John C. Ball

John C. Ball is interested in contemporary postcolonial and Canadian literatures, particularly fiction, as well as postcolonial and diaspora theory, ecocriticism, satire and satire theory, space and place theory, urban fiction, historical fiction, creative writing, and drama production.

He is the author of Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (University of Toronto Press, 2004) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (Routledge, 2003). He has also edited Twentieth-Century World Fiction, volume 3 of the The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). He was editor or co-editor of UNB’s journal Studies in Canadian Literature from 1996-2013; he has co-edited several special issues of the journal, including, most recently, The Ruptured Commons (2024).

He has published over 35 scholarly essays in edited books or journals such as ARIEL, Genre, Canadian Literature, Transnational Literature, and Essays on Canadian Writing. Authors whose work he has published on include Chinua Achebe, Dionne Brand, Catherine Bush, Austin Clarke, David Dabydeen, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Jamaica Kincaid, Robert Kroetsch, Hanif Kureishi, Kate Pullinger, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, M.G. Vassanji, Derek Walcott, Tim Winton, and many more.

Current and recent research explores applications of risk theory, ecocriticism, and/or cosmopolitanism to recent postcolonial and Canadian novels, including climate-change fiction; postcolonial representations of oceans and sea voyages; and public discourse on satire. Formerly chair of the Department of English, he has supervised over 33 graduate theses at UNB, both in his academic fields and in creative writing; a regular actor and director in local theatre, he has directed over a dozen productions for Theatre UNB. Current member of the Graduate Academic Unit.

Recent articles and book chapters

“Risk and Responsibility in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows.” Ruptured Commons. Ed. Anna Guttman and Veronica Austen. John Benjamins Publishing, 2024. 16-32.

“Gun Island and Blaze Island: Improbability, Risk, and Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Two Recent Climate-Change Novels.” Studies in Canadian Literature 48.1 (2023): 62-86. [Special issue: “The Ruptured Commons”]

“Shoring Up Britain: David Dabydeen’s Oceanic Sublime.” Like Diamonds from Dirt: Essays and Interviews about David Dabydeen’s Creative Writing. Ed. Lynne Macedo. Hansib, 2024. 30-40.

“Salman Rushdie and Cosmopolitanism.” Salman Rushdie in Context. Cambridge UP, 2023. 305-17.

“Shouldering the Burdens of History: The Parrot as Postcolonial Satirist in Gary Barwin’s Yiddish for Pirates.” Journal of Jewish Identities 13.1 (2020): 1-16.

“Postcolonial Satire.” Teaching Modern British and American Satire. Ed. Evan R. Davis and Nicholas D. Nace. MLA Publications, 2019. 189-96.

“Over the Edge: Risk, Ecology, and Equivalency in Will Ferguson’s 419.” ARIEL 49.2-3 (2018): 179-204.

“‘The Shimmering Edge’: Surfing, Risk, and Climate Change in Tim Winton’s Breath.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 41.1 [Special issue: “Unsettling Oceania”] (2018): 19-29.

“‘An Open Wound’: The Memory and Legacy of Partition in Vassanji’s Writings on India.” The Transnational Imaginaries of M.G. Vassanji: Diaspora, Literature, and Culture. Ed. Asma Sayed and Karim Murji. Peter Lang, 2018. 17-31.

“Capital Offences: Public Discourse on Satire after Charlie Hebdo.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 50.3 (2017): 297-317.

“Letters in Canada 2014: Emergent Fiction.” [Omnibus Review] University of Toronto Quarterly 85.3 (2016): 176-99.

“Up the Hill: SCL/ÉLC Then and Now.” [Memoir of my years editing Studies in Canadian Literature.] Studies in Canadian Literature 41.1 (2016): 266-74. [Special issue: “Canadian Literature: The Past Forty Years”]

“Infinite Worlds: Eighteenth-Century London, the Atlantic Ocean, and Post-Slavery in S.I. Martin’s Incomparable World, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress, and Thomas Wharton’s Salamander.” Transnational Literature 5.2 (2013): 15 pp. (online).

“Drickie Potter and the Annihilating Sea: Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Waves of Nothingness.” Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Julie McGonegal, Ranjini Mendis, and Arun Mukherjee. Rodopi, 2012. 203-20.

“Immigration and Post-War London Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Ed. Lawrence Manley. Cambridge UP, 2011. 222-40.

“Historical Fiction.” Twentieth-Century World Fiction. Vol. III of The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Vol. ed. John Clement Ball; gen ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 1129-34.