Homecoming for Professor

Returning to Manawatu and Massey is a homecoming for Professor Casie Hermansson. Having been raised in Palmerston North and now living in Kansas, she arrived back in the city in July for a six-month stint as a visiting professor at Massey’s English department.

Professor Hermansson has strong ties to the city and University – her parents are retired Massey academics, and she did a Bachelor of Arts in English and French at Massey, and then honours in English in 1990.

After travelling abroad and teaching in a French high school, she got a scholarship to study at the University of Toronto, where she completed a master’s and then a doctorate. Her dissertation was on how the Bluebeard fairy-tale had been rewritten by 20th Century feminist writers.

Bluebeard is a grisly folktale about a serial wife murderer, and was a nursery staple until early last year century when it was edited out of children’s books for being too frightening. The most famous version was by Charles Perrault and published in 1697 – but many French, English and American versions have developed.

Professor Hermansson says Bluebeard was a topic of fascination amongst 20th Century women artists so “it was really ripe for looking at through a feminist lens to see what feminist artists have done with it”.  She has published two Bluebeard books, and recently Clever Milly, her own, “kid-friendly” version of the famous folktale.

Professor Hermansson, who teaches English at Pittsburgh State University in Kansas, has also written novels, poems and short stories, and is currently writing a spy series for teenagers with reading difficulties.

Her research while in New Zealand focuses on adapting children’s literature to film, and she is also collaborating with Massey colleagues – some of whom were her teachers when she was here as a student. She will give a seminar next month on her current research.

But her time in Palmerston North is also about reconnecting with family, and introducing her children Griffin, 10, and Corin, 8, to the Kiwi way of life.

“I’ve been gone for 23 years, my family are still here, and my children are American children, so it is important for them to see where I grew up, and to experience some Kiwi culture. For me this is a homecoming, for my kids it is an adventure."