Rachel Bryant

Rachel Bryant studies colonial and settler colonial North American literary histories as a member of the Department of Humanities and Languages at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Saint John. Her ongoing research program focuses on non-Indigenous responsibilities under the Peace and Friendship Treaties and on building capacities on both sides of that treaty relationship. She supports land-based, Wolastoqewi-led education as a member of the board at Caribou Club, and she recently began a program of research focused on the intersections of print and paper in New Brunswick prior to the advent of the wood pulp paper industry.

Rachel has written articles and chapters on captivity narratives and the Puritan author John Gyles; on the colonial grammars that were normalized in the first Canadian/American novel; on Captain John Smith’s famous rejection of Powhatan kinship structures in the Virginia tidewater; on William Shakespeare’s anxieties around ecological exploitation and parasitic social relationships; on the nineteenth century tradition of absolution writing in Atlantic Canada; on the Puritan sense of mission in English Canadian contexts; on Sophia Hawthorne’s Scotland writings; on the continuing relevance of Moses Perley’s colonial propaganda in New Brunswick political discourse; on the power of children to lead New Brunswickers away from failed settler colonial systems; and more. Her writings 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 Wabanaki artists have featured in regional arts symposia and in public and open-access venues such as the Journal of New Brunswick Studies.

Rachel was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University from 2017-2020, studying the place of colonial Canadian texts in the enterprise of early American studies, and she then worked as a Research Associate, first at the Atlantic Canada Studies Centre and then at the Mi’kmaq-Wolastoqey Centre from 2021-2023. At UNB Saint John, 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.

Rachel serves as the Honours Advisor for the discipline of English at UNB Saint John and is a member of the Graduate Academic Unit. She is Saint John’s Faculty of Arts committee representative for Piluwitahasuwawsuwicik.

Courses taught

• Imperial Encounters (North American, 1500-1800)
• Early National U.S. Literature (19th century U.S.)
• Reading through Treaty (a methods course)
• The Idea of America (the European imagination, 1500-1800)
• The New American Literary Studies (20th-21st century North & South American)
• Dreaming of America (20th/21st century U.S. novels)
• Studies in Indigenous Literature
• Wabanaki Writing

Selected publications

“On Treaty, Virtue, and Plots that Choose Death: Moses Perley’s Sporting Sketches,” forthcoming in Journal of New Brunswick Studies.

“wikhikhotuwok and the Re-Storying of Menahkwesk: Telling History Through Treaty,” co-authored with Gina Brooks, forthcoming in Journal of New Brunswick Studies.

“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

“On Lakotowakən, Peace, and the Ways in Which We Treat One Another,” a keynote address with Gina Brooks for the inaugural gathering of the St. Andrews Historical Society, St. Andrews NB, 2024.

“The Feather Has Two Sides: Contexts for Convergence with Wabanaki Art and Artists,” a panel with Tara Francis, Starlit Simon, and Gina Brooks, Arts Atlantic Symposium, Moncton NB, 2024.

“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.

“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, Social Justice and the City, virtual.

“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.