ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University has been recognized again for its world-class researchers, contributing to its continued growth as one of Canada’s top research-intensive universities. This year, 93 of its researchers have been recognized as being among the world’s most-cited scholars — an increase from 85 last year.

The influential  has placed ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ researchers in the prestigious rankings of the world’s top 2% most-cited scholars, showcasing the impact of their innovative work in science, engineering, business, international affairs and the arts.

“Many of these researchers are at the forefront of their disciplines, advancing initiatives across key areas of strength for ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´,” says Rafik Goubran, Vice-President (Research, Innovation and International). “Our institution continues to grow a global presence in notable fields such as information and communication technologies, engineering, earth and environmental sciences, and health and wellness.”

The researchers are being recognized in 48 diverse disciplines, as they were last year, highlighting ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s commitment to innovative research and working with community and industry partners to drive real-world solutions to our society’s most complex and pressing challenges.

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A new podcast, , has been developed by Dr. Barbara Leckie and produced by Mary Stinson, former executive producer of CBC’s Writers and Co. with Eleanor Wachtel. CommonS Sense is a podcast about rethinking “common sense” for a livable future. Hosts Barbara Leckie and Joel Westheimer explore what counts as common sense through the lens of the commons broadly defined—shared resources, collective action, and public conversation.

Featuring high-profile guests Bill Ayers, Candis Callison, Bill McKibben, Astra Taylor and others, the show asks how reimagining common sense and the commons can contribute to more effective and just climate action.

 for Commons Sense — that’s commonS, with an ‘S’!

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As the pun indicates, “Research Talks” is a series of lectures on the work that English Faculty and Graduate Students are doing and an opportunity for the department’s research to speak and to be heard in the community. “Talks” also registers the informality of the occasion, where speakers can test mock presentations and entertain hypotheses with colleagues before taking them to a conference or submitting them for publication.

Research Talks

“Toward a Marxist Theory of Cultural Policy”

This talk outlines a new interpretation of the making of a global cultural policy since 1945. Using UNESCO as a case study, I argue for reading cultural policy in relation to the fate of the globalizing postwar economy. I outline three stages in the history of global cultural policy frameworks – postwar liberal cosmopolitanism, the development of age, and the neoliberal ‘creative economy’ era – and relate them to broad cycles of capitalist expansion, stagnation, and crisis.

“The stuff they put in the old readers’: Remembered and Recited Poetry in the Stories of Alice Munro”

This talk examines the representations of poetry recitation that recur throughout the work of Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. Munro’s stories explore the legacy of this once-widespread pedagogical practice by addressing the ambiguous ways in which memorized poetry circulates in people’s lives long after they have left school. Through her focus on the circulation of memorized poetry within families, Munro tests the claims made on behalf of the practice by educators who introduced it into Canadian schools, and by those who remember and seek to revive recitation in contemporary classrooms.

Katherine Parr and the Pleasures of Archival Research

For centuries, Tudor historians and literary scholars have assumed that the influential Anglican Prayer Book was composed entirely by senior male clergymen. In this talk I will show that the political “Prayer for the Queen’s Majesty” still used today was actually produced by Queen Katherine Parr for Henry VIII in 1544, and was put into the English Prayer Book by Queen Elizabeth I in 1558. As I outline the “facts” in this surprising historical narrative, I will draw attention to the challenges and joys of sleuthing in the archival records of Tudor England.

Sebastien Malette, “MĂŠtis Peoplehood and Ontology”

MĂŠtis politics provides a fantastic window to better understand Indigenous political movements. In the case of the MĂŠtis, it reveals at least two political ontologies. On the one hand, we find a political ontology influenced by binary classic nationhood criteria, requesting the “birth” of a “New People” grounded in what is conceived as an exclusionary delineated space: the “MĂŠtis Historic Homeland.” On the other hand, we see a more flexible and relational approach to MĂŠtis “peoplehood” that operates on the basis of a more relational, pragmatic and multi-centered approach to MĂŠtis identity.

Jennifer Henderson, “Neoliberal Memorialization and Indigenous Resurgence”

What does the Monument to the Victims of Communism have to do with the controlled admittance of residential schooling into a public narrative of Canadian history? This paper argues that the subjectification of residential school survivors is joined to the production of a ‘state-phobic’ social imaginary in the current moment. The work of a major theorist of indigenous resurgence, the Anishinabe writer and activist, Leanne Simpson, may be read as an intervention in this context.

Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Blacks and Jews: The Other 1492 and the Holocaust in the Caribbean Literary Imagination”

Caribbean writers regularly invoke two traumatic moments of Jewish historical experience: the Sephardic expulsions of the 1490s and the Holocaust. This talk argues that Caribbean literary treatments of Jewishness cannot be interpreted through the lens of Black-Jewish relations in the U.S. and especially not through a paradigm of “competitive memory.” Instead, they need to be contextualized with reference to the distinctive histories of contact and entanglement between Black and Jewish diaspora cultures in the Atlantic world.

Travis DeCook, “The Secular Bible: Disenchantment at the Intersection of Theology and Media Theory”

Media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Eugene Thacker have addressed the relationship between ideas about media and enchantment, the world’s permeability to the supernatural. This talk explores the intersections between this concern and a persistent tendency in theology to associate the Bible’s transition into early modernity with disenchantment. It offers a critique of this tendency and its assumptions about media, and in doing so raises complications for contemporary thinking about secularity.

Kamari Clarke, “Colonial Inscriptions, Postcolonial Sentimentalities”

Following Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s 2012 indictment by the International Criminal Court, this presentation examines his use of history and metaphor to demonstrate how contemporary postcolonial imagery is communicated through tropes that set conditions for future action. Linking histories of colonial domination with contemporary conditions of violence in Africa, narrative forms of encapsulation are mobilized to produce fetish-like histories that are difficult to contest in the postcolonial African context. The paper demonstrates how such cultural forms are used to produce imperatives that respond to colonialism, domination, and subjugation and that allow for the reinscription of the present in morally coherent ways.

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2023 English Graduate Student Society (EGSS) Conference

Community/Solitude: The Poetics and Praxis of Life in Transition

May 5^th, 2023, at 9:00 am to 7:00 pm
May 6^th, 2023, at 9:00 am to 4:30 pm

Click here for the conference program.

2021 English Graduate Student Society (EGSS) Conference

Recuperating Joy: Symbiotic Connections, Optimisms, and Unproblematic Faves
May 8-9, 2021

For more information visit the conference .

2019 English Graduate Student Society (EGSS) Conference

April 27-28, 2019

For more information visit the conference .

2014 Prestige of Literature Conference

October 10-11, 2014

Keynotes: Dr. James English, University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Lorraine York, McMaster University

This conference aims to explore the role that prestige plays in the contemporary literary marketplace. James English’s The Economy of Prestige, Gillian Roberts’s Prizing Literature, and Lorraine York’s Literary Celebrity in Canada are prominent examples of recent studies that consider how literary prizes—and debates about prize culture—confer and circulate prestige. English notes that prizes are both “a means of recognizing an ostensibly higher, uniquely aesthetic form of value” and “an arena in which such value often appears subject of the most businesslike system of production and exchange.” For example, when Johanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimentalists won the 2010 Giller Prize its independent publisher was forced to sell rights to a company that could handle the increased demand for copies. The ways in which authors can become prestigious have proliferated in recent years. A favourable review or interview in a respected publication, being endorsed by another renowned author, or having one’s work selected for a book club broadcast on radio or television—these are just a few of the paths to literature’s elite echelon of celebrated writers. Writers who reach such heights—Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, and Margaret Atwood, for example—have moreover used their prestige to draw attention not just to their own work but to other writers and to particular political causes. In recognition of the many forms and sources of prestige that have not yet been significantly studied, as well as furthering current studies on prestige, participants in this conference will consider how prestige is generated and managed, what it is used for, and how it is contested.

For more information, visit the conference

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This event provides an opportunity for doctoral candidates to share research, glean feedback, and gain experience presenting a paper in front of a large audience, the annual PhD Colloquium has proven itself invaluable as test-run for work in progress before it is presented at professional conferences and job talks.

2024

PhD Research Roundtable – April 11, 2024, Noon – 2 p.m. in DT 1811

Featuring four upper-year doctoral candidates in conversation with their supervisors, this roundtable will showcase exciting research being undertaken in our PhD program.

• Adam Dias on strategies of managing estrangement and identification in science fiction and fantasy
• Ross Chiasson on how Euro-American traditions of ruin-gazing dating back to the seventeenth century are (re)imagined in the virtual worlds of video games
• Cait Jones on how city novels by black Queer writers are pitched against racist legal frameworks in the medical system and in housing and immigration policy
• Sarah Pelletier on trade and craft identities as instruments of exclusion in nineteenth-century typographical journals

Supervisors Brian Johnson, Philip Kaisary, and Jody Mason will discuss the ways that these research projects intersect with and enrich their own. The roundtable will conclude with an open period of discussion.

