Christine Lahey
Adjunct Faculty
MA, Wayne State University; BA, Wayne State University
Christine Lahey has taught at CCS for 38 years, specializing in interdisciplinary studies and fairy tales. She has created courses on The Fairy Tale: Art, Literature and Film, as well as Imaging: Visual/Verbal Crossovers. She is currently interested in Icelandic Sagas and medieval travellers’ tales. Most recently, her family’s long emigrant history (since 1648) in New France (Quebec) has provided material for her poetry. She is also interested in the rise of Modernism, especially as expressed in the Sitwells, a trio of British siblings extremely influential in arts and literature in the last century. Christine has one of the largest private collections of Sitwelliana in the United States.
Professional Experience
Christine Lahey has taught in the Liberal Arts department since 1981. Back in 1987 Christine participated in a revolutionary synthesis course “Culture, Art and Society” in which multiple faculty from across the departments in the College delivered weekly lectures in the Music School auditorium (now the site of the Walter B. Ford Building); her segment was “Literary and Art Treatments of the Holocaust” which she shared with art historian Nancy Barat. Since then she has developed a popular course on the fairy tale, offered since 1996, which considers both traditional tales from the European canon (Perrault/Brothers Grimm) as well as revisionist contemporary versions and non-Western tales such as The Arabian Nights and the Panchatantra. Recently she has delivered papers at national conferences on tale types and strategies for teaching fairy tales to visually-gifted students. Her published work includes articles and reviews in The Georgia Review and Ball State University Forum.
Significant Publications, Presentations and Exhibitions
Poem: “Motor City Men” in George C. Galester, Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2012.
Poem: “Dan’s Shoe Repair: 1959” in the anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. Edited by Charles Fishman. St. Louis, MO: Time Being Books. 2007.
Two Poems: “Afterglow” and “Motor City Men” in the anthology Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry 2001. Wayne State University Press.
Two Poems: “Afterglow” and “Hot July Night” in All’s Normal Here: A Charles Bukowski Primer, edited by Loss Glazier. Ruddy Duck Press. 1985.
Chapbook: Sticks and Stones. Detroit: Urban Despair Books.1980.
Exhibition: Black Night Series (interdisciplinary poetry/photography).
College for Creative Studies. Juried Faculty Show. 2005
Exhibition: Black Night Series. “1991 Michigan Council for the Arts Grant Recipients”. Detroit Artists Market. 1991.
Multimedia Performance of Poem Sequence “Houses” danced by professional mimes with handmade paper screens. Alvin’s Bar, Detroit. 1986.
