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Books

The Devil Comes to Bonn

A novel reflecting the #MeToo movement. Historian, Stella encounters an aggressive man at a German heritage conference and unleashes a sinister side of herself, jeopardizing identity, career and family. When she meets Hildegard, at first, she sees no mirror to her own life, after all, Hildegard survived working as a maid to Hitler.

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The Devil Comes to Bonn is available on Amazon in print and eBook formats. It is also in UK bookshops and can be ordered as print on demand in many countries.

Excerpts

Warning black decals of birds dotted the glass walls of the old West German Bundeshaus in Bonn. Eagles shot-up, wings folded over curved bodies, sleek like cannons. Others hurtled earthward, wings arced, piked beaks splitting.

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A seat, it might seem trivial. She was not heroic Rosa Parks in 1955, retaining her Alabama bus seat against a white man and brutal, racist oppression. She was not igniting sparks in the US civil rights movement, but it was her seat and yet another man demanded that a woman move. It seemed an outrageous comparison, but banal, everyday insults could explode into the monumental.

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She walked to the other head; the bearded saint’s view ran sideways, along the cobbles. He could see the sky only by squinting upwards, surely impossible from the pose that the sculptor, Iskender Yediler, had allotted him. He was earth-bound, but faithful to himself. Stella trod carefully around the memorial heads, tracing a protective loop.

Refraction in writing distorts and angles and thus creates new ways of seeing, sliding us sometimes subtly between stories, and sometimes brashly. Writing with refraction as my chief tool, meant that neither of the stories in The Devil Comes to Bonn could be told in a straightforward manner; they interrupt each other constantly, sometimes only a page separates them. The aim of the sudden halt of one story and jolting re-starting of the other creates a space for readers to ponder beyond the compulsion of the narrative drive of ‘what next?’ Jennifer Harris

Work in Progress:
Falling from the Bridge

In the monumentality of Paris, a marriage cracks.

Academic Work

Academic interests that flow into my fiction are reflected in this selection of papers:

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2019, “Juxtaposed concepts of place” in Ann Davis and Kerstin Smeds, eds, Museum and Place, ICOFOM, Paris.

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2015, “Metaphor in social history museums,” Complutum, 26(2), pp.121-131.

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2014, “The past in the present: using poetics as an interpretative strategy at Pasargadae” in Ali Mozaffari, ed., World Heritage in Iran: Perspectives on Pasargadae, Farnham, UK, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

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2011, “Guerilla art, social value and absent heritage fabric,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 17(3), pp.214-229.

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2010, “Memorials and trauma: Pinjarra 1834” in Michael Broderick and Antonio Traverso, eds, Interrogating Trauma, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

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1999(a), “Learning from popular culture: interpretation, visitors and  critique,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, V (3&4), pp.135-148.

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