In this Issue
Message
from
the
Chair
Message
from
the
Graduate
Officer
Message
from
the
Undergraduate
Officer
Message
from
SAGE
Research,
Publication,
and
Awards:
Faculty
Research,
Publication,
and
Awards:
Graduate
Students
Graduate
News:
Dissertation
Defenses
Alumni
Profiles:
Tiffany
Murray
2013
Award
Ceremony
Message from the Chair
Greetings from English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo! I am delighted to report that our Departmental newsletter is back, better than ever, with a new editor, Michael MacDonald, a new look, and a new mandate to present an overview of departmental activity, to highlight faculty and student research, and to update you on what is happening in English at Waterloo.
- Beth Coleman, an expert in digital media and digital creation, and author of Hello Avatar: The Rise of the Networked Generation;
- Dorothy Hadfield, our new Extended Learning Coordinator and editor of Shaw and Feminisms;
- Jennifer Harris, an expert in nineteenth-century American literature and co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Coquette and The Boarding School;
- Frances Condon, a writing studies specialist and author of I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric.
With this wave of new positions, the Department of English has grown larger than at any time since the early 1990s, enriching our depth of expertise in digital media studies, American literature and culture, critical race studies, and online pedagogy. Nor is that all: in late 2013, English was approved for five more faculty positions, partly in connexion with a new University initiative. Next year I will write more about this extraordinary investment by the University in our department and report on the colleagues who have joined us. As for other notable developments in 2013, English welcomed the first postdoctoral fellows in its history: Banting Postdoctoral Fellow Robert Zacharias, supervised by Winfried Siemerling, and SSHRC Research-Creation Postdoctoral Fellow Nicholas Balaisis, supervised by Marcel O'Gorman.
Among departmental staff it was a period of goodbyes - to graduate coordinators Fiona McAllister and Lisa Hendel, and undergraduate coordinator Jennifer Crane - and of hellos - to new graduate coordinator Julie-Anne Desrochers (joining us from the Department of French Studies) and new undergraduate coordinator Emily Hudson (joining us from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge in the UK). Sustaining the department throughout these changes in personnel has been our able administrative assistant and overall office guru, Margaret Ulbrick.
About the department's research you can read more below, but from a collection of a twentieth-century American poet's letters to a multi-million dollar collaborative grant, from an eighteenth-century monograph to a feminist blog, from local outreach to international collaborations, and from welcoming a Banting post-doctoral fellow to welcoming international visiting scholars, it has been a period of extraordinary research intensification in English. In part this derives from the continued growth and success of the graduate programs in English, now the largest in the faculty of Arts, with a thriving PhD program and three MA streams, all available by co-op. But it is also part of the strategic planning that we undertook in 2013, which looks forward to expanding on the unique literary and rhetorical programs and integrated research culture of the Department. We have also been working hard to improve the experience of our students, with considerable effort being invested in undergraduate outreach and mentoring, a new PhD professionalization course, and information about careers in English. You can check out some short videos of our career panel, emceed by alumnus Eric Friesen, on our YouTube channel. What can you do with an English degree? and Why study English at Waterloo.
Finally, I must comment on the remarkable internationalization of the department. In the last few years we have welcomed visiting scholars and graduate students from Algeria, China, Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Africa interested in working on literary, rhetorical, and language-centred projects many of which can only be done in our department. Our own graduate programs welcome many top-notch international students every year, from countries around the world: Bangladesh, Brazil, Italy, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, and many others. And our work spans the globe as well, with an increasing departmental emphasis on teaching in such areas as intercultural rhetoric, critical race theory, and global Englishes. Faculty members are active abroad, too, engaging in teaching and research activities in such locales as Paris, Amsterdam, Zagreb, New Delhi, Boston, and Hangzhou, China, where I myself taught an intensive survey of British Literature to third-year English majors in April 2013. Placing English studies in a global context is practical and pragmatic, engaging with a world increasingly connected by commerce, travel, electronic communications and social media, and by the growing use of English as a lingua franca. I am proud to see Waterloo English take a leading role in this international engagement.
Here's to a great 2014!
Fraser
Easton
Chair
of
English
Language
and
Literature
Message from the Graduate Officer
Your Humble Narrator, with the extraordinary assistance of Margaret Ulbrick, a revolving cast of Temps, a spool of baling wire, and boxes of chewing gum, managed not to break the graduate programme irrevocably in the four months he was wearing both the Officer and Coordinator hats (coats, boots, underthings), until the arrival of Julie-Anne, who began in July. A new dawn broke. She took a few months to get her bearings, but has quietly, efficiently, and very astutely put the office into well-oiled order. The graduate section of the departmental website, as one of the more visible signs of Julie-Anne’s handiwork, reveals this new, lubricated order:
Information for Faculty and Staff
We have had an impressive range of award holders over this period. Ten students have held an OGS, four at the M.A. (Elizabeth Dupuis and Adan Jerriat-Poole, both in Literary Studies; Heidi Ebert, in Experimental Digital Media; and Kaitlyn Holbein, in Rhetoric and Communication Design), six at the Ph.D. (Kent Aardse, Lamees Al Ethari, Ashna Bhagwanani, Mike Lesiuk, Tommy Mayberry, and Steve Wilcox). Five students have held the SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Cameron Butt, Lauren Rabindranath, Farah Yusuf, and Catherine Zagar, all in Experimental Digital Media; and Maria Geertsema, in Literary Studies). Seven students have held the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (Lacey Beer, Adam Bradley, Lauren Burr, Sarah Gibbons, Jesse Hutchison, Dani Stock, and David Thiessen). All of these students also won the UW President’s Graduate Scholarship, and Steve also won the SSHRC Storyteller’s Award.
