Experience

• University of Toronto

  Associate Professor

  Hilary (Cunningham) Scharper is a Canadian novelist and professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Scharper's fiction, teaching and research focus on cultural approaches to nature.
  
  Her major works include: an award winning ethnography of the US Sanctuary Movement: “God and “Caesar at the Rio Grande” (University of Minnesota Press; Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award); a novel “Perdita” (Simon&Schuster Canada, Source Books USA, La Court Echelle French version); a collection of short stories “Dream Dresses” (Seraphim Editions).
  
  Hilary’s academic work centers on boundary-making as itself a multi-faceted encounter with “nature”—one which ultimately generates certain types of human-nature interactions while excluding or marginalizing other kinds. Because “borders” can encompass geophysical spaces, metaphysical categories, ecological zones, as well as human and non-human actors, Hilary focuses on “nature” itself as a kind of borderscape. Her current research on animal sanctuaries develops this approach through the concept of “gated ecologies,” i.e., nature-borderscapes in which human and nonhuman marginalization (and destruction) unfold as a contingent, interconnected reality.
  
  Hilary’s literary work draws upon historical fiction and the gothic genre. Her current project is a five-volume series of stories unfolding within landscapes defined by water, wind and forests—a Gothic Trinity for a society dealing with climate chaos.