While we live in an age of information with fast facts and explainer videos just a tap away, certain histories and stories are becoming harder and harder to find.

This seemingly contradictory phenomenon is explored in ā€œBan this Book: Censorship, Sexuality, and Questions of Harm,ā€ a unique graduate course offered at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ University that encourages students to take direct, local action against censorship.

Throughout the course, students learn about the different laws, policies, trials, and practices used to target books, bookstores, libraries, and schools for representations of marginalized sexual and gender identities ā€“ and, more recently, racialized identities and information about racist and imperial histories.

Taught by English professor Jodie Medd, the goal of the course is to educate about this history of censorship and connect that history to the challenges we face today, such as to remove certain books from their libraries.

To that end, the course gives students the opportunity to work together on a community engagement group project relevant to what theyā€™ve been discussing in class.

For example, the courseā€™s Fall 2025 cohort helped organize a public talk by celebrated storyteller Ivan Coyote, created and distributed their own zine, volunteered at a new Ottawa-based , designed a ā€œdangerous booksā€ display in the MacOdrum Library on campus, and raised money for the Ottawa Trans Library, just to name a few projects.

ā€œIn a course that tackled pressing ā€“ and depressing! ā€“  issues that could lead to a sense of despair or overwhelm, the class members generated joy, excitement, and possibility through their process of working together to make some lovely and powerful things happen,ā€ says Prof. Medd.

Two graduate students reflect on their community engagement projects, in their own words:

What, if any, books are truly dangerous?

By Ashley Menard (MA student in English)

In Prof. Meddā€™s ā€œBan this Bookā€ course, I worked with three classmates ā€“ Malak Zaid, Joyce Friesen, and Ally Robidoux ā€“ to create a library display called ā€œAre These Books Dangerous?ā€

The display paired vivid visuals that hinted at each bookā€™s themes with short text summarizing the book and explaining the challenges those titles have faced (and still face) in Canadian contexts. Although many of the books have not been formally banned, we wanted to spark discussion about what makes a book ā€œdangerous,ā€ and what motivates attempts to restrict it.

Our research suggested that outright bans are relatively rare in Canada, but challenges are not, and they come from a wide range of concerns across the political spectrum. I was surprised by the diversity of reasons, since I expected conservative and reactionary values to drive most objections, but found progressive concerns also drove challenges.

Finally, I noticed that many challenges claim to protect youth, from young children to teens, yet young people themselves had little voice in the proceedings I reviewed. Listening to those most directly affected could be an important step in deciding what, if any, books are truly dangerous.

Circumventing obstacles to knowledge through DIY publishing

By Maya Chorney (PhD student in English)

Payton Leigh, Laura Oā€™Gallagher, Madeleine Vigneron, and I formed our group based on a shared interest in doing something with zines. After discussing a few possibilities, such as hosting a zine workshop, we ultimately decided that making one of our own would be the best way for us to share ideas and research inspired from this class with the general Ottawa community.

To develop the zine, we each took up topics related to the course and broader issues of censorship that we were most interested in. The result is a multi-media research-creation project that features mini essays, poetry, an interview with a community member, interactive prompts, and other resources that we hope will equip readers with knowledge to better understand censorship and tools to fight back against the kinds of regressive politics we have been discussing throughout the semester.

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My name is Ayla, Iā€™m an undergraduate English student at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ University, and I’m currently finishing up my three-term Co-op experience. When I first began, I thought I would be working ā€˜English-specificā€™ jobs like technical editing or working as an intern at a publishing house. Now, towards the end, Iā€™ve learned that the skills Iā€™ve built during my degree have allowed me to contribute meaningfully in a variety of professional environments: the , and .Ģż

Kanata North Business Association (KNBA)

It comes as a surprise to some that as an English major, I spent the first of my three Co-op work terms immersed in technology. 

My first placement was with the Kanata North Business Association (KNBA). The KNBA represents the 540+ member companies which are in Kanata North Tech Parkā€”a designated business improvement area. 

One of the major events that I helped to plan was the Annual Technata Hackathon. The event focused on sustainability and invited students from ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““, the University of Ottawa and Algonquin College to participate in group mentorship and problem solving. Planning the event was a test to my time management skills, which were luckily already quite strong from balancing assignments in university. From organizing the catering to organizing the participants and mentors, I learned how to juggle not only my own time and expectations, but othersā€™ as well.  

One of the highlights from this event was interviewing the participants, mentors and sponsors, whose responses I used to write an article on the event. In my degree, the lectures and materials have always invited discussion. The interpersonal skills acquired through these discussions allowed me to interview confidently and effectively. This article led to my favourite project of the work term, which was organizing and editing the KNBAā€™s annual publication TechTalk. This magazine was printed and distributed at the annual partnerā€™s summit, and it included my article on the Hackathon.

