Heike Härting is Associate professor of English. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Victoria and joined the department in August 2003. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Research Centre on Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies at the Université de Montréal (Centre de recherche des études littéraires et culturelles sur la planétarité, CELCP), the first Centre of its kind in Canada. Trained in postcolonial and contemporary Canadian studies, her research concentrates on postcolonial literatures and theories, narratives of global violence and planetary health in African and Canadian literatures. Her current research projects examine the ways in which decolonial writing and bioart address, shift, and reconfigure hegemonic and colonially received discourses of the Anthropocene, of planetary geopolitical and geological transformations, and of planetary health (human and more-than-human).

Among others, she has published various articles, a co-edited special issue on "Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East" of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (with Nouri Gana, 2008), a special issue on peacekeeping narratives and security of the University of Toronto Quarterly (with Smaro Kamboureli,2009), a co-edited special issue of Transtext(e)s Transcultures on “Cinematic Im/mobilities in the Planetary Now” (with Johannes Riquet, 2023), and a book on Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (with Heather Meek, Routledge, 2024).  She is the lead investigator of the multidisciplinary research team Les études culturelles et littéraires sur la planétarité: Pratiques, épistémologies, et pédagogies transformatrices/ Cultural and Literary Planetary Studies: Practice, Epistemologies, and Transformative Pedagogies (funded by the Québec government, FRQSC Soutien aux équipes de recherche, 2020-2025). She is also the principal investigator of "Viral Conjunctures: Pandemics and Planetary Health Narratives." (2023-2027), a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is also a co-investigator and member of several research teams working on the creative intersections of care, well-being, and narrative. Her research is closely related to her pedagogical practice, which fosters collaborative, decolonial, intersectional, and reparative approaches to knowledge production and dissemination. She is involved in a number of pedagogical and communal initiatives (e.g., with the CÉGEP Vieux Montréal) and supervises various doctoral and MA projects related to contemporary literary and cultural planetary studies, the health humanities, and postcolonial and Canadian literatures.