PeopleFaculty

Kaplan 146
E-mail

Education

Ph.D. UCLA  1994
B.A. UCLA  1986

Research Interests

Twentieth and twenty-first century British and Irish literature; modernism; theory of language; philosophy of mind; visual art; history of writing; medieval and Renaissance antecedents to modern literature.

Colleen Jaurretche is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of English at UCLA where she focuses on twentieth century British and Irish authors. Her first book, ‘The Sensual Philosophy’: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mysticism (Wisconsin, 1997) investigates theological works from the six through sixteenth century in its examination of James Joyce’s writing in the context of the tradition of negative theology. Her second book, Language as Prayer in Finnegans Wake (UP Florida, James Joyce Series, 2020), brings together thinkers from antiquity, the Middle Ages, early Enlightenment, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to examine conditions of language as prayer. She is currently working on a cultural geography of the continental West told through her family’s Mexican, European, and Indigenous stories and landscapes. She is a citizen of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai.

Jaurretche has also edited a collection of essays on Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and published essays in James Joyce Quarterly, European Joyce Studies Annual, and Joyce Studies Annual.

Public Humanities

In 2010 she co-founded and today co-directs the Libros Schmibros Lending Library in the historically underserved Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights.  Since its inception, Libros Schmibros has put almost 50,000 books into people’s hands, hosted many public programs, and been installed as artist-in-residence at the Hammer Museum.

Selected Publications

‘The Sensual Philosophy’: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mysticism (Wisconsin, 1997)

Language as Prayer in Finnegans Wake (Florida, James Joyce Series, 2020)

Courses Taught at UCLA

Funny as Shite: Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien; Modern Drama; Literatures in English since 1850; James Joyce Senior Seminar; Twentieth-Century British Poetry; Modern and Contemporary Irish Literature; Modern Novel; Victorian Poetry; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Undergraduate Honors Seminar: Hamlet; Literary Cities: Dublin

Interest Areas
• British Literature & Culture, 19th C. – Present
• Visual Culture / Media Studies / Digital Humanities
• Critical Theory
• Postcolonial Theory / Transnational Studies