Rate My Professor Rochelle Simmons

Dr. Rochelle Simmons is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago, within the Division of Humanities. She holds an MA from the University of Auckland and a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research expertise includes contemporary fiction, literature and the visual arts, and literature and cinema.

Dr. Simmons has produced scholarly chapters and articles examining narrative structures, visual elements, and socio-political themes in modern literature and film. Key publications include her chapter "'I want to go to collage': On Ali Smith and John Berger" in E. Jelínková and R. Sumner's The Literary Art of Ali Smith: All We Are Is Eyes (Peter Lang, 2019); "Propaganda by deed: Provocation, primitivism, and politics in John Berger's writing" in Y. Gunaratnam and A. Chandan's A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger (Zed Books, 2016); the article "Suburban metropolis: The city in Peter Wells' cinema" in Studies in Australasian Cinema (7.1, 2013); "Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion as a Cubist novel" in University of Toronto Quarterly (67.3, 1998), reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism (180, 2004); and "Driving Force: Narrative in Lee Tamahori's Television Advertisements and Once Were Warriors" in Media International Australia (80, 1996). She has supervised master's and PhD theses on topics such as representations of love in Jane Austen's novels (MA, 2011), the window in Virginia Woolf's early novels (MA, 2018), spaces of femininity in Woolf's 1920s novels, postmodern economics in Don DeLillo's White Noise (MA, 2019), and collaborative poetry with Kenneth Koch (PhD, 2013). Additionally, she chaired sessions at the Screen Cultures conference (2011) and led a Catch-Up Book Club discussion on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (2019).