Literature faculty | English Language and Literature

Literature Home | Program | Faculty | Courses | Declaring your English major

Here are some of the faculty members who teach courses for the honours English literature degree. Click on the faculty member's name to view his or her full profile. English Language and Literature degrees at the University of Waterloo integrate the study of literature, rhetoric, professional communication, and media studies, so all faculty in the department participate to some degree in the literature program.

For information on all of our faculty members, see our Faculty profiles page.

For a list of our faculty members' research interests, see our Areas of Expertise page.

Lamees Al Ethari

Lamees Al Ethari's research interests include life writing, Arab and Arab North American literature and culture, diaspora and postcolonial theory, and ethnic American literature. Her current work focuses on the life writing of Arab migrants to Canada beginning from the late 19^th century to the migrations that have taken place within the last two decades due to war, political unrest, and the incidents of the Arab Spring. She is also working on a collection of poems, titled From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris, which reflects her own experiences of the Gulf War and its aftermath. She teaches undergraduate courses in academic writing, creative writing and literature.

Fraser Easton

Fraser Easton's areas of speciality are 18th- and 19th-century literature, especially Defoe, Smart, Edgeworth, and Austen. He also has particular interests in gender, sexuality, and class, as well as in political economy and popular culture. He is currently undertaking research projects concerning the religious poetry of Christopher Smart, the economic ideas of Jane Austen, and the coverage in popular media of women who lived disguised as men. He has also worked recently on Thomas Sheridan and the eighteenth-century rhetorical movement known as the "Elocutionists." He teaches courses in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and literary theory.

Ken Graham

Ken Graham's areas include Renaissance Reformation literature (including Shakespeare and Milton), poetry, and the relationship between literature and rhetoric. His research focuses on the relationship between literature and history, particularly the histories of religion, politics, and education during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, with particular attention to religious poetry and Shakespeare studies. He is currently studying the effects of religious culture on Shakespeare’s language, and particularly on his rhetoric, and teaches undergraduate courses in Shakespeare and English Renaissance poetry.

Shelley Hulan

Shelley Hulan's area of specialization is nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian writing. Her research interests include the literary and philosophical representations of nostalgia in Canada’s Confederation and transitional periods (1867-1914, 1880-1920), the same periods’ literary discourses of emotions and memory, and the tropes that were key to naturalizing colonial dominance in late nineteenth-century Canada. She teaches undergraduate courses on various issues in Canadian writing, on early, modern, and regional Canadian literatures, and on the representation of the emotions, health, and wealth in Canadian poetry and novels.

Victoria Lamont

Victoria Lamont's main areas of research and publishing are 19th- and early-20th century popular westerns (particularly by women), women’s science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, and American popular culture. She is currently writing a book that revises the early history of the popular western so it takes women writers into account. She is also researching the portrayal of woman suffrage in American Popular Culture and working on a series of articles that recover and re-evaluate mid-20th century woman-authored “space-opera’’—a name given, sometimes pejoratively, to science fiction considered imitative of the western. She teaches courses in American literature, critical theory, and literary criticism.

John Savarese

John Savarese's areas of interest include literature of the Romantic period, poetry and poetics, and the history and philosophy of science. His current work examines how Romantic poetry and Romantic-era theories of poetry re-envision the nature of the mind, moving away from an isolated, individualistic model of the mind to a more social, interactive conception. He teaches courses in Romantic and Gothic literature, introductory literary studies, and writing.

Winfried Siemerling

Winfried Siemerling's areas of specialty are Canadian/Québécois comparative literature, cultural difference, postcoloniality, race, and the issue of recognition in North American and Hemispheric Studies. His current work explores African Canadian writing and improvisation studies. He teaches courses in Canadian literature, postcolonial literature, and literary theory.

Heather Smyth

Heather Smyth's areas include postcolonial and transnational studies (with a particular focus on Caribbean literature), gender and sexuality, nationalism, multiculturalism, and racialization. Her current work explores connections between literary collaboration, multiauthored texts, and critical race coalitions in Canadian literature. She teaches undergraduate courses in women's literature, criticism and theory, and postcolonial literature.

Sarah Tolmie

Sarah Tolmie is a medievalist whose research interests are in historiography, visionary poetry, and embodiment. She has published articles on Middle English and Scots literature, as well as on Langland’s Piers Plowman. She is also a novelist and poet and has conducted research on dance as a mode of interactive data visualization. She teaches medieval and early modern literature, general British literature, and creative writing.

Paul Ugor

Paul Ugor's research interests in general are concerned with new social processes in global politics, economy, information and communication technologies, cultural/textual representations, and everyday life, and the new social responses which these activities elicit from the public domain, especially from marginalized groups like racial minorities in the global north, youth, women, and disenfranchised subjects in postcolonial settings. Other research interests include Modern African Literature, African Cinema/Nollywood, Black Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, African Youth Studies, and Postcolonial Anglophone World Literatures.