Rachel Bryant

Rachel Bryant studies colonial North American literary history as a member of the Department of Humanities and Languages at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Saint John. She has published articles and chapters on the Puritan captive John Gyles, the English novelist Frances Brooke, the Virginia colonist John Smith, William Shakespeare, the Canadian/Australian author S. Douglass S. Huyghue and others.

Her writings about colonial, settler colonial, and Wabanaki literary histories have been published in numerous journals, including AlterNative, NAIS, Settler Colonial Studies, Canadian Literature, University of Toronto Quarterly, English Studies in Canada and others. Her first book, The Homing Place (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017), was short-listed for the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing and awarded the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction. Her ongoing collaborations with Wolastoqey artists and scholars have featured in regional arts symposia and in venues such as the Journal of New Brunswick Studies.

Rachel worked as a Research Associate at the Mi’kmaq-Wolastoqey Centre at UNB Fredericton from 2021-2023 and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University from 2017-2020. She speaks in public forums about what it means, for her and her family, to be treaty people in the land of the Peace and Friendship Treaties, and she teaches courses on North American and Indigenous literary histories. For her teaching, she was nominated for the Dr. Alan P. Stewart Memorial Award in 2021 and awarded a Departmental Award for Teaching Excellence for 2021-2022. She is a past Trustee of the Saint John Free Public Library and a current member of the New Brunswick Public Libraries Board.

As a descendent of Loyalists and New England Planters, Rachel is committed to balancing her own family’s rights and responsibilities and to honouring the commitments her ancestors made to live in this territory in good relationship with Wabanaki people. She is currently completing a book manuscript about peacemaking and is co-organizing a SSHRC-funded gathering on decolonial community building.

Selected publications

“wikhikhotuwok and the Re-Storying of Menahkwesk: Telling History Together,” co-authored with Gina Brooks, forthcoming in a special issue of Journal of New Brunswick Studies edited by Ken Coates, Mario Levesque, and Graydon Nicholas. 2024.

“The Last of the Wabanakis: Absolution Writing in Atlantic Canada,” Settler Colonial Studies 10.1, 1-14. 2020.

“The Grammar of Inanimacy: Frances Brooke and the Production of North American Settler States,” Firsting in the Early Modern Transatlantic World, edited by Lauren Beck, New York: Routledge. 2019.

“Kinshipwrecking: John Smith’s Adoption and the Pocahontas Myth in Settler Ontologies,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, special issue on custom adoption edited by Damien Lee and Kahente Horn-Miller, 14.4, 300-308. 2018.

The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic, Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 2017.

“Honey from the Rock: John Gyles and the Northeastern North American Search for Anglo Indigeneity,” University of Toronto Quarterly 85.1, 1-24. 2016.

Selected presentations

“The ones who are poor: Settler colonial extractivism and/as the heart of the humanities,” Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting, York University, Toronto ON. 2023.

“wikhikhotuwok and the re-storying of Menahkwesk,” a collaborative basket installation and treaty talk with Gina Brooks for the Arts Atlantic Symposium, Saint John NB. 2022.

“Sheila Croteau: A Legacy of Love,” a Greater Saint John Community Foundation video production, An Evening with Jesse Thistle and Sisters of the Drum at the Imperial Theatre, Saint John NB. 2022.

“Moses Perley’s Legacy of Dishonorable Relations,” Atlantic Canada Studies Conference, Fredericton NB. 2022.

“Toward the Sharing of Saint John: Reckoning with the City Charter.” Social Justice and the City, Tertulias, NB Media Coop. 2021.

“What is an American now? J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur at the Canadian Turn,” Dalhousie University Friday Speaker’s Series, Halifax NS. 2017.

“Thus the Oak Succeeds to the Pine: Canadian Exceptionalism in the writings of Anna Brownell Jameson,” Irish Association for American Studies/British Association for American Studies Conference, Belfast, Ireland. 2016.