English Department

Christina Tourino

Assistant Professor of English

This past summer, Christina Tourino, associate professor of English at CSB/SJU, traveled to both Colombia and the Balkans. Her days abroad weren’t spent relaxing in the sun however.

In Colombia, she attended a conference on Columbian Literature where her fiancé Corey Shouse, CSB/SJU assistant professor of Modern and Classical Languages, presented a paper. Her trip to Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia was a chance to see the war-torn region with a group of CSB/SJU faculty. Funded by a gift from Dan Whalen, SJU alum ’70, the Balkans trip was designed to help Tourino and her colleagues better understand this area of conflict and enrich their classrooms with cross-cultural experiences. “I went to the Balkans because I’m interested in literatures that come out of national and ethnic crises. Being there in person helped me understand 'ethnicity' in literature and film differently than I understand it here in the States.”

Tourino will incorporate what she learned in the Balkans into her first-year Symposium class, where she already focuses on literatures from various cultures in crisis. “We begin with testimonial literature -- works that testify to a trauma in place of those who have died, often contradicting the 'official' version of history sanctioned by their national governments. Then we move beyond that strict definition to even fictional texts that seek to speak about some unspeakable historical event or crisis.”

Tourino’s students learn about human rights violations from around the globe, but they also learn what is at stake in the way those violations are recorded. Each year, Tourino’s Symposium visits the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “Students not only try to immerse themselves in the event to understand it better, but they also think of the Museum itself as a kind of multi-authored book to be considered for its effort to narrate a crisis in a particular way.”

In addition to her Symposium course, Tourino teaches an introduction to fiction course, “Courting Fiction,” where students read novels and philosophy that deal with the perils of love, romance and reading. She also teaches Multicultural Literatures of the U.S., where students read Jewish, Black, Latino and Asian American writings.

Tourino, who lives in St. Joseph with her dog Claire and cats Monkey and Gray, has taught at CSB/SJU since the fall of 2000. She received her bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish in 1990 from Willamette University, a small liberal arts university in Oregon. In May 2000, she graduated from Duke University with a Ph.D. from Duke’s Literature Program. Tourino decided to accept a job at CSB/SJU because of the “outstanding English department — strong, but also cooperative. I also love the fact that the school is small enough that faculty from other disciplines are available for collaboration.”

But, Tourino says, what really made her decision to come to CSB/SJU easy was the fact that there was an opening for an alto in the Collegeville Consort, a choir made up of community members and CSB/SJU students and faculty. “I’ve always loved music and it was important for me to continue to make music with others.”

Tourino recently published a paper on an Asian Canadian text; her next paper dealing with Cuban masculinity is forthcoming in a Purdue University Comparative Cultural Studies publication.

Tourino’s interest in multi-ethnic, feminist and comparative literature brings a unique perspective to her classroom. “English departments, which have always concerned themselves with works not originally written in English (think of Dante and Tolstoy) are now considering non-European writers as well. Teaching Central and Latin American Literatures provokes students into seeing U.S. literatures in a very different light.”