Past Presenters:

2018

Dessa Bayrock: Canada Reads and the Gamification of Literary Awards

Todd Anderson: Marshalling Sacred Epigram in Early Modern England

Ryan Prittie: Don’t You Wish This Moment Could Last Forever? Scott Pilgrim and Slice-of-life Manga

Jenna Herdman: ’Thundering Wonders’ and the Working Classes at the Crystal Palace: Representations of the Great
Exhibition in Reynolds’s Newspaper

Veronika Kratz: Judith Merril: Anthologizing Canonical Science Fiction in the “Year’s Best” Series

2013-14

Bridgette Brown: Imperial Imaginings, Canadian Writing and the South African War (c. 1899)

Alexander Grammatikos: “Let Us Look At Them As They Are”: Lord Byron and Modern Greek Print Culture

Sarah Waisvisz: Murky Memory: Perpetrators and Complex Political Victims from the Literary Haitian Diaspora

2012-13

Andrew Connolly: What is the Literary Postsecular?

Christopher Doody: Reading 2.0: Amazon, Free Labour, and Exploitation

Robert Mousseau: Cultural Bulls Reading Literary Books: Exploring Influence in Authorship Through Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey

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Our PhD program was inaugurated in 2006 with a Speaker Series. Since then, we have welcomed internationally recognized scholars in the fields of literary and cultural studies to speak at this annual event, which has become a cornerstone of the doctoral program. 

Sally Chivers

PhD Speaker Series Fall 2025
Thursday, October 30, 2025, 4-5:30 p.m. in DT 1811

Sally Chivers is Full Professor of Gender & Social Justice at Trent University, where she is a Founding Executive Member and Past Director of the Trent Centre for Aging & Society. An award-winning interdisciplinary researcher best known for her path-building book, The Silvering Screen, Dr. Chivers has published extensively on the social and cultural politics of health, aging, and disability.

PUBLIC LECTURE: “Making the stories we tell about aging matter”
Thursday, October 30, 2025, 4-5:30 p.m. in DT 1811

The fear of getting old pervades cultural representations of older adults, even when scripts are eerily cheery. Domestic fiction with prominent older characters often hinges on fears about where an older character will live once living at “home” becomes unreasonably difficult. Cinema that features older characters presents exuberant active aging that tamps down terror about decline while also proliferating stories about the horrors of dementia. Public narratives about death in later life imply there is a right and wrong time to die, nudging audience members towards a belief that longevity is within their control. These are “just stories,” but they are stories that infiltrate social media, advertising, journalism, podcasts, public conversations, private conversations, and policy. With examples from my scholarly podcast Wrinkle Radio, the talk will focus on how skills gained through literary study have a role to play in interdisciplinary studies that seek to shift ageist policies and practice steeped in fear.

Everyone is welcome. No registration required.

Past Speakers

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

PhD SPEAKER SERIES WORKSHOP 2025
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 10-11:30 a.m. in DT 1812

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews (she/they) is a Filipinx-American poet and literary critic and an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of BETWEEN (2018, Finishing Line Press), winner of the New Women’s Voices award, and A Brief History of Fruit (2020, University of Akron Press), winner of the Akron Prize for poetry. Her scholarly monograph, The Academic Avant-Garde, is out now with Johns Hopkins University Press. Her critical work has won the Ralph Cohen Prize from New Literary History and a development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Dr. Andrews received her BA in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in poetry from Penn State University, and a PhD in English Language and Literature from Yale University.

Faculty and graduate students in FASS are warmly invited to join Dr. Andrews for a workshop “On ‘Interventions’: Positioning Your Research.” Please register in advance (link below).

In this seminar discussion, Dr. Andrews will lead us through the structure and argumentation of the introduction and first chapter of her recent monograph, The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University, a recent finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Through discussion of how Andrews’s work takes stock of its field and positions itself accordingly, students will come away with a sense of how to think about their own dissertations as book projects.

Please register for the workshop.