We had six PhD graduates over the year: Ashna Bhagwanani, Jason Hawreliak, Pamela Mansutti, Alexis McQuigge, Danila Sokolov, and Stefanie Stiles, along with two more successful defences for doctorates that will be minted in early 2014, by Craig Love and Kevin Ziegler. Kim Garwood’s defence is scheduled for mid-March 2014, and at least two more should follow shortly thereafter. We don’t have records for all of them, but they have already had considerable success as a group. Pamela is teaching in Shanghai, for instance, at a Joint Institute of the Chinese University of Jiao Tong and the University of Michigan, Danila has a Killam post-doctoral fellowship in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Stefanie and Alexis have Assistant Professor positions in the prairies, Stefanie at the University of Lethbridge, Alexis at the University of Regina.
We also had too many MA graduates to list here, forty in total—twenty-one in Literary Studies, fifteen in Rhetoric and Communication Design, and three in Experimental Digital Media. The occasional note they throw back over the wall to us suggests they are making their mark on the world and remember us fondly.
The Professionalization milestone seminar began this fall, coordinated by Aimée Morrison, and was a rousing success. By all measures, in the formal course-evaluations, in an email survey I conducted, in spontaneous comments, in hallway and office and beyond, in the digisphere, the reviews were stellar. Our students were grateful for the opportunities to explore degree navigation, journal publishing, pedagogy, dissertating in real time, conferencing, digital scholarship, and potential career paths, academic, alt-academic, and extra-academic.[1] Other institution’s students were jealous. Other institutions will either be playing catch-up or will just fall away. This is the future of doctoral studies.
Randy
Harris
Associate
Chair,
Graduate
Studies
[1] Check out the syllabus here: http://www.hookandeye.ca/2013/09/graduate-professionalization-seminar.html
Message from the Undergraduate Officer
Our undergraduates are busy, innovative, and creative, and are enrolling in Coop in ever-greater numbers, exploring the whole range of jobs at which English students excel. They're taking International Exchange terms at an increasing rate, too, heading off to South Korea, Ireland, Sweden, Barbados, Spain, and other destinations, at the more than 90 partner universities with which UW is associated. In view of the myriad ways our students complete and use their English degrees we've begun a more intensive focus on career support for our undergraduates. We held a very successful and well-attended Career Event in Fall 2012 featuring a panel of English Advisory Council members and former graduates, all with English undergraduate or graduate degrees. They offered amazingly helpful advice to English students on how to network and create their own opportunities for their first job and how to identify the core career skills and professional development that their English degrees are giving them. We videotaped the whole event and made shorter informational videos as well: you can find them on our Youtube site, UWaterlooEnglish. Jennifer Harris has also been interviewing English alumni for the department blog and their stories are posted on the WaterlooEnglish Facebook site for our undergraduate and graduate students.
The face of the Undergraduate Office has also been changing during 2012-13. Many of you may remember the cheerful enthusiasm of Jenn Crane, Undergraduate Coordinator, as she answered your questions about plans and courses and exams. Jenn was offered a great opportunity in the Centre for Extended Learning in April 2013 and was replaced—after the summer-long one-woman administrative endeavour of Margaret Ulbrick—by the equally cheerful and enthusiastic Emily Hudson, joining us from the University of Cambridge in the UK. Emily has taken the office by storm, whipping up posters and recruitment events and the less-exciting timetables and exams. We're lucky to have her on the Undergraduate team!
Heather
Smyth
Associate
Chair,
Undergraduate
Studies
Message From SAGE
The Student Association of Graduates in English (SAGE) has been a part of a number of exciting initiatives in the past year and a half. In the fall term of 2012 SAGE hosted a number of annual events, including our OGS/SSHRC application workshop and our Comprehensive Exams workshop. We also started hosting weekly social gatherings at the Grad House. In the winter term SAGE held its general meeting in which we ratified the constitution to ensure more regular communication between SAGE and its members. In the spring term we conducted our first annual General Student Survey in which we collected data from existing SAGE members on their experience of academic, professional, and social aspects of life at Waterloo. The survey will enable SAGE to track the progress of its initiatives, as well as provide anonymous feedback to the Graduate Studies Committee. Also in the spring term SAGE held its annual colloquium entitled Overflow: Environments in Excess, in which the keynote speaker was Waterloo’s own Andrew McMurry. The colloquium featured individual papers and roundtables composed of graduate students in English.
