Education
B.A., Massey University, New Zealand
M.Phil. (Dist.), Massey University;
Ph.D., Duke University, 2004
“… and I want nothing. It’s what I’m trained
to believe in. But I can still dream of things that have never been
but someday will be.” – The Mekons, Journey to the End of
the Night.
Sue & Eugene Mercy, Jr. Assistant Professor of English
On Sabbatical for the academic year 2007-08
Joined Connecticut College: 2004
Specialization:
- Postcolonial literature and theory
- Twentieth-century British and British-Colonial literature
- Critical theory
Simon Hay wrote his dissertation about ghosts, and the way they work in modernist literature — British and British-colonial — not to describe something from the past that returns to haunt (the way a ghost in a Victorian or Edwardian ghost story does), but rather to describe the present itself, in its more modern forms, as ghostly. He is currently revising this dissertation by asking some broader questions of the gothic and of the discourses of melancholy that seem specific to narratives of Atlantic modernity, trying to think through both the implications of the theoretical understanding of the world based in melancholy (rather than, say, joy), and the nature of an Atlantic world that thinks of itself, represents itself, in such terms.
He is also thinking about detectives, and would like teach a course on detective stories in the future. He is especially interested in the way detectives come to stand in for ways of knowing our world — its social organizations, structures, relationships and flows of information — in direct relationship to the way that those ways of knowing become more difficult and even impossible for us to practice ourselves. He is especially interested, then, in the relationship of the detective to the colonial world, and to detectives - and detective fiction writers - who position themselves at some point of colonial encounter.
"When I'm not thinking about these things (or, often, at the same time), I like listening to my iPod, which seems to know what I want to hear better than I do, hiking, watching movies (especially horror movies), or just hanging out with my wife, Cybele," comments Hay.
Professor Hay teaches English 220: Theory and Practice of Literary Study, English 236: Introduction to Postcolonial Literature, and English 493, 494: Literature of the Atlantic World.
View the English department site.