Two Faculty Members Promoted to Full Professor

Professor of English Hilary Thompson

Hilary Thompson joined the Bowdoin faculty in 2005, having previously held lecturing posts at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Michigan, where she earned her PhD in 1998. Her scholarship and research areas include literatures of the nonhuman and extra-human, focusing on contemporary global anglophone multispecies fictions. Thompson's first work, Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium (Routledge, 2018), examines global anglophone fictions of the animal, retrieving more expansively connective models of creatureliness in premillennial works from the more constricted and human-centric biopolitical writings of the post-9/11 era. Her latest book, Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel (Bloomsbury, 2023), examines novels written by diversely diasporic authors from 2018 to 2020, highlighting their extra-human turn and engagement with spirit animals, spirit dimensions, and animist life-worlds.

Thompson says teaching contemporary fiction from global anglophone writers means she is always reading new things. "My particular focus on representations of the nonhuman and nonhuman perspectives means I'm often trying to imagine all the ways the world looks from other species' points of view, or really all the other worlds our world intermingles with," she says. Recently, Thompson says, she's been especially fascinated by the merger of contemporary literary fiction with more fantastic modes, "with magical realism reaching across the aisle to fantasy fiction, spawning new hybrids." This trend, she adds, inspired the New Modes of Magic course she taught during the spring semester. The class examined how these new works both draw on and transform diverse cultural traditions, blurring the boundaries between literary, fantasy, and science fiction as they critically address contemporary issues. "I loved the way students brought their detailed knowledge of magical systems to our discussions, sometimes throwing me for a loop and teaching me a lot in the process," she says. Thompson is currently working on a new book manuscript titled The Cosmic Commons: Planetary Thinking from Above.