In the fall term of 2013 SAGE introduced a number of new positions to its executive, including: co-op advisor, Literature, RCD, and XDM representatives (splitting the Master’s position into three streams), as well as Incoming and Continuing PhD representatives (splitting the PhD position into two). These diverse positions better reflect the interests of the student body and should provide more accurate representation. Also in fall 2013 SAGE joined forces with the Games Institute to make our annual orientation event more interactive, which proved to be a great success. In lieu of our SSHRC/OGS workshop SAGE executive members participated in Rebecca Tierney-Hynes’ insightful and informative workshop on the same subject that was open to all students. Looking forward, SAGE will be hosting our annual colloquium on March 21st, 2014. The title of this year’s colloquium is (Im)Mobility: Transgression and Control.
Research, Publications, and Awards: Faculty
Katherine Acheson published Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate), spoke at conferences in Aberdeen (Scotland), York (UK) and Puerto Rico, and gave invited talks at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Library of Congress. She was a research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Institute for three months in the fall of 2013 and the recipient of a UW-SSHRC seed grant.
Tristanne Connolly co-edited two essay collections with Helen P. Bruder: Blake, Gender and Culture (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) and Sexy Blake (Palgrave, 2013). She published an essay on Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants and Isabella Rosselini's Green Porno videos as interactive media in a special issue of the Japan-based journal Poetica. In spring 2013 she travelled to the University of Tokyo on a Research Networking Fund Grant provided by the University of Manchester for international research collaboration on eighteenth-century literature and medicine. At the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference, "Romantic Prospects", at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, she gave another paper on Darwin's botanical poem in relation to pre-Romantic forms of georgic and philosophic poetry. Here in Waterloo she published an interview with poet Jason Guriel in the nationally acclaimed literary magazine based at St Jerome's, The New Quarterly, and did a live version of the interview as part of the inaugural New Quarterly Wild Writers Festival.
Jay Dolmage's book Disability Rhetoric was published in the "Critical Perspectives on Disability" book series by Syracuse University Press in November 2013. He authored a section entitled "Essential Functionaries" within the larger essay "Faculty Members, Accommodation, and Access in Higher Education" in the MLA's Profession 2013. He published a chapter entitled "Altogether Unsatisfactory: Approaching Past and Present Discourses of Space at Halifax's Shed 21" in the collection Diverse Spaces: Examining Identity, Heritage and Community within Canadian Public Culture. Jay is a co-investigator on a SSHRC Standard Research Grant entitled "Investigating Writing in the Undergraduate Curriculum at Canadian Universities," and was an Invited Scholar and successful co-applicant for a SSHRC Partnership Grant for the 2013 Common Pulse Festival of Disability Arts and Culture which took place in September. Jay also completed a two-year SSHRC Insight Development Grant in May 2013, and currently holds a UW/SSHRC Seed Grant for a project entitled "Framing Race and Disability." Jay is the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, which published three regular issues in 2013, in addition to a special online digital art exhibit. Jay gave two talks this year: "Neo-Liberal Spaces of Disability" at the Canadian Disability Studies Association. Victoria, BC, May 2013; and “Spaces, Times, and Economies of Disability” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Las Vegas, NV, April, 2013. Last but not least, Jay has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Fraser Easton published “Christopher Smart’s Elocution” in Reading Christopher Smart in the 21st Century, edited by Min Wild and Noel Chevalier (Bucknell UP, 2013). He was a participant in “English@the edge of what?,” the Canadian Association of Chairs of English Roundtable, at the ACCUTE conference (FedCan Congress, Victoria), and also presented “Smart's Alphabets” at the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in London, Ontario. In April 2013 he was a visiting Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Zhejiang Gongshang University in Hangzhou, China, where he taught a two-week intensive survey of British literature to 25 third-year English language undergraduate students.
In 2012 Ken Graham published articles on “Devotional Poetry” and “Plain Style” in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., and on Shakespeare’s contemporary Fulke Greville in the Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature. He also spoke on Greville and the Psalms at a Greville conference held in Munich in April, 2013. At the 2013 Shakespeare Association of America conference in Toronto, he led a seminar on “Shakespearean Adaptation and the World’s Religions.” Finally, he read parts of his book-length study of English Renaissance poetry and church discipline at the 10th International Milton Symposium in Tokyo in August, 2012, at the 2012 Canada Milton Seminar in Toronto, at the 2012 Renaissance Society of America conference in Washington, D.C., and at the 2013 Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies meeting in Victoria, B.C.
Dorothy Hadfield edited Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off, published in the Florida Bernard Shaw series from the University Press of Florida in January 2013. The volume includes her chapter on “Writing Women: Shaw and Feminism Behind the Scenes.” In April 2013, she presented on “Online Courses and Absentee Authors: Breaking Down Barriers” with Anuja Bajaj (CEL) at the uW Opportunities and New Directions conference. In addition, Dorothy and Jay Dolmage were awarded one of uW’s first Learning Innovations and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) grants to experiment with gamification and simulation strategies for English 210F. The grant project period ran from January 2013-December 2014.
In 2012 Jennifer Harris was elected president of the Canadian Association for American Studies (CAAS), and American Literatures Director of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). She also published essays in Acadiensis, Canadian Literature, and Journal of Canadian Studies, as well as a Norton Critical Edition of The Coquette and The Boarding School (with Bryan Waterman). In 2012 and 2013 Harris organized panels and/or gave papers at a number of conferences, including CAAS, NeMLA, and C19. Her early co-edited collection, The Oprah Phenomenon, continues to generate interview requests. Most notably, Dr. Harris joined the English Department at Waterloo in 2013; in advance of this, she received a major award recognizing excellence in teaching, research and service from her previous institution in fall 2012.
Randy Harris published a book with Shelley Hulan and Murray McArthur, Literature, Rhetoric, and Values (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), of selected papers from the 2011 conference, and two articles, "Figural Logic in Mendel's Experiments on Plant Hybrids" (Philosophy and Rhetoric 46.4), and "The Rhetoric of Science meets the Science of Rhetoric" (POROI 9.1). He also gave an invited paper at the Association of Rhetoric, Science, and Technology Vicentennial Celebration (Florida, November 2012), "The Rhetoric of Science Meets the Science of Rhetoric" (edited for publication in POROI), as well as two other papers, "What are the Cognitive Affinities?" for Waterloo Ignorance Day (Waterloo, December 2012), and "The Fourth Master Trope" for the Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric (Victoria, Congress, 2013). He attended the symposium, "Rhetoric in the Twenty-First Century,” at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Oxford University, July 2012), and had an eight-evening lecture series at the Milton Public Library on "Rhetoric, Propaganda, and Bullshit" (Winter 2013).
Ken Hirschkop has been a busy modernist over the past two years. In 2012 he attended three conferences devoted to modernist and avant-garde culture: in March the conference “Moving Modernisms” at the University of Oxford; in September the third conference of the European Network for Avant-garde and Modernist Studies (at the University of Kent); and in November the annual conference of the Modernist Studies Association in Las Vegas. At the first he was a participant in the final, summing-up roundtable, at the second he delivered a paper on “Language and Revolution: Grammar and the Avant-Garde,” and at the third a paper titled “On Language as Such and National Language.” In 2013 he led a quieter life, so that writing could take priority: he attended only a workshop on Modernism and Rhetoric at New York University, where he spoke mostly about Gramsci. Though most of his writing has been devoted to the completion of his magnum opus on linguistic turns in the early twentieth century, he managed to eke out two articles in 2013: the afterword to a collection on Russia in Britain, 1880-1940 ("A Time and Place for Everything: On Russia, Britain and being Modern") and an article in the journal Modernist Cultures (“Language in 1910 (and after): Saussure, Benjamin and Paris”). The first piece contributes to current debates about cosmopolitanism; the second is about how urban life affects linguistic theory.
Alysia Kolentsis's essay, "Grammar Rules in the Sonnets: Sidney and Shakespeare," was published in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare's Poetry, ed. Jonathan Post (Oxford UP, 2013). Her article, "Shakespeare's Linguistic Creativity: A Reappraisal," will appear in the next issue of Literature Compass.
Victoria Lamont and Kevin McGuirk hosted the 2013 meeting of the Canadian Association for American Studies, with the theme "Total Money Makeover: Culture and the Economization of Everything." It was a resounding success, with over 100 papers on topics ranging from DIY Punk to 19th century literary card games. Randy Martin of New York University gave a mind-bending talk on derivatives and dance, and economist Jim Stanford of CAW-TCA torpedoed myths about traditional economics' take on culture while cracking some pretty hilarious jokes (remind me to tell you the one about how Conrad Black became a billionaire sometime). Victoria and Kevin are putting together a special issue of The Canadian Review of American Studies on the conference theme. Victoria is putting the finishing touches on her book Westerns: A Women's History, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Kate Lawson's article “Personal Privacy and the Post Office Espionage Scandal, 1844” was published in spring 2013 in the on-line journal BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. She delivered a paper on Vanity Fair and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Venice in June 2013. In July, she began a two-year term as president of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.
Michael MacDonald published three essays in 2012/13. “Shakespeare and the Arts of Persuasion” appeared in The Blackwell Companion to British Literature, vol. 2; “Martial McLuhan II: The Military is the Massage” was published in Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture and Writing (following up “Martial McLuhan I”); and “Black Logos: Rhetoric and Information Warfare” appeared in Literature, Rhetoric, and Values, a collection edited by colleagues Shelley Hulan, Randy Harris, and Murray McArthur. Michael also organized a panel devoted to “Marshall McLuhan and Media War” at the Canadian Communication Association conference (Fedcan). Finally, Michael published 45 chapters of The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies on the Oxford Handbooks Online portal (print to follow in 2015).
