Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is a Professor of English specializing in postcolonial studies at Virginia Tech. Her monograph (Frontier Fictions: Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt, Palgrave 2018) focuses on settler colonial literatures of South Africa, Canada, the US, and Australia, arguing that stories of 19th-century settlers provide a means for individuals and communities to work through guilt over indigenous dispossession and genocide.
She has published a monograph on island castaway narratives (Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest, Minnesota 2007), co-edited with Peter Hulme the collection Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance (Routledge 2014), co-edited with Yuting Huang another collection on settler literatures (Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race, Routledge 2018), and recently co-edited with Janne Lahti the collection Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film(Routledge 2020). Her current work investigates 19th-century mining texts as sites where land rights and colonial power were and are still negotiated. A theme of her research has been examining the psychological and social work that texts, monuments, and films perform during times of colonial conflict.
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower 