This week, I sat down with Professor Caoimhe Harlock after one of her classes, The Trans Renaissance: Contemporary Transgender Fiction and Film. Caoimhe, pronounced KEE-vah, has just begun her first semester teaching at Hampshire College, and after just a few weeks, has a positive outlook on the rest of her tenure here.
“I think classes have been going great,” says Caoimhe, who had been looking forward to meeting Hampshire students ever since responding to the College’s job advertisement. “Some of the first opportunities I got to teach were with really engaged students,” and Hampshirites fortunately fit that description.
Not only is this Caoimhe’s first time at Hampshire, but her first time living in New England.
Hailing from rural Florida, Caoimhe spent her twenties receiving her higher education in the southern U.S., attending University of Texas Austin, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and receiving her master’s degree in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I ask Caoimhe what she thinks about living in Massachusetts. She appreciates what living up north has to offer, despite how different it is from her previous milieu. “I really like how rural Amherst is,” she says, “It’s good for my soul to live where there’s a bunch of dairy farms.”
I ask Caoimhe about what she likes to do outside of teaching, and our conversation steers towards film.
Caoimhe shares that she spent much of her twenties watching works with “dour themes about religion and existentialism, the search for meaning and all that,” like those of Swedish director Ingmar Bergen. Caoimhe also enjoys the post-war work of Japanese directors Kenji Mizoguchi and Masaki Kobayashi. On a more lighthearted note, Caoimhe suggests the campy, anti-fascist Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge.
In addition to film, Caoimhe mentions that she plays the bass – “not very well, but I like it” – and spends time at home with her partner, her cats, and her dog, where she does what she loves most, which is creative writing and making comics.
Caoimhe’s debut novel, which she is putting the final touches on, is called Take Up the Serpent, about “a young trans girl living in rural Florida whose father is an Evangelical minister.”
After Take Up the Serpent, Caoimhe hopes to start work on an untitled novel, which she describes as a spiritual sequel to The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.
Both of her novels draw on her Evangelical upbringing in Florida. “My relationship to religion as a kid was kind of a violent one,” Caoimhe shares, and after leaving her home, she had a period of “reactionary atheism.” However, later in adulthood, she began to reforge her relationship with spirituality and is now a self-described practitioner of witchcraft and a priestess of the goddess Hecate. “I like to think of transness in spiritual as well as social and cultural dimensions,” Caoimhe says. Caoimhe’s comic strip “Mothers,” available on her website keevacomix.com, speaks beautifully to the experience of femininity and transness through a spiritual lens.
In the final minutes of our conversation, I ask Caoimhe if there are any books or artworks that she would recommend to Leapfrog readers. She praises the graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris, about a young queer girl growing up in the late fifties and early sixties Chicago who relates to horror movies and imagines herself as a werewolf. Caoimhe also plugs Dostoevsky once more, saying that “The Brothers Karamazov is a difficult book that remains relevant in a lot of surprising ways,” nearly 150 years after its initial publication.
In a short amount of time, my interview of new professor Caoimhe Harlock has given me a deeper understanding of her background, her personality, and her interests, showing that she is part of a cohort of people that Hampshire College will appreciate and welcome with open arms. Look out for more Professor Profiles in future issues of Leapfrog as I sit down with more new faculty this semester, and keep an eye on The Hub for Caoimhe’s classes in the spring!