In December, Murray McArthur published "Replication and Narration: ‘Counterparts' as a Replicon of Joycean Narration" in the 2013 Joyce Studies Annual.
In the past year Ted McGee gave several talks to local groups on Shakespeare in performance, including one on productions of Romeo and Juliet in the Waterloo Lecture Series at the Stratford Public Library. For the Stratford Festival's new "Forum" of events, he wrote "Dear Mary, Dear Elizabeth", a reading of letters of Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I, and he performed this piece with Festival veteran actors, Lucy Peacock and Seana McKenna, playing the two queens. Besides his program notes for Stratford's productions of Mary Stuart and The Three Musketeers, he published "Narrative Threads: Juliet's Costumes and their Contexts" in Canadian Theatre Review (Fall, 2013). His paper on the English entertainment of the French ambassadors in 1564 won Early Theatre's award for the best article on theatre history. He is currently one of the team working on early performance records of the northeast of England, a project for which the principal investigators won a major grant from the UK's Humanities Research Council.
Kevin McGuirk published An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A. R. Ammons 1951–1974.
Andrew McMurry found himself in an unusual vortex of energy that year. Nothing to do with his own energy, of course: that was as its usual low ebb. But events conspired to force his hand. As the planetary emergency deepened, his work was getting more traction. It was important to make hay while the sun shined and the earth heated up. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. He was invited to give some talks apropos of how messed up things were: “The Moods of Climate Change, with Thoreau” at the Boston ALA convention, which later found its way into The Concord Saunterer (certainly the greatest name of any American lit journal); “Observations of Modernity and Trout Fishing” at an art history colloquium in Berne; and “The Role of Humanities in the Time of Climate Change, or, What to Do as the World Burns” at Western. McMurry and his partner in crime, Bill Major, put together an issue of the Journal of Ecocriticism, and their editorial took some flack, so in the next issue they published a rejoinder, which felt good. An actual debate! McMurry was also proud to have his essay, “Children of Men on the Road to Nowhere” included alongside those of several of his departmental colleagues in a volume called Literature, Rhetoric and Values: Selected Proceedings of a Conference Held at the University of Waterloo, 3-5 June 2011. He was relieved to finish a couple of other essays he’d been toiling away at for the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism and the Oxford Handbook of Rhetoric. He also published “Sociological Systems Theory in Literature” in a volume called Traditions of Systems. It was one of the hardest essays he’d ever written. Then McMurry began a sabbatical in mid-2013 and worked on two books, one called Usable Transcendentalism and the other called Futile Culture, the latter under contract at TAMU Press. The incommensurability of usefulness and futility was not lost on him; indeed, the two concepts seemed to bracket his feelings about his own work that year.
In the past academic year, Marcel O'Gorman juggled research with creative projects while waiting for the Critical Media Lab to relaunch in its new home. O'Gorman completed the first draft of his manuscript, entitled Necromedia: the Collusion of Death and Technology, and he had two essays, both invited by the editor, published in leading journals in his field. In Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities he published Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story, which takes a creative and bitingly critical look at a recent philosophical trend called object-oriented ontology. In Canadian Journal of Communication, O'Gorman published a career-encapsulating article that discusses the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of the Critical Media Lab. In addition to these publications, O'Gorman moved his ambitious installation project, Myth of the Steersman from Algonquin Park to the Canadian Canoe Museum. This completes a 3-year portage for this commissioned piece, which was installed in five galleries. O'Gorman was also busy at conferences this term. He gave an invited lecture at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and delivered conference papers at York University and Notre Dame, among others. Finally, O'Gorman was very busy this summer, helping his new wife Laurel set up and curate Cobblestone Gallery in Uptown Waterloo. The gallery showcases work by Canadian artists, artisans, and other makers, which has helped O'Gorman to focus more intently on how to think with evocative objects.
Neil Randall and his team of researchers were awarded a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership Grant to forge ahead on their IMMERSe project. IMMERSe (Interactive & Multi-Modal Experience Research Syndicate) is a research network made up of 35 researchers across eight universities, with six formal academic partners and six formal industry partners. Over the next six years of SSHRC funding, Randall and his team will develop and grow the IMMERSe network and undertake an ambitious program of research focused on player immersion and player behaviour in games and game-related technologies and interactions. Ongoing research partnerships are in place with the Stratford Festival and Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital (as part of a major games-for-health initiative), and a further ongoing project includes the crowdsourcing of stories surrounding people’s reminiscences of hockey through the years.