PUBLIC LECTURE: “Experimental Poetry and the Aesthetics of Criticism”
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 4-6 p.m. in DT 2017

What do we mean when we talk about “academic poetry” today? Drawing from arguments developed in The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Andrews will provide a surprising answer to that question, one that can help us see the links between the ongoing “crisis” of the humanities, the political economy of art-making, the history of educational reform, and the form of reading and writing that goes by the name of literary criticism. Poetry’s tendency toward compression and emotional intensity might seem diametrically opposed to criticism’s elongation and relative detachment. But when poetry begins to question its own form, the result is a sprawling subgenre that can help critics recognize and recommit to the formal qualities of their own thinking.

Everyone is welcome.

David Austin

David Austin is the author of Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution (2018) and Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal (2013, winner of the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize). He is editor of Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness (2018) and You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James (2009). He has also produced radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas on C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon. A former youth worker and community organizer, he currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College and is a Lecturer in the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

PhD SPEAKER SERIES WORKSHOP 2024: “Sociology and Prophecy as Poetry: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Phenomenology of Violence”
Monday, January 29, 2024, 10 – 11:30 a.m. in DT 1812

Faculty and graduate students in English are warmly invited to join David Austin for a workshop on Linton Kwesi Johnson. This workshop will be of interest to those working on twentieth-century literature and culture, twentieth-century poetry and performance, and Black Studies.Drawing on his poems, this workshop will explore Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry and prose as part of a tradition of dread poetry as prophecy (revelation). Invoking AimĂŠ CĂŠsaire and Frantz Fanon, we will discuss Johnson’s poems “Dread Beat an’ Blood,” “Five Nights of Bleeding,” and “Doun de Road,” and his poetic essay “Jamaican Rebel Music” as part of his phenomenology of violence. For a copy for the readings and confirming your attendance, please contact Prof. Jody Mason, by January 22, 2024, at jody.mason@carleton.ca.

PUBLIC LECTURE: “C.L.R. James: Philosopher of the Dispossessed”
Monday, January 29, 2024, 4 – 6 p.m. in DT 2017

OPEN TO ALL

C.L.R. James was one of the great minds of the 20th century. James was a true polymath who made significant contributions in the areas of politics, philosophy, sports and aesthetics, history, literature, literary criticism, and Marxist theory. Ultimately, James was a socialist who fought and thought to change the world. The lecture will explore James’s life and ideas and situate him within his formative years in the Caribbean. Light refreshments will follow the lecture.

Claire Battershill

Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English and a short fiction writer. Her research focuses on 20^th and 21^st century book history, digital archives, and experimental literature. She’s the author of Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014); Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (Bloomsbury 2018); and Women and Letterpress Printing: Gendered Impressions 1920-2020 (Cambridge 2022), as well as several articles and co-authored and collaborative publications. She’s also a co-director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) a digital archive of 20th century publishing history.

BOOK ARTS LAB WORKSHOP: “Accordion Play”
Thursday, March 16, 2023
11 a.m. – 1 p.m. in the Book Arts Lab (MacOdrum 234E & 234F)

In this book making and creative writing workshop, we will make simple accordion books and consider the types of narratives and poems best suited to this simple but evocative form of paper folding. The accordion’s musical associations, its elongated structure and its capacity for doubleness make it a particularly enjoyable form for experimentation. Through a series of writing prompts and accordion making exercises we’ll experiment with the aesthetic, material, and literary potential of this form. No previous experience in book arts or creative writing is required.

PUBLIC LECTURE: “Constellations and Marks on the Wall: Metaphorical Methodologies and the Gendered History of Letterpress Printing”
Thursday, March 16, 4 – 6 p.m. in DT 1811

OPEN TO ALL

This talk will present historiographical methodologies particularly suited to the study of gender and literary letterpress printing from the early 20th century to the beginning of the 21st. Through a series of examples of letterpress practitioners and literary letterpress artists, I consider how and why we might approach the study of women printers in a constellated rather than a comprehensive fashion. The figure of the constellation and indeed material metaphorical ways of thinking can help us with the extremely challenging process of example selection in a time period that is so full, so diverse, and so complex that drawing out particular examples almost inevitably feels either overdetermined by existing canons of print culture or feminist history or else completely random. Thinking about feminist historiography as a constellated practice, and seeking metaphors that allow for fragile archives, indeterminate narratives, and speculative approaches, allows patterns and suggestions of meaning to come into and fall out of view; it suggests that some kind of narrative is possible, but that comprehensiveness is not the goal.

Cheryl Suzack

SEMINAR WORKSHOP: “Historicizing Indigenous Dispossession”
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
10 a.m. – Noon in DT 1216

*SPACES LIMITED* Graduate students and faculty please register via email to priya.kumar@carleton.ca, to receive pre-circulated readings.

PUBLIC LECTURE: “Transnational Indigenous Feminisms”
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
2:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. in DT 1811

OPEN TO ALL

Cheryl Suzack is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Indigenous law and literature with a particular emphasis on writing by Indigenous women. In her book, Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law (U of T Press 2017), she explores how Indigenous women’s writing from Canada and the United States addresses case law concerning tribal membership, intergenerational residential school experiences, and land claims.

Her current project analyzes Justice Thurgood Marshall’s papers in the context of Indian civil rights claims from the 1960s. She is a co-editor (with Greig Henderson and Simon Stern) of “The Critical Work of Law and Literature,” University of Toronto Quarterly (Fall 2013) and a co-editor and contributor (with Shari Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman) to the award-winning collection, Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (UBC 2010).

Andrew Piper

WORKSHOP: “Modeling Plot” (open to Graduate Students and Faculty)
Thursday, February 5, 2015
12:30-2:30 p.m., Gordon Wood Lounge (1811 Dunton Tower) 

Please register in advance for the workshop: lana.keon@carleton.ca

In this workshop we’ll read recent pieces that discuss new computational methods for studying plot at large scale, including my new article, “Novel Devotions: Conversional Reading, Computational Modeling, and the Modern Novel,” which will be appearing this Spring in New Literary History. What is the relationship between plot and language? What functions do different plot structures serve? How can we best measure these across large collections of texts? And what role does modeling play in the interpretive process? These are some of the questions I hope we can address during our workshop.

PUBLIC LECTURE: “Of Topics and Topoi: On Spatial Reading”
Friday, February 6, 2015
1:30-3:30 p.m., Gordon Wood Lounge (1811 Dunton Tower)

With all of the recent work that uses topic models to study large amounts of texts, no one has as yet stopped to ask the question, “What is a topic?” Ranging from classical rhetoric to computational models, this talk will explore the nature of topics and the way they are currently being understood and deployed within the field of cultural and literary analytics. My goal is to better understand the nature of computational topics and the types of conceptual entities for which they stand, and more importantly, the way they represent open, generative language fields rather than closed conceptual units.

Andrew Piper is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. His work explores the application of computational approaches to the study of literature and culture with a particular emphasis on network theory. He directs the digital humanities laboratory, .txtLAB @ McGill, and is the lead investigator on two multinational research projects, the Digging into Data project, “Global Currents: Cultures of Literary Networks, 1050-1900,” and the SSHRC partnership grant, “Novel^TM: Text Mining the Novel,” which brings together 21 partners across North America. He is the author most recently of Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago 2012) as well as Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago 2009), which was awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book and honourable mention for the Harry Levin Prize for the American Comparative Literature Association.

Jodi Dean

“Enclosing the Subject” (from current project, Crowds and Party)
November 21, 2014
Workshop, 12:30-2:30 p.m., Gordon Wood Lounge (1811 Dunton Tower) (open to graduate students only, please register in advance: lana.keon@carleton.ca)

This paper inverts Althusser’s claim that the individual is interpellated as a subject. Arguing that the subject is interpellated as an individual, it engages Freud’s discussion of group psychology to demonstrate the enclosure of the collective subject of politics in the individual form.

“Crowds and Publics”
Public Lecture, 3:30-5:30 p.m.
2017 Dunton Tower

Since 2011, the most important social actor worldwide has been the crowd. The most pressing political challenge has been the struggle over, around, and through the crowd: of what politics is the crowd the subject? Drawing from early crowd theory and its inversion in contemporary business porn as the “wisdom of crowds,” this talk considers the affective and disruptive dimension of crowds. Crowds force a relation to politics different from that theorized around ideas of publicity and publics, a relation that draws out the necessity of political division.

—âśÄ”âśÄ”âśÄ”âśÄ”

Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York and Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Jodi Dean is one of the most exciting and incisive diagnosticians of our contemporary moment. Spanning the theoretical terrain of feminism, media theory, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, her work offers a profound and far-reaching challenge to the complacencies of the neoliberal imagination. She is the author of The Communist Horizon (2012), Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of the Drive (2010), Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (2009), Žižek’s Politics (2006), Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (2002), Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (1998), and Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After Identity Politics (1996).

