Kelly Baron

I'm interested in how intergenerational memories of trauma are represented in contemporary Canadian genealogical novels, or novels telling a family history. I'm also interested in the intersection between music and literature, specifically in the way in which music is used to depict scenes of memory in the novels I study. I'm the former publisher of The Ex-Puritan and the managing director of Siren Recordings, a Canada Council and Toronto Arts Council-supported sonic poetry label due to launch in fall 2024.

List of Publications

• Co-editor with Andrew DuBois. Sing in Me, Oh Muse: Music In/As Literature. Lexington Books, 2025.
• “’The trick is that the dancing and singing are unrepeatable:’ Empowering Improvisations in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.” Canadian Literature 252 (2024): 15-34.
• “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the impossibility of testimony.” In Comics and Catharsis: Exploring Narratives of Trauma and Memory in the Graphic Novel. Ed. Jordan Tronsgard. University of Mississippi Press, 2024. 6948 words.
• “Aural Memory in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.” English Studies in Canada 46:2 (2023): 81-196.
• “Modern Love: Negative Affect in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and André Breton’s Nadja.” Modern Language Studies 52.2 (2023): 36-49.
• “‘But How, How to Exist and Not to Belong?’: Hybridity and Trauma in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach.” Studies in Canadian Literature | Études en Littérature Canadienne 47.1 (2022): 131-149.
• “Rewriting Indigeneity in the Canadian Gothic: Monsters, Mash-Up, and Monkey Beach.” In Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling. Ed. Natalie Neill. Lexington Books, 2022: 139-152.
• “Reflections on the testimony of trauma: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el Desierto.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 30.1 (2021): 107-121.
• “Coleman Silk and the collective trauma of America.” Philip Roth Studies 15.2 (2019): 66-83.

Book Reviews

• “Portraits of Lost Pasts.” Omnibus Review of The Lost Century and What is Written on the Tongue. Canadian Literature. Forthcoming 2023. 
• “Three Failures.” Omnibus Review of The Music Game, The Beautiful Place, and Choosing Eleonore. Canadian Literature. 2023. 
• “Mistaken Identity: Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Latest.” A review of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fayne. Literary Review of Canada. Jan/Feb 2023. 
• “Talk Diversity to Me: On Cynicism and Sincerity.” A review of Tajja Isen’s Some of My Best Friends and Naben Ruthnum’s A Hero of Our Time. Literary Review of Canada, June 2022. 
• “Stories to Live By.” Omnibus Review of You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked., Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, and Treadmill: A Novel.” Canadian Literature. 2022. 
• “Women’s Time.” Omnibus review of We, Jane, Erase and Rewind, and We Want What We Want.” Canadian Literature. 2022. 
• “Paddling Alone, Together.” Review of Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic.” Canadian Literature. 2022.