Winfried Siemerling has been participating in two large, collaborative SSHRC- funded projects on Jazz, “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” (MCRI 2007-14) and the new Partnership Grant “International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation: A Partnered Research Institute” (2013-20). Together, they garnered over $5 million in SSHRC support. Most of his time, however, went towards his individual SSHRC project on “African Canadian Writing, Literary History, and the Presence of the Past” (2011-15). A result is the monograph The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past. The first comprehensive survey of black Canadian writing and its transnational connections from the beginnings to the present, the volume received an Award to Scholarly Publication (ASPP) Grant and will appear with McGill-Queen’s UP in early 2015. Related outputs were the chapters “Canadian Literatures and the Postcolonial” for Ato Quayson’s The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, “Slave Narratives and Hemispheric Studies” for The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, edited by John Ernest, and “Mary Ann Shadd, la diaspora africaine et les Amériques,” in a book published by Brigitte Fontille and Patrick Imbert. A chapter on improvisation, "Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research," co-written with Ajay Heble, appeared in Diana Brydon and Marta Dvorak’s volume Cross-Talk. Articles included “Time-Spaces of the Black Atlantic: Yemaya, Diasporic Disruption, and Connection in Dionne Brand,” for a special Issue on Dionne Brand co-edited by Heather Smyth; “A Conversation with Lawrence Hill,” published in Callaloo; and a sidebar on Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor for Edwin Gentzler’s “Imperial and Anti-imperial Translation in Native American Literature,” which appeared in Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal. Radio Canada’s International Spanish program “Canada en las Americas” interviewed Siemerling on the importance of Black History Month. He also gave a paper on Lawrence Hill at the Congress held at Wilfrid Laurier and the University of Waterloo, was invited to give a keynote lecture at the Summer School of the Bavarian America Academy in Munich, and talks at the Department of English of University of Toronto, for the American Studies Association (ASA) in Puerto Rico, and at an earlier conference of the Bavarian America Academy in Munich. Last, but not least, he was instrumental in getting Banting postdoctoral scholar Rob Zacharias to the University of Waterloo, whom he has supervised since 2013.
Heather Smyth had a full year of conference presentations and trips, including a paper delivered at the MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US) conference in San Jose in April 2012; a paper and roundtable presentation on postcolonial studies at Congress at UW in May 2012; papers delivered at two meetings of the four-part series “Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’” under the auspices of EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines des Mondes Anglophones) in Wake Forest, North Carolina (2012) and Montpellier, France (2013); and a conference paper at the triennial meeting of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Study in St. Lucia--featuring Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and the Caribbean launch of his new play. She wrote two papers expanded from these conference papers, one of which will appear in the African diaspora journal Callaloo. She co-edited (with Leslie Sanders) a special double issue of the Caribbean women's literature journal MaComere on the work of Dionne Brand that will be in print early in 2014.
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes published a book in August 2012: Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers 1680-1740 (Palgrave). It's in a series called “Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Cultures of Print,” edited by Clifford Siskin and Anne Mellor. She also won a SSHRC 4A Award that she is using for a research trip to London, UK this spring. In addition, Rebecca won a fellowship to go to Australia. It's called an Early Career Research Fellowship at the Australian Centre for the History of Emotion, which is funded by the Australian Research Council. Finally, Rebecca was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
In the 2012-2013 academic year, Julia Williams published a textbook called LEAP Advanced: Reading and Writing published by Pearson. Along with co-authors Trien Nguyen and Angela Trimarchi (both of the Economics Department), she also published a journal article entitled “Language Diversity and Practice in Higher Education: Can Discipline-Specific Language Instruction Improve Economics Learning Outcomes?” in Collected Essays on Teaching and Learning. One of her highlights was attending the British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP) conference in Nottingham, U.K.
Linda Warley published the essay “Flucht und Vertreibung and the Difficult Work of Memory” in the journal Life Writing in 2013 (vol. 10: issue 3). This essay is part of her new research project, which explores the experiences of German Canadians who were child refugees during the closing months of WWII, German nationals who were forcibly expelled from parts of East and Central Europe. In the next stage of her research Linda will participate in an oral history project that is being undertaken by the Waterloo Centre for German Studies. She will interview and transcribe the life stories of some local German Canadians who have similar stories to tell.
David-Antoine Williams has been pursuing his SSHRC-funded research project on the Oxford English Dictionary and English poetry. He presented some of this work at two Digital Humanities conferences, in Hamburg (July 2012) and Hannover (December 2013) and at a conference on "Poetry and the Dictionary" in Oxford (June 2013), and spoke on a panel discussing "Modernist Poetry Criticism and the New Ethics" at the Modernist Studies Association annual conference, in Brighton (August 2013). Williams has recently published articles on self-antonymic words (like "cleave") in poetry ("Poetic Antagonyms", The Comparatist) and on theoretical aspects of computer-assisted literary criticism ("Method as Tautology in the Digital Humanities", /Literary and Linguistic Computing/), and is looking forward to the appearance of a long piece on the English poet Geoffrey Hill and etymology in Modern Philology. From time to time he writes posts on literature and language on his research blog, http://poetry-contingency.uwaterloo.ca, and tweets from his perch @thelifeofwords.
