Heike Härting is Associate professor of English. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Victoria and joined the department in August 2003. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Research Centre on Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies at the Université de Montréal (Centre de recherche des études littéraires et culturelles sur la planétarité, CELCP), the first Centre of its kind in Canada. Trained in postcolonial and contemporary Canadian studies, her research concentrates on postcolonial literatures and theories, narratives of global violence and planetary health in African and Canadian literatures. Her current research projects examine the ways in which decolonial writing and bioart address, shift, and reconfigure hegemonic and colonially received discourses of the Anthropocene, of planetary geopolitical and geological transformations, and of planetary health (human and more-than-human).

Among others, she has published various articles, a co-edited special issue on "Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East" of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (with Nouri Gana, 2008), a special issue on peacekeeping narratives and security of the University of Toronto Quarterly (with Smaro Kamboureli,2009), a co-edited special issue of Transtext(e)s Transcultures on “Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now” (with Johannes Riquet, 2023), and a book on Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (with Heather Meek, Routledge, 2024).  She is the lead investigator of the multidisciplinary research team Les études culturelles et littéraires sur la planétarité: Pratiques, épistémologies, et pédagogies transformatrices/ Cultural and Literary Planetary Studies: Practice, Epistemologies, and Transformative Pedagogies (funded by the Québec government, FRQSC Soutien aux équipes de recherche, 2020-2025). She is also the principal investigator of "Viral Conjunctures: Pandemics and Planetary Health Narratives." (2023-2027), a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is also a co-investigator and member of several research teams working on the creative intersections of care, well-being, and narrative. Her research is closely related to her pedagogical practice, which fosters collaborative, decolonial, intersectional, and reparative approaches to knowledge production and dissemination. She is involved in a number of pedagogical and communal initiatives (e.g., with the CÉGEP Vieux Montréal) and supervises various doctoral and MA projects related to contemporary literary and cultural planetary studies, the health humanities, and postcolonial and Canadian literatures.

Heike Härting received her doctoral degree from the University of Victoria and joined the department in August 2003.

Heike Härting specializes in Canadian literature and criticism, postcolonial literary studies, and diaspora and globalization studies. She has also worked on narrative theory and rhetoric, focusing on the development of a postcolonial practice and politics of metaphor in contemporary Canadian fiction.

Currently, her research evolves around histories, epistemologies, and representations of violence, warfare, and humanitarianism in contemporary film and literature in English. She received a SSHRC research grant for her work on postcolonial narratives of civil and global war and was a co-investigator in the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Globalization and Autonomy (McMaster University). She holds an FQRSC grant for her project on "The politics of corpses in Rwandan and Sri Lankan Narratives of Global War" and has co-edited a special issue on "Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East" of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Together with Smaro Kamboureli, she is presently editing a special issue on "Canadian Peacekeeping Narratives, Security and the Canadian Imaginary" of University of Toronto Quarterly (78.3 ; Summer 2009). She published "Global Civil War and Postcolonial Studies," in the Working Paper Series of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition (McMaster U., globalization.mcmaster.ca/wps.htm). Her essays "Global Violence and Political Legitimacy in Sri Lankan Narratives of Ethnic Civil War" and "Culture, Race, and the Global Imaginary in Roméo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil" are forthcoming with the University of British Columbia Press. She has finished her book manuscript Unruly Metaphor: Nation, Body, and Diaspora in Contemporary Canadian Fiction and published articles on, amongst others, Michael Ondaatje, Austin Clarke, David Dabydeen, and Jeannette Armstrong. She is also the editor of Postcolonial Text (http://postcolonial.org).

Combining her research interests with her commitment to teaching and pedagogy, Heike Härting enjoys supervising a number of doctoral research projects. She also co-founded the Department's inter-university graduate research colloquium with the University of Guelph and the TransCanada Institute (see Guelph-Montreal Exchange Colloquium at www.transcanadas.ca). A three-year pilot project, the Colloquium is designed to bring together graduate students from both universities to collaborate on issues of Canadian literatures and criticism in various cultural and linguistic contexts.

Härting won a Government of Canada Award from the International Council for Canadian Studies and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. She is presently a SSHRC Co-investigator for the Major Collaborative Research Initiative Globalization and Autonomy / Mondialisation et Autonomie based at McMaster University. Her research will contribute to the project's various editorial and publishing ventures.

She has published on Maragaret Atwood, Anita Rau Badami, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Wole Soyinka in such journals as ARIEL, Third Text, and Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en Littérature Canadienne. Two of her articles are forthcoming in Postcolonialism and Pedagogy: Canadian Literatures in the Classroom, edited by Cytnhia Sugars and in La Troisième Solitude: Écriture Minoritaire Canadienne / The Third Solitude: Canadian Minority Writing, edited by Lianne Moyes. She is also an editor of Canada's first online journal on postcolonial literatures, Postcolonial Text.