For a few of my written deliverables, I was asked to write on topics which I was not familiar with, featuring ā€˜up-and-comingā€™ technology. One such instance was when I was asked to write a blog post on semiconductors, which was meant to kick-start Chip Month (October). I didnā€™t have a clue what a semiconductor was, and up until this point, would have guessed it was some kind of semi-truck. However, my degree has helped hone my research abilities. After asking a friend in engineering to explain the concept, reading through various articles and publications and asking AI to help simplify the topic, I was able to write a blog post explaining the ā€˜whatā€™ and ā€˜whyā€™ of a semiconductor. 

Working in the Kanata North Tech Park, I learned how versatile my degree was, and how many opportunities there were for an English major that no one thinks or talks about. 

Library and Archives Canada

My second work term was spent at the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) branch of Library and Archives Canada (LAC). While it is difficult to picture an English major in a Tech Park, LAC is exactly where you would picture one. 

I worked largely on one project throughout the summer term, which I will first contextualize. Under the Privacy Act, there are exceptions for when LAC can release information which would normally be redacted. One of these exceptions is 8(2)(m)(i), which allows government institutions to release information in the ā€˜public interest.ā€™ However, ā€˜public interestā€™ is interpretive, and it is therefore difficult to determine when an invasion of privacy is warranted. LAC is investigating how this section could be applied to Indigenous information. Like the rest of ATIPā€™s teams, the Indigenous records team is backlogged. Normally, information is released through an informal processing of requests under 8(2)(k) of the Privacy Act, however, this too is time-consuming. Unlike a non-Indigenous citizen requesting information, these requests often pertain to land claims, historical grievances, etc. which are often urgent in nature. Additionally, under OCAP (ownership, control, access, and privacy) which are the governing principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, First Nation, Inuit and MĆ©tis governments require access to their own information to properly practice self-governance. Canada has committed to reconciliation, and data sovereignty is a part of that.

While a Library and Archives might be an expected workplace for an English major, policy work is not necessarily included in that association. However, once again, my research skills were advantageous in this role. My work involved researching various Indigenous, First Nation and MĆ©tis organizations and reading through the reports that they had published concerning the Privacy and Access to Information Acts. Additionally, it involved reading through suggested policy changes and familiarizing myself with the concept on Indigenous Data Sovereignty. 

This research accumulated into a 25-page report wherein I made the case for why LAC needed a policy for releasing Indigenous information under 8(2)(m)(i) (ā€˜public interestā€™), as the current structures were an obstacle to Indigenous Data Sovereigntyā€”an incredibly important issue. 

This work term was incredibly fulfilling, as it allowed me to work on a real-world issue, and broaden my understanding of information, data and ownership. Bringing this knowledge back to my degree, I have a greater appreciation for information accessible to me in my studies. 

Hydro Ottawa

My third, and current, work term is with Hydro Ottawa. Again, this is a position not expected for an English major, and I often receive confused looks when I tell people that I work for an energy corporation. Despite this, I believe this placement to be the most related to my degree. 

I work on the Corporate Planning team responsible for internal reporting. Internal reporting includes deliverables such as the Annual Reports, Quarterly Reports, the CEOā€™s communications, the Boardā€™s presentations to Hydro Ottawaā€™s shareholder (the ), and the 5-year Strategic Direction.Ģż

Thus far in my placement, I have worked on confidential presentations for my supervisor and for the board and am currently assisting in authoring the new 5-year Strategic Direction. I am incredibly excited to be working on this document, as it details the companyā€™s plans for the next five years. Additionally, both through working on the presentations and now on the Strategic Direction, I am learning to write in a completely new way. Corporate writing is incredibly concise and should be accessible for most people. This means breaking down syntax, and asking myself ā€œWhat am I trying to say? Can I say it in fewer words?ā€ While building on my written communication skills from my degree, I am also adding new ones. 

Another learning curve has been the operational pace of the team. Because we have so many deadlines, it is an incredibly fast-paced working environment. It has pushed me to be even more efficient in my time-management, and to work under tight deadlines. This has been incredibly rewarding as I am able to directly see where my work is going and the impact it is having. And… I am writing and reading… All day, every day (an English majorā€™s dream). 

I am learning an incredible amount in this work termā€”about energy, my own writing and the corporate setting in general. It is demanding, but it is rewarding, and it has pushed and challenged me in ways that, I believe, will best prepare me for any work environment that I might enter after graduation.

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When I chose English as my major, the question I was asked was: ā€œWhat are you going to do with that degree?ā€ Before I went into the program, my answer was straight-forward: ā€œAn editor.ā€ Now, after two and half Co-op experiences, my answer has been to reframe the question itself. Rather than: ā€œWhat are you going to do with that degree?ā€ (because, really, to list off the various jobs seems a bit tedious), I would instead prefer to respond to the question of: ā€œWhat skills and experiences are you gaining through an English degree?ā€ I am learning communications, interpersonal relations, analysis, and, while I could go on, I will end with, critical thinking.

