Orly Lael Netzer
Adjunct Research Professor
- PhD (Alberta)
- Email Orly Lael Netzer
My research focuses on the public work of testimony in contemporary Canada. I turn to testimony because it outlines the relational and ethical stakes of this moment, inviting us to contend with the gaps between our aspired values, shared narratives, and lived realities. Working at the intersection of autobiography, memory, and cultural studies, with particular focus on histories of injury, and discourses of redress and reconciliation — my scholarship explores how testimonial culture (in literature, performance, and visual arts) invites us to become witnesses, rather than readers or spectators.
Interlacing settler, Indigenous, and diasporic approaches, my research practice focuses on inheriting difficult knowledge, weaving diverse ways of knowing, centering survivors and communities’ agency and aims, and fostering socially-responsible spaces for learning and dialogue. In so doing, my scholarship uses critical humanities approaches to explore how cultural production shapes our ways of being with others, within and beyond the nation.
Selected Publications
Edited collections
In Search of Right Relations: Provocations on Ethics and Life Stories. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2027. (ISBN 9781771127479)
Teaching Life Writing: Theory, Methodology, and Practice. Co-edited with Amanda Spallacci. Routledge, 2025. (ISBN 9781032781167)
Trans Narratives: trans, transmedia, transnational. Co-edited with Anna Horvat, Sarah McRae, and Julie Rak. Routledge, 2021. (ISBN 9781032058436)
Peer reviewed journal articles
“On Teaching Life Writing in an Age of Social Change.” Co-authored with Amanda Spallacci. “Teaching Life Writing: Theory, Methodology, and Practice” special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 37.3, 2022. doi: 10.1080/08989575.2022.2154437.
“Material Weapons: Paratext, Ethics, and Testimony in Carmen Aguirre’s Something Fierce.” “Testimonial Encounters in the Americas” special issue of AmLit – American Literatures edited by Molly Appel and Leila Pazargadi, 1.1 (Oct. 2021): 64-85. doi: 10.25364/27.1:2021.1.5 [open access].
“A VR Empathy Machine: Canada Reads 2019, Testimonial Transactions, and the Cunning of Affective Recognition.” Canadian Literature, 242 (2020): 58-78. https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/canlit/article/view/192411.
“Collaboration” co-authored with Maria Faini and Emma Maguire, in “What’s Next? The Futures of Life Writing” special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. 32.2 (2017): 247-250. doi: 10.1080/08989575.2017.1289017.
“From Qallunaat to James Bay: An Interview with Mini Aodla Freeman, Keavy Martin, Julie Rak, and Norma Dunning” co-authored with Rebecca Fredrickson, Brandon Kerfoot and Katherine Meloche. Canadian Literature 226 (Autumn 2015): 112-123. doi: https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i226.187571.