Bilde av Niemi, Minna Johanna
Photo: Toje Jenssen
Bilde av Niemi, Minna Johanna
Department of Language and Culture minna.j.niemi@uit.no +4777644176 You can find me here

Minna Johanna Niemi


Associate Professor English Literature

Job description

Minna Johanna Niemi is associate professor (førsteamanuensis) 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).

https://www.routledge.com/Complicity-and-Responsibility-in-Contemporary-African-Writing-The-Postcolony/Niemi/p/book/9780367139698

She is currently co-editing a collection of essays focusing on Zimbabwean politics of the past and working on her second monograph on western complicity in the postcolonial political arena.


  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    Picaros and Shapeshifters: The Postcolonial Picaresque Style in GauZ’s Standing Heavy
    Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) 2024 DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    Contested political alliances in fortress Europe: migrants and Europeans in Helon Habila’s Travellers
    Continuum. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 2023 ARKIV / DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    Critical representation of neoliberal capitalism and uneven development in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body
    Journal of Southern African Studies 2021 ARKIV / DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    Challenging Developmentalist Narratives: Helon Habila's Oil on Water as a Representation of the Extractivist Exploitation in the Niger Delta Region
    Lexington Books 2018
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    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 2017 ARKIV / DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    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 2017 ARKIV / DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    "Revising postcolonial trauma: Multidirectional identifications in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps"
    Journal of Postcolonial Writing 2015 DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi, Justin Parks :
    Home, Homelessness and the Wayward Subject in the Novels of James Joyce and Claude McKay
    Peter Lang Publishing Group 2010
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited
    Routledge 2021
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    ”Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker’s Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South” in World Cinema and the Visual Arts (David Gallagher, ed.)
    Anthem Press 2012
  • Astrid Rasch, Minna Johanna Niemi, Jocelyn Alexander :
    Reading Repression and Resistance in Zimbabwean Literature
    Journal of Southern African Studies 27. October 2021 DATA / DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi :
    Making The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: An interview with Yaba Badoe
    Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 2018 DOI
  • Minna Johanna Niemi, Nuruddin Farah :
    “Witnessing Contemporary Somalia from Abroad: An Interview with Nuruddin Farah”
    Callaloo 2012 DOI

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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" (2019-2022)

    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.

    https://www.routledge.com/Complicity-and-Responsibility-in-Contemporary-African-Writing-The-Postcolony/Niemi/p/book/9780367139698

    Articles:

    "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

    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