2012-13

Priscilla Wald (Duke University), “How Do You Know You’re Human?: Bioslavery in the Moment of Biotechnology”

Alan Galey (University of Toronto), “The Dark Basement of the Digital Humanities: Shakespeare and the Prehistory of the New Media Prototype”

2009-10

Heather Murray (University of Toronto), “The CANLIT Project, and the Question of a National Reader”

2008-2009

Mary Poovey (New York University), “Discriminating Reading”

Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania), “The Materiality of Writing”

Ato Quayson (University of Toronto), “Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies: Spaces, Dialogues, Controversies”

2007-08

Timothy Brennan (University of Minnesota), “Intellectual Labor”

Seth Lerer (Stanford University), “Lyric Times: Voice and Text in Medieval Literature”

2006-07

Christine Bold (University of Guelph), “Cowboys and Publishers: The Emergence of Transatlantic Popular Print Culture”

Linda Hutcheon (University of Toronto), “In Defense of Literary Adaptation as Literary Production”

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The ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´-Ottawa University Medieval and Renaissance Society is a collection of scholars, both graduate students and faculty, who live and work in the Ottawa-Kingston area. We gather on average twice a year for events that have in the past included colloquia, work-in-progress presentations, discussions of recent major publications in the field, and lectures by visiting scholars. We also try to gather for a party or reception at least once a year. Our get-togethers are an opportunity for early periods scholars from a variety of disciplines and universities to share their work and meet other people working in their periods in the area. The group also organizes panels at conferences held further afield (e.g. Kalamazoo Medieval Congress).

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Organized by a professor from the English department, the graduate student reading group is a great way to explore literary and cultural theory at both beginner and advanced levels. This longstanding group is known for its relaxed atmosphere and for bringing grad students and profs together to expand their theoretical knowledge in directions not covered by coursework. During the first few weeks of classes, BABEL’s faculty facilitator arranges a meeting with interested grad students to create a reading list and to arrange a schedule for the year. Even though the reading group is not a formal requirement to the program, students are encouraged to attend this venue, since its exploratory scope will greatly assist them in developing the theoretical dimensions of their research projects, grant proposals, and dissertations.

Winter 2025

Tues. Jan. 28

• Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s Philosophy of Nonsense (Introduction, pp. 1-26)

Past Sessions

Fall 2023

Tues. Nov. 7

• Introduction to Mari Ruti’s The Singularity of Being

Fall 2021

Fri. Sept. 24

• Planning meeting

Winter 2020

Thurs. Jan. 23

• Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocence, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), 159-165

Thurs. Feb. 13

• Mikhail Bakhtin, excerpts from Rabelais and his World: Holquist Prologue, Bakhtin Intro, and Chapter 1 pages 59-94.

Thurs. Mar. 12

• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, pages 22 – 68

NOTE: All meetings in Gordon Wood Lounge (DT 1811) with the exception of the meeting on Feb. 13th which will be held in DT 1816. Readings are available as PDFs. Please contact the Graduate Administrator.

Fall 2019

Oct 17: Derridean deconstruction

• selections from Margins of Philosophy: 12-15, 309-330 (1982)
• selections from Of Grammatology: xiv-xxi, lxvi-lxxix, 27-39, 68-73, 144-164 (1974)

Nov 14: recent thinking on the commons

• Slavoj Zizek, “How To Begin From the Beginning” (2009)
• Lauren Berlant, “The commons: infrastructures for troubling times” (2016)

Dec 5: conjunctural analysis in cultural studies

• selections from Stuart Hall et al, Policing the Crisis: read Intro, 218-227, 254-272, 306-323, 378-397 (1978)
• Jeremy Gilbert, “This Conjuncture” (2019)

NOTE: All meetings in Gordon Wood Lounge (DT 1811). Readings are available as PDFs. Please contact the Graduate Administrator.

Fall 2017

Friday, October 20th, 1:00-2:30

Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” Perspecta 12 (1969): 163-72.

Siegfried Kracauer, “Two Planes,” “Analysis of a City Map,” and “Farewell to the Linden Arcade,” from The Mass Ornament (36-44, 336-342) [these are extremely short]

Friday, November 3rd, 1:00-2:30

Jane Jacobs, “The Uses of City Neighborhoods,” The Death and Life of American Cities (112-140).

Friday, November 17th, 1:00-2:30

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “The City: The Sewer, The Gaze, and the Contaminating Touch,” The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (125-48).

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