Research, Publications, and Awards: Graduate Students
Kasandra Arthur published a chapter, “You, the Reader?: Authority, Rowling, and Harry Potter Fans?” in Harry Potter: Still Recruiting, edited by Valerie Frankel. She also presented a paper, “Exploring the Theoretical Applications of Adaptation Studies to Fanfiction Studies,” at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference.
Cameron Butt was awarded a SSHRC Bombardier MA award for 2013/14. Cameron will be presenting his latest research on Shakespeare, geography, and technology at the Invisible Cities Graduate Symposium and Expo at the Communitech Hub. Finally, Cameron will be presenting an early version of his XDM MRP at the Renaissance Society of America in March 2013 on a panel called “Renaissance Studies and New Technologies.”
Morteza Dehghani received an Arts Graduate Scholarship in 2013 (like the previous year) and won the English Department's creative writing award in 2012 and 2013. His poems have appeared in Luvah, Journal of the Creative Imagination. His book of poems Send My Roots Rain is now being hammered and pressed and will be out before the end of the year.
For Shawn DeSouza this year has, and continues to be, quite active. In terms of scholarly publications he co-authored a number of manuscripts: “Visualizing Performance History: two productions of Judith Thompsons’ White Biting Dog in the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)” is currently in press with Digital Studies; “An Interactive, Materialist-Semiotic Archive: Visualizing the Canadian Theatrical Canon in the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)” is currently in press within University of Alberta Press’ Place and Space: Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere; “Abstraction and Realism in the Design of Avatars for the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)” has been published by Visual Communication (November 2013), “Visualizing theatrical text: from Watching the Script to the Simulated Environment for Theatre (SET)” has been accepted by Digital Humanities Quarterly; and lastly, “SET Free: Breaking the Rules in a Processual, User-generated, Digital Performance Edition of Richard the Third” is currently under review by Ashgate Press’s Shakespeare International Yearbook 2013: Digital Shakespeares. In terms of conference proceedings he contributed to: “Is There An Archivist in the Sim?: Literacy as Agency in a Postpositivist, Mixed Media Virtual Theatre Archive” at the American Society for Theatre Research (November 2012, now published in Canadian Theatre Review, October 2013); “Soulpepper Theatre’s 2011 Revivals: Reproducing and Redefining the Canadian Theatrical Canon” as part of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (August 2012); and lastly, “Manipulating time and space in virtual worlds: design directions for the Simulated Environment for Theatre” as part of the Society for Digital Humanities (May 2012). Over the course of the year he was working to develop the software upon which all of the above manuscripts are based, namely, the Simulated Environment for Theatre. Version 2 was released in August of 2012 and since that time he has been leading the interface design of Version 3 (Forthcoming). In addition, as part of the Gamifying Shakespeare Project, he was a designer and researcher on the Staging Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet mobile game (Unreleased). Other popular accomplishments include publishing his first book, Metamagic: An Introduction (A Guide To Using Magic as a Medium For Discourse) (April 2013), and publishing his stage play, silence, as part of Necessary Angel Theatre’s Incite! compendium on mental illness (Forthcoming, 2013). This year as well he received a Tyrone Guthrie Award for performance from the Stratford Festival of Canada.
In April 2013, Stephen Fernandez—a third-year PhD Candidate—attended the 29th Pacific-Rim International Conference on Disability and Diversity in Honolulu, Hawaii. During that meeting, Stephen presented a paper on the embodied rhetoric of disability in performance art. This paper is currently being considered for a collection of essays on body politics. Stephen has also written a review article for the English department's game studies publication, First Person Scholar. The article, which appeared in March 2013, discussed the function of performative authorship in the interactive drama game, Prom Week.
Najme Khatami published an article regarding visual rhetoric—“Persian Painting: A Visual Window into a Genderless Language”—in the Pakistan Journal of Women's Studies (July 2013).
Last year Mike Lesiuk presented three conference papers: one at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) in Madison WI, another at a joint NAVSA/ACCUTE panel at Congress 2013 in Victoria BC, and a paper on non-academic careers at ACCUTE’s Professional Concerns Panel, also at Congress. He taught Youth and Adolescence for both the fall 2012 and winter 2013 terms, and Rhetoric and Pop Culture this past fall. He has also received an OGS award for the 2013/14 academic year.
Kyle Malashewski, following the completion of coursework in the summer of 2012, went full-bore into comps and came out alive and ABD. In October of last year, Kyle flew to Edmonton to present at the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) conference; and, just this past October, attended CSECS in nearby London to talk about the early stages of his dissertation research. The fall term was a busy one as he became an independent instructor and taught a course on post-WWII children’s literature. It was deeply rewarding, if also deeply exhausting. He is currently looking forward to 2014: diving headfirst into his first chapter on Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; drafting his first scholarly article; attending the American Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) conference in Colonial Williamsburg; and, perhaps as early as next fall, eagerly taking on his next teaching assignment.
Lauren Rabindranath (MA XDM) was awarded the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Master's Scholarship (SSHRCC) for her research proposal, "Digital devices and transient events: new experiences at Burning Man."