This last one is especially important in countering the new, though no less intimidating, question of: ā€œWell, isnā€™t AI just going to replace you anyways?ā€. In some ways this question felt more insultingā€”the idea that a machine could do (better) what we’re spending years studying.

My initial reaction to society’s obsession with AI was to ignore its existence entirely. I refused to engage with any of the platforms outside of the few class assignments which mandated AI exploration. This approach worked while I was in school, and the idea that, if my will was strong enough, I could put the cat back in the bag was believable for a time.

So, imagine my surprise, when, on my second day of Co-op work at the Kanata North Business Association (KNBA), I was asked what they could be doing to better implement AI into their workflows. Apparently, I belong to the ā€˜technologicalā€™ generation, and I should just ā€˜know these things.ā€™ What I had just spent the last year resisting, I would now have to wholeheartedly embrace and… advise on?

When I first started working with AI, it felt like a betrayal to my English degree. It felt like I was training the very entity that would eventually replace me. However, it was also through working with AI that I learned that would not happen, and that I was not replaceable.

On my first day of work at Hydro Ottawa, I was told by my supervisor that they were specifically looking to hire an English major. Rather than taking AIā€™s outputs at face value, I am able to read, analyse, comprehend and think critically on the content it is producing, which are all desirable skills.

One such example is writing a blog on semiconductors at the KNBA. I was tasked with simplifying the subject so that it was digestible for a wide audience. However, this was a technology that I was not familiar with. I did my own research, but the terminology was foreign ā€“ so how could I break it down for others, if I did not understand it myself?

Because I didnā€™t have the time to research extensively, I put my notes into ChatGPT and asked it to explain the information as if it were speaking to a ten-year-old. This helped me to understand what semiconductors were, and why they were important, so that I could write the blog post in a way that made sense to others.

AI did not do my work for me, it did not replace my abilities or skills, but rather it enhanced my productivity.  

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is a poet, novelist, storyteller and veteran whose novel Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures is available from Double Dagger Press.

Today, Matt writes and teaches in Paris: leadership at the Ɖcole Militaire and creative writing at SciencesPo. His many published works interrogate themes of dehumanization, poetics, monsters, masculinity, cross-cultural exchange, and healing. He also co-hosts the by-donation Write Time workshop, and organizes fitness enthusiasts who use trees as barbells: the Log Club.

Follow his work and receive .

ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ the Novel

Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures tracks Jones, a drone operator stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2010. As he monitors Sahar, a teenager and suspected terrorist, Jones commits the ultimate crime: he cares.

Jonesā€™s supervisor is similarly stained, a fierce soldier who champions Afghan women. By day, Jones and the Major track Taliban down the cratered highways. By night, they wish their love had never hurt so many.

Beneath the base, Jones befriends Noah who, despite his cruel fangs and horrifying strength, is the only gentle creature in the entire desert. As Jones contends with a brutal predator stalking soldiers, Noahā€™s bids for freedom grow desperate, and the fighting season renews with a fresh crop of Taliban.

In Kandahar, thereā€™s a monster in every window. And thereā€™s also one in every mirror. As the war grinds him to ever-finer particles, Jones grapples with the tollā€”madness, craters, grief.

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By Emily Putnam

ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ā€™s own Sarah Phillips Casteel will be launching her new book, , published in Columbia University Press’ new , at the on Thursday April 11.

The first-of-its-kind book delves into a variety of often neglected literary and artistic creations that illuminate Black wartime experience in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.

This work underscores the importance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

Casteel says that within Holocaust studies, there has been increasing attention to neglected or overlooked victim groups. 

ā€œBecause the numbers of Black victims were relatively small, they have tended to be overlooked or to be perceived as less significant. I don’t agree with that perspective, but I think it has played into the invisibility of Black experience during World War II.ā€

She says a number of other components contributed to the lack of acknowledgement thus far.

In an often-overlooked aspect of World War II history, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were in some cases subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps.

Casteel explains that it was artworks, in particular the ā€™s and Ghanaian Canadian writer ā€™s novel that initially got her interested in this neglected topic.

“I think there has been a systemic erasure of Black historical experience in wartime Europe as well as more broadly,” says Casteel. “I became really intrigued with what writers and artists have done to draw attention to a chapter of the war that scholars, museums, and other institutions had overlooked.”

Emphasizing Black agency, Casteelā€™s book explores both testimonial art by Black victims of the Nazi regime and creative works by Black writers and visual artists that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime era. 

In the absence of public recognition, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of overlooked Black victims of the Third Reich. Their works shed light on the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in shaping collective memory.

ā€œIt’s been an interesting research challenge, just trying to find traces of these Black wartime stories,ā€ says Casteel. ā€œPart of the challenge is that the Nazis didn’t have a designated category for Black prisoners. So that makes it harder to trace their presence in the camp system and in the archive.ā€

Among the artworks Casteel examines in the book are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist , the jazz fiction of African American novelist , Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist .

Casteel hopes that people will take away from the book a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of different histories of oppression and the diversity of experiences of Nazi persecution. 

She notes that utilizing visual sources enables new narratives to surface.

“Because this is a hyper-visible victim group, it’s sometimes easier to find traces of Black stories in the visual documents as opposed to the textual ones because the archive has not always recorded their presence well. Whereas when you have something like the Josef Nassy Collection, you can access a story that wasn’t recorded in written form.”

Casteel says that she is struck by how artists have often pointed to underrepresented narratives before scholars have.

She explains that a combination of storytelling mediums was essential to uncovering these histories.

ā€œI came to the conclusion that when you’re faced with a history that’s been so invisible and so suppressed, you end up having to draw on all the resources of all the different media that you can in order to try to recover it. I think that’s why I ended up putting the book together in this wayā€”why the book is so eclectic in terms of the range of artistic genres and mediums that it addresses.ā€

Casteel hopes that her work will reach beyond academia and help to bridge gaps in the historical awareness of who was affected by the Holocaust.

Casteel was also interviewed in where she discusses the book in-depth.

Those looking to celebrate the release of Sarah Phillips Casteel’s new book can on April 11 at 5:30 p.m. Casteel will be in conversation with Aboubakar Sanogo, and Ming Tiampo will moderate the conversation.

Organized by the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada, the event will be presented in English with simultaneous French translation. Following the talk, Casteel will be available to sign copies of the book.

Sarah Phillips Casteel is a professor of English at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture and the Institute of African Studies. She is a member of theā€™s Academic Council. Her previous books include  (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the coedited volume  (University of Virginia Press, 2019).

The post Upcoming Book Launch For Sarah Casteelā€™s Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible In Literature And Art appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Lightning Interviews with Our Community

Name: Paul Keen
Academic Title: Associate Dean, Professor
Email: paul_keen@carleton.ca
FASS Affiliation(s): Department of English Language and Literature, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture

How would you explain your research to someone with no experience in your field?

My research focuses on a set of connected debates that people in Britain were having about the meaning of literature in the Romantic period. Most of these debates sprang from much wider issues such as the political struggle for democracy that spilled over into Britain in the years after the French Revolution, and questions about what it meant to be a professional author in the midst of Britain’s accelerating shift into a modern commercial nation driven by fashion, credit, and conspicuous consumption as a status marker in an unstable world. These changes were compounded by related pressures unleashed by highly political debates about modern science, the politics of empire, women’s rights, and education. All of these issues foregrounded questions about literature that are strikingly current in our own day: How should we even define the word “literature”? What use was it? What social role or public value should it have? Who should be reading and writing what, and how much should this be regulated?

My most recent project is related to this. It explores the arguments that advocates were making for the public value of the humanities in the early nineteenth century, which is the time when modern humanities programs (including the first courses in English literature) were being set up in Britain’s new universities. These advocates’ arguments are especially interesting because, like our own age’s obsession with STEM, this was a utilitarian age, so the claims they developed on behalf of the liberal arts still ring true today!

What first sparked your interest in your discipline and research?

I got hooked by a fourth-year undergraduate course on the 1790s poets (mainly and ) which highlighted the powerful influence of the French Revolution on their writing. Like most of the brightest thinkers of their generation, they were obsessed with it. William Wordsworth wrote a lot of radical poetry in his early days, and went to live in France during the Revolution (as did many other writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams). Coleridge dropped out of university and became a radical writer and public speaker. I was intrigued by the energizing mix of poetry and radical politics, idealism and activism that energized their generation. They believed that the arts could be a powerful force for reshaping society in better ways. In some ways, it was a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, especially because of the galvanizing effect of reformers’ opposition to Britain’s war with the new government in France, which they denounced as an unjust reactionary war, much the way that protestors rejected the Vietnam war in the 60s. It’s not hard to find parallels with our own day as well.

What’s one fact about your research area that most people are surprised to learn?

The fact that most people are surprised by is the same one that surprised me most as I got into my research: that people thought of literature, not as the fairly narrow aesthetic category that we do today, but really as the late eighteenth-century version of social media. William Godwin, who was one of the leading writers of the day defined literature as “the diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion, whether written or oral.” That’s completely different than how we think of it today but it was actually pretty standard at the time. It didn’t mean that poetry and other types of creative writing were less valued; it makes the arts more interesting because it reminds us that they were part of a much larger set of social and political forms of debate that comprised what they thought of as the public sphere. Again, I was struck by just how strongly all of this resonated with our own debates about social media today!

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

It’s probably the same misconception that we all have about history generally, and it’s one that we never fully manage to work our way out of. We tend to think of these earlier ages as somehow “traditional” or old-fashioned, as though they were all 200 years old and wearing hopelessly out-of-date clothing, just because a couple of centuries passed since then. We sometimes approach writers from these earlier ages like they were born and raised inside the Norton anthology, and were writing their poetry and novels for our university English classes. It’s rare to remember that, in every age, people were living in the present tense. Like us, they were living in the most modern age that had ever existed and (again like us) one that was dealing with unprecedented changes like revolution, imperialism, urbanization, and the effects of capitalism. A lot of the writers that we study today were both brilliant and confused, arrogant and idealistic, political and professionally ambitious. They were trying to think their way through extraordinary questions and contradictions, and to use their writing as a way to intervene in all of these things, but without the benefit of hindsight or any kind of instruction manual. That sense of their modernity, which can be hard to fully embrace, makes historical study far more compelling.

Do you have a favourite class to teach?

I love teaching courses in Romantic literature, for all of the reasons that I’ve been discussing above.

Do you have any current or upcoming academic projects that you’re excited about?

My most recent book,, explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favour of the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures that dismissed the arts as self-indulgent pursuits incapable of addressing real-world problems. Its focus reflects the ways that similar pressures today have foregrounded all over again the question of how to make the case for the value of the humanities. Evidence of these problems surrounds us, but the core of my argument is that these pressures also constitute an important opportunity: a chance to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, their potential benefits to contemporary life, and how we might channel these benefits back into the larger society. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society ā€“ its various pasts and its possible futures ā€“ and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must ultimately be situated. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way: knowing more about past debates will provide a crucial basis for moving forward as universities, and the humanities in particular, position themselves to respond to new challenges during an age of radical change.

My current project, The Joke of Literature: A History of the Essay in English, tracks the history of that most elusive of genres, ā€œthe essay,ā€ over the three centuries since its meteoric rise in popularity after the appearance of The Spectator in 1711. G. K. Chestertonā€™s description of the essay as ā€œthe jokeā€ of literature typified the genreā€™s uncertain history, always on the margins of those more ambitious forms of writing that could be embraced as ā€œliterary.ā€ But this apparent limitation may help to explain both the essayā€™s enduring popularity across different historical periods and the renewed critical interest in the genreā€™s unruly status as ā€œan experimentā€ or ā€œa try-on,ā€ as Montaigne called it, whose provisional nature unsettled the possibility of categorical certainties. Flaunting essaysā€™ association with fragmentary and discontinuous writing that traded in the quotidian and the ephemeral, essay writers reveled in its democratic ethos, contrasting the immediacy of their everyday focus with the obscurity of more ponderous works that remained largely irrelevant to most readers.

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Lightning Interviews with Our Community

Name: Janne Cleveland
Academic Title: Associate Dean, Instructor
Email: jannecleveland@cunet.carleton.ca
FASS Affiliation(s): ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ Dominion-Chalmers Centre, Department of English Language and Literature, School for Studies in Art and Culture, Drama Studies

How would you explain your research to someone with no experience in your field?

I examine how theatre can be a force for positive social change, especially in its use of comedy and the function of laughter to disrupt and empower.

What first sparked your interest in your discipline and research?

As an undergrad I was already interested in the power of the arts, and entered graduate studies with a literary study in mind. Then I clandestinely encountered a puppet play by Canadian Master Puppeteer, . It changed everything! I subsequently did my doctoral dissertation on puppetry with a focus on Burkett’s work.

What’s one fact about your research area that most people are surprised to learn?

Puppets make really good dissidents because they can get away with saying things that human actors cannot.

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

That puppets are just “kid stuff”. Children gravitate to them seemingly naturally, but they are much more than that!

Do you have a favourite class to teach?

I’m a teacher first, so I love the “aha!” moments that happen for students who are working out their own ideas, and these can come from any class. Senior courses are wonderful for really drilling down to deep ideas, but first-year classes are great for introducing students to concepts about the world and their place in it that they might not have considered previously.

Is there a reading or course from your time as a university student that significantly changed the way you think about the world?

Freud’s exploration of The Unconscious was a game changer for me.

What media and/or popular culture content have you recently enjoyed?

When I rule the world, everyone will see “Barbie” at least once. It’s smart and playful and is a designer’s dream!

What’s your favourite spot on campus?

In summer I love to walk by the river and watch for herons. In September it’s great to sit in the quad and feel all the excitement as it becomes filled with the energy of returning students.

Do you have any current or upcoming academic projects that you’re excited about?

I’m going to start working on my stand-up routine again!

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By Emily Putnam

Meet literary trailblazer Tyler Pennock, ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ā€™s newest Artist in Residence whose unique approach to poetry and storytelling challenges convention and celebrates the contemporary.

Pennock hails from the Lesser Slave Lake region of Alberta as a member of the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation.

Armed with a Creative Writing MFA from Guelph University, Pennockā€™s literary career has been nothing short of remarkable.  In 2022, they released their celebrated second book, ā€˜ā€™, following up the resounding success of their debut work, ā€˜ā€™, which was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Indigenous Voices Award for Poetry.

Pennock also commits to fostering cultural understanding and knowledge through their teaching role at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto.

This is an ethos that Pennock is excited to bring to ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ University ā€” which they consider a homecoming of sorts.ĢżĢż“I spent nine of my formative years in Ottawa, so this experience feels like a return to a familiar place.”

