studies 20.2 (2017).
"Totalitarian politics and individual responsibility: Revising Hannah Arendt’s inner dialogue through the notion of confession in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians." South African Journal of Philosophy 36.2 (2017): 223-238.
“Revising Postcolonial Trauma: Multidirectional Identifications in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.3 (2015): 283-295.
“Witnessing Contemporary Somalia from Abroad: An Interview with Nuruddin Farah.” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters 35.2 (Spring 2012): 330-340.
”Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker’s Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South.” Contemporary Cinema and the Visual Arts. Ed. David Gallagher. London: Anthem Press, 2012. 153-162.
“‘A dynamic of blaming and counterblaming’: J. M. Coetzee’s Analysis of Self-deception in South African Resistance Literature.” Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought 1.1 (2011): 124-142.
“Home, Homelessness and the Wayward Subject in the Novels of James Joyce and Claude McKay.” (Co-authored with Justin Parks.) Phenomenology, Modernism, and Beyond. Ed. Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg. Oxford, UK: Peter Lang, 2010. 249-72.
“Challenging Psychoanalysis: A Black Woman’s Experience of ‘Race,’ Class and Gender in Alice Walker’s Meridian.” Close Encounters of An Other Kind: New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity & American Studies. Ed. Roy Goldblatt, Jopi Nyman and John A Stotesbury. Joensuu: University of Joensuu Studies in Literature and Culture, 2005. 85-94.
“Alice Walkerin Possessing the Secret of Joy –romaani transnationaalisen feminismin edustajana.” (“The Representation of Transnational Feminism in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy.”) Vieraaseen kotiin. Ed. Pirjo Ahokas and Lotta Kähkönen. Turku: U of Turku P, 2003. 61-81.
Teaching
2025-26 Courses
- ENG 1122--Introduction to Literature
- ENG-3108--Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in English Literature
- ENG 3992/ ENG 3983--M.A. Thesis Seminar
2024-25 Courses
- ENG 1122--Introduction to Literature
- ENG-3105 Border-Crossing Narratives
- ENG 3992/ ENG 3983--M.A. Thesis Seminar
- ENG 3130--Literature and the Environment
2023-24 Courses (fall 2023, sabbatical leave)
- ENG-3108 Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in English Literature
- ENG-2981/ ENG-2951 Bachelor thesis seminar in English literature
2022-23 Courses (spring 2023, sabbatical leave)
- ENG 1122--Introduction to Literature
2021-22 Courses
- ENG 1122--Introduction to Literature
- ENG 3130--Literature and the Environment
- ENG 3992 / ENG 3983--M.A. Thesis Seminar (fall and spring semesters)
2020-21 Courses
- ENG-3114 Modernism: Contemporary Narratives of Loss and Transformation
- ENG-3108 Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in English Literature
- ENG-2981 Bachelor thesis seminar in English literature
- ENG 3992--M.A. Thesis Seminar (fall and spring semesters)
2019-20 Courses
- ENG-3105 Border-Crossing Narratives
- ENG 3992--M.A. Thesis Seminar (spring semester)
2018-19 Courses
- ENG 1122--Introduction to Literature
- ENG 3130--Literature and the Environment
- ENG 2129--Gender and Sexuality in Literature
- ENG 3992--M.A. Thesis Seminar (spring semester)
2017-18 Courses
- ENG 3992--M.A. Thesis Seminar
- ENG 2114--Modernisms: World Literature in English
- ENG 3108--Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in English