David
Shakespeare
published
an
essay,
"'The
Sight
of
All
These
Things':
Sexual
Vision
and
Obscurity
in
Blake's
Milton"
in
the
collection
Sexy
Blake,
edited
by
Helen
P.
Bruder
and
Tristanne
Connolly
(Palgrave
Macmillan,
2013).
Emma Vossen published her collected poems about the fetish art of Superman Co-Creator Joe Shuster entitled "'Not a Dream! Not a Hoax! Not an Imaginary Story!' The Lost Years of Joe Shuster" in the short fiction anthology Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories in February 2013. She also has two upcoming publications. One is a book chapter entitled "Laid to Rest: Romance, End of the World Sexuality, and Apocalyptic Anticipation in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead" in the upcoming anthology about zombies and sexuality entitled Necrosexuality which will be coming out with McFarland in early 2014. The second publication is a book chapter entitled "Feminism and Sexual Fantasy: Reading and Defending Fifty Shades of Grey as Pornography" in the anthology Sexual Fantasies which is coming out with Peter Lang International Academic Publishers in fall 2014. In addition, in November of last year Emma received the Provost's Doctoral Entrance Award for Women which is given to any student with a "first class standing," with "an outstanding record of research accomplishments, and/or references citing significant future potential in research". On the conference front, Emma attended the Society for Utopian Studies Annual Conference in October of 2012 and presented a paper entitled "Sex, Romance, and Monogamy as Survival Technique and Coping Mechanism in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead". Emma also returned to Carleton in May to attend Interface 2013: Creative and Critical Approaches in the Digital Humanities which was hosted by the Carleton University Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture and she presented the paper entitled "The Privileging of Parental over Sexual Relationships in Telltale Studio's adaptation of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead". Emma also attended "New Narrative VI: Seeing is Believing" hosted by the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC) at the University of Toronto in May and presented the paper "Laid to Rest: Sex and Monogamy in The Walking Dead". At the annual general meeting of the CSSC she was also elected as one of the five members of the Advisory Board for the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics. Finally, Emma co-founded the Games Institute Janes (GI Janes) through her RAship with Neil Randal. The GI Janes is an official affiliation of the University of Waterloo Games Institute that is looking to raise awareness about the issues surrounding gender in gaming and gaming culture. The GI Janes are working together to build a community (both online and offline) which can function as a safe space for gamers who identify as women (and their allies) in Kitchener, Waterloo, and beyond. So far they have organized many gaming events in the KW area and have been updating the twitter: @gamesinstitute and the GI Janes blog.
In the spring of 2013 Steve Wilcox was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. This award qualified him for the W.K. Thomas Award (https://uwaterloo.ca/graduate-studies/graduate-awards/wk-thomas-graduate-scholarship), which he was nominated for and won in November 2013. As part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Research For A Better Life initiative, in June 2013 Steve was one of the 25 recipients of the inaugural SSHRC Storyteller’s Award. He received the award for his video compilation of data visualization techniques as applied to online journal databases. The award allowed Steve to present his research as part of the Top 25 Storytellers at a special session at Congress 2013 in Victoria, B.C before a panel of judges. He then earned a spot in the Top 5 and was invited to present his research again at the World Social Science Forum 2013 in October in Montreal. At Congress 2013 Steve presented a paper entitled “Feed-Forward Scholarship: Why Games Studies Needs Middle-State Publishing,” which addressed his philosophy for online publishing. More specifically, the article outlines his underlying approach to FirstPersonScholar.com, of which he is co-founder and editor-in-chief. In November 2013 Steve was invited to be a guest speaker on SSHRC’s Imagining Canada’s Future panel at CIGI in Kitchener, Waterloo. His role was to represent the next generation of scholars. The paper presented addressed SSHRC’s 6 Future Challenge Areas and applied Steve’s feed-forward approach to scholarship, climate change and anticipating future challenges. In December 2012 Steve, along with fellow English grad students Michael Hancock, Jason Hawreliak, and Kent Aardse, launched FirstPersonScholar.com, a periodical that publishes essays, commentaries, and book reviews in the field of games studies on a weekly basis. FirstPersonScholar now receives over three thousand visits per month, and has received international attention, including a forthcoming journal in the U.K. that is based on Steve’s feed-forward thesis.
Graduate News: Dissertation Defenses
It has been a highly successful couple of years in the PhD program. In addition to the achievements listed above, there were ten successful dissertation defenses. Congratulations to the following students:
2012
- Stephanie Bell | Under Review: Source Use and Speech Representation in the Critical Review Essay
- Sheila Hannon | Endorsement Editorials: Rhetorical Strategies of Compelling Arguments
- Pamela Mansutti | Trauma and Beyond: Ethical and Cultural Constructions of 9/11 in American Fiction
- Danila Sokolov | Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities: Vernacular Genealogies of English Petrarchism from Wyatt to Wroth
- Stephanie Stiles | To Hurt the