While at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““, they aim to expand their literary repertoire.

ā€œIā€™m working on a collection of poetry to follow up Blood, which will again be more oral tradition in terms of how I conceive of it,ā€ says Pennock. ā€œIā€™m also working on a couple of short stories, and a sort-of literary criticism that Iā€™ve been considering in terms of how we lose and then recover para-textual information in the context of oral traditions.ā€

ā€œIā€™ve also liked reading a lot of theory lately, because it’s not something you get access to so much in undergrad. And in graduate studies you get tossed in it, like radishes in a salad. And you still don’t get enough of it in terms of depth.ā€

One of Pennockā€™s signatures as a literary artist is that they challenge traditional ideas of poems and choose to go without titling many of their works. “I imagine the poems themselves as audience members, actually speaking to each other, so not titling a poem brings forward a sense of how oral cultures work. It’s not a disembodied title or name,ā€ says Pennock.

ā€œIf I named a poem, you could just state the name, but it gives no understanding of the poem. Whereas if I asked you what your favourite poem is, you would tell me according to your descriptor.” In this way, Pennockā€™s act of naming, or rather not naming a literary work, becomes one of discovery.

Though often given the ā€˜titleā€™ of a spoken word poet or performance artist, Pennock declares, “I’m not [a spoken word poet], although I’ve been invited to spoken word events.” Rather, they see the performance of poetry as a continuation of oral traditions and cultures.

Pennock takes inspiration from all over, including from the likes of singer-songwriters such as Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, and Bjƶrk, and enjoys playing Elder Scrolls on their PlayStation to engage in the art of story. ā€œThey put so much into world building, you could at any point in any of the games, going back to 2000, pick up a book and read it,ā€ says Pennock. ā€œYou can now pick up a book and it refers to a time in a game you played [and] refers to a story you already know. And I love that part.ā€

They also enjoy the outdoors and are quite familiar with Ottawaā€™s trails, saying, ā€œI like to ride my bike, and I’ll go for exceptionally long walks, because, why have legs if you’re not going to use them.ā€

When considering advice to aspiring writers at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““, Pennock notes, ā€œTake the word ā€˜aspiringā€™ out is what I would say to them. Thereā€™s no such thing as aspiring, you just are.ā€

Pennockā€™s tenure at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ spans from September 1 to December 2023. All students are welcome to drop by to engage with Pennock and fellow students for a poetry-focused workshop on Wednesday, Nov. 8 in Gordon Wood Lounge on the 18^th Floor of Dunton Tower. You can also email them at tyler.pennock@carleton.ca.

The post Talking with Artist in Residence Tyler Pennock: New works, the art of writing, and returning to familiar ground appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

The post Two Internationally Celebrated Writers Join the Department of English as the 2021ā€“2022 Writers-in-Residence appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Jody Mason has been awarded for her book (McGill-Queenā€™s University Press).

The winner of the annual Gabrielle Roy Prize was chosen by a jury composed of Margery Fee (University of British Columbia), Heidi Tiedemann Darroch (Camosun College), and Veronica Austen (St. Jeromeā€™s University) who affirm:

“Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement distinguishes itself for its tremendous research and critical insight. In constructing an analysis of the Canadian Reading Camp Association, the precursor to Frontier College, Mason offers insight into how reading and literacy were used in a citizenship-building project to form workers as liberal subjects and prevent the radicalization of immigrants. She draws on a range of primary sources ā€“ reports, letters, government documents ā€“ to construct a meticulously detailed historical account that allows her to form new theoretical insight about the ideological construction and functioning of reading and literacy. Mason is to be particularly commended for the impressive rigour of this book.”

The Prize is expected to be awarded in person at Congress, next Spring 2021.

Upon receiving the Prize, Professor Mason reflected on writing her award-winning book.

Reflections on Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement

by Professor Jody Mason

I worked in community literacy as a graduate student in Toronto and Iā€™ve long known that I would someday write something about the relationship between the literacy movement and ideas about the literary. Gauri Viswanathanā€™s Masks of Conquest (1989) and Heather Murrayā€™s ā€˜Come, Bright Improvement!ā€™: The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (2002) are in some ways very different booksā€”one about the uses of English literature as an instrument of rule in colonial India and the other about the rather unfamiliar conceptions of the literary that shaped the reading cultures of Victorian Ontarioā€“ā€“but both insist that literary value has a history that might be reconstructed by looking at practices of use. In addition to analyzing whatā€™s on the page, these scholars consider where texts go, and how, and why. Both stamped my thinking and teaching long before I began to think in earnest about actually doing any research of this kind on my own. In 2011, after my third child was born, I began working with the archival fonds of Frontier College, Canadaā€™s longest-running organization devoted to teaching adults to read. Housed at Library and Archives Canada, the fonds is enormous (more than one hundred meters of textual materials!). The book I ended up writing, Home Feelings, uses a small part of the fonds to tell a larger story about how the mutual relation of literacy, literature, and citizenship in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century worked to establish settler authenticity and authority.

