Brophy, Sarah

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Brophy, Sarah

PERSONAL:

Education: Earned Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—English Department, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4L8, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, faculty member in department of English.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Social Sciences and Humanaities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship, 2001-02; McMaster Students Union Teaching Award for the Faculty of Humanities, 2004.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning, University of Toronto Press (Buffalo, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Teaching Life-Writing Texts: MLA Options for Teaching, Topia, Canadian Children's Literature, Essays on Canadian Writing, The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Literature and Medicine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Canadian writer Sarah Brophy is a researcher interested in life-writing, with a particular focus on the social meaning of certain life-altering situations, such as illness and reproduction. Her research delves into personal narratives, including biography and autobiography, taking into consideration gender, sexuality, race, and cultural concerns. Her first book, Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning, looks at the grief engendered by this illness, both from the perspective of the person who is dying and the people in their lives who are forced to watch them suffer. Brophy notes that, as a society, we tend to avoid the pain of true grieving. As a result, we miss out on the growth in our capacity for love that the experience would otherwise encourage. Her research includes the works of many AIDS patients, primarily diaries of homosexual men with the disease and books by friends, family, and caregivers. Many reviewers noted her focus on homosexual men, as well as the lack of cultural differences between them. G. Thomas Couser commented in Biography: "The book's contribution to the ongoing critical reckoning with AIDS life writing is found not in crosscultural comparisons, then, but in her dominant, and unifying, concern with mourning as a broadly cultural, rather than merely personal, phenomenon." Daniel Burr, in a review for the Lambda Book Report, remarked that Brophy's effort is "difficult because it forces the reader to confront, without any comfortable consolations or pious certainties, the deeper dimensions of a world crisis."