The Canadian Reading Camp movementā€”forerunner of Frontier Collegeā€“ā€“ is not widely known, despite its importance in Canadian cultural, social, educational, and, I would argue, political history. Founded in 1899 or 1900 by a Presbyterian minister influenced by the values of the social gospel movement, Alfred Fitzpatrick, the movement inaugurated its work in 1900-1901 in four lumber camps near Nairn Centre, Ontario. The rooms, housed in makeshift shacks, were stocked with reading material but were unsupervised. The association grew quickly; by 1903, there were at least twenty-four reading rooms in shacks, tents, and rail cars across northern Ontario. It continued to expand its work westward with the growth of the railroad, mining, and construction industries that relied on itinerant, increasingly non-British immigrant, labour. As the association grew, so its methods altered. The unsupervised reading room gradually ceded place to the librarian-instructor, and, subsequently, by the end of the associationā€™s first decade, to the labourer-teacherā€“ā€“often and then almost exclusively university students who worked by day and conducted classes in English and other basic subjects by night. The growth of the Canadian Reading Camp movement was precarious in these early decades: the association received no government funding at the outset (although it began to receive modest provincial grants during its first decade) and instead relied on donations from churches, individuals, and the companies that benefited from its operations.

Between 1899 and 1939, the Canadian Reading Camp Association (known after 1919 as Frontier College) derived most of its work and much of its raison dā€™ĆŖtre from the non-British immigrant labourers who were filling the nationā€™s work camps. Even in the earliest days, instructors made particular efforts to reach out to foreign-born workers, particularly those who could not speak English. These efforts increased steadily as more and more labourer-teachers went West in the first decade of the twentieth century in order to work on rail and construction gangs, which were populated overwhelmingly by non-English speaking workers. The relevance of these efforts to the concept of ā€œcitizenshipā€ was articulated in 1912, when the associationā€™s annual report indicates its desire to impart ā€œour ideas of citizenship and our ideals of lifeā€ to immigrant camp workers. As the link between the immigrant and ā€œthe redā€ was solidified in liberal thought, and as labour conflicts such as the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike generated new liberal anxieties about the stability of the capitalist economy, the work of Frontier College focused almost exclusively on a counter-literacy for liberal citizenship. The publication of the associationā€™s A Handbook for New Canadians in 1919 was the culmination of two decades of fieldwork, and it laid the basis for the associationā€™s future citizenship education efforts, which were to augment considerably during the 1920s. After 1932, the work of Frontier College shifted somewhat. Labourer-teachers were deployed not to regular work camps but to the relief camps for unemployed men operated throughout the first half of the 1930s by the Department of National Defence.

ĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢż Though the principal case study analyzed in Home Feelings is the Canadian Reading Camp Movement, the book is in a more general sense an attempt to bring a sociology of literature approach to bear on the history of citizenship in Canada. British Canadian reformers affiliated with Frontier College defined their settler claims to national space through a pedagogy of national citizenship that served primarily to distinguish them from both a non-British immigrant settler population and Indigenous Peoples. This early-twentieth-century practice of citizenship education was forged in close relation to imaginative literature, drawing deeply on the liberal reformist and idealist conceptions of the literary that had emerged in Victorian Britain. A key element in the early twentieth-century consolidation of the nationā€™s liberal order, citizenship and its pedagogy were entwined from the beginning in literary print culture and the intimate ā€œhome feelingsā€ this culture was believed to cultivate.

A history of social and cultural practices, Home Feelings attempts to think through the particular durability of liberal thought. For example, the early-twentieth-century creation of a literacy for liberal citizenship that was primarily aimed at cultivating obedient and productive workers and that harnessed the sentimentality of the intimate public sphere shares much with current emphases on skills training for employment, individual adaptability, and family as a network of private support in precarious times.
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The following excerpt is taken from the introduction to Home Feelings:

ā€œThis book analyzes the production, use, and consumption of a print culture of liberal citizenship through a critical history of the early-twentieth-century Reading Camp Movement, employing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on social history, the history of reading, literary and cultural studies, and the sociology of culture in order to show how contests among non-state actors were important in shaping ideas about citizenship that may seem to be simply effects of postwar state policy. Eschewing the nationā€™s more frequently studied urban centres, the better-known state literacy and citizenship initiatives of the postwar period, and evolutionary narratives of social citizenship, I argue that literature, literacy, and citizenship were being brought into new relation and were subject to new kinds of meaning and contestation in early-twentieth-century Canada, particularly in the frontier work camps where Frontier College focused the efforts of its Reading Camp Movement. As the British Canadian settler majority sought to define itself in relation to an expanding non-British immigrant population and as capitalā€™s need for non-British immigrant labour produced important social and political tensions, an early pedagogy for citizenship emerged that drew on the affective dimensions of citizenship (ā€œhome feelingsā€) as a means of engaging a principal adversary and interlocutor ā€“ socialist and communist print cultures and the non-British immigrant communities with which these were associated.

More broadly, the arguments of the book explore what Corrinne Harrol and Mark Simpson call ā€œliterary/liberal entanglementā€: both emerging in the late seventeenth century, these paradigms share a ā€œhistory of entanglement,ā€ one ā€œfoundational to politics and culture across English-speaking liberal modernity.ā€[1] If state legal mechanisms for monitoring and controlling immigration proliferated during the decades under examination here, my interest is in how the Reading Camp Movement combined the cultural mechanisms of literature, literacy, and citizenship to encourage apparently benevolent forms of liberal selfhood, particularly among non-British immigrants. In the context of Frontier Collegeā€™s early-twentieth-century work, older ideas about literacy and literature came to shape conceptions of citizenship and ideas about its cultivation: post-Enlightenment beliefs in literacy-as-progress and the particularly Victorian commitment to the prophylactic functions of books, literacy, and literature in the context of industrial capitalism ā€¦ came to lend authority and purpose to emergent citizenship education efforts. Both literacy and citizenship served as important instruments of social distinction, differentiating those who could ā€œgiveā€ them from those who ā€“ be they British or French Canadian workers, as in the earliest camps, or non-British immigrant workers, as was increasingly the case by the early 1910s ā€“Ģżlacked them.

The Reading Camp Movement emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century from a social reform tradition deeply shaped by both the literacy-as-progress and literature-as-prophylactic arguments; it was also influenced, however, by a maternal-feminist ideology that privileged the family as the ideal site for the cultivation of the citizen. All of these forces coalesced in the associationā€™s emphasis on literacy and the private consumption of books as tools of individual improvement, yet the association departed from the traditions of the reform-oriented workersā€™ education movement in its privileging of popular fiction and poetry, which Frontier College founder Alfred Fitzpatrick viewed as necessary proxies for the homes and families rendered absent by the needs of the labour-camp economy. As the organization came into contact with a state reluctant to support the use of these tools among adults and with an increasingly non-British immigrant and non-English speaking population of camp workers, it adapted its conception of literacy and moral citizenship to a pedagogy for ā€œCanadianization,ā€ an assimilative vision of citizenship that worked to consolidate settler prerogatives and to cultivate the individualism and autonomy of liberal selfhood. Literary forms retained an important place in this emergent pedagogy for citizenship, assuming the function of introducing the immigrant and his family to the interventions of the state. However, in the relief camps for the unemployed where Frontier College deployed its services during the 1930s, instructors turned from the language of citizenship ā€“ a term increasingly appropriated by the unemployed movement ā€“ towards poetry as a means of cultivating individual moral reflection and of encouraging individual responsibility to the family over commitments to collective organizing.

Importantly, all of these various interlacements of literary culture, literacy, and citizenship demonstrate the affective dimensions of liberal citizenship that are occluded in Habermasian analyses of the liberal public sphere and its ā€œbourgeois reading public.ā€ Attending consistently to the important role that women and family ā€“ and the more general affective dimensions of citizenship that I call ā€œhome feelingsā€ ā€“ played in an emergent pedagogy for liberal citizenship, particularly as these informed the uses of literary culture as a counter to leftist political print, the chapters that follow reorient the analysis of Canadian citizenship away from the public sphereā€“focused approaches that have typified evolutionary liberal narratives of citizenship.[2] While the pedagogy for liberal citizenship that Frontier College deployed in frontier camps was far from stable ā€“Ģżthe respective values of literature, literacy, and citizenship shifted in response to the race and class relations of each period ā€“ the individualism that it promoted consistently endorsed the workerā€™s intimate relation to home and family as a crucial aspect of citizenship.

Those Frontier College commitments that produced a less receptive state response in the 1910s and 1920s ā€“ the critique of labour camp conditions, the dismantling of hierarchies of manual and mental labour, the democratization of access to public universities ā€“ were abandoned in the name of survival. More amenable to state interests was an argument, increasingly adopted by Frontier College, that proffered literacy and citizenship as remedies for a political threat that was identified with the non-British immigrant labour force, while attenuating focus on the exploitative labour relations of the industries that depended on the work camp. Yet if these early elaborations of the meanings of literacy, culture, and citizenship were important to the formation of state institutions in the postwar period, they were subject to significant contest in the first three decades of the twentieth century as Frontier College confronted various state bureaucracies and as it attempted to engage camp workers who interrogated or, more often, chose not to avail themselves of its versions of literacy or citizenship.ā€

[1] Corrine Harrol and Mark Simpson, ā€œIntroduction: Toward a Literary History for the Twenty-First Century.ā€ In Literary/Liberal Entanglements: Toward a Literary History for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Harrol and Simpson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 7.

[2] See JĆ¼rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Boston: MIT Press, 1991).
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The post Professor Jody Mason Captures The 2019 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Book on the Roots of Reading, Literacy, and Citizenship in Canada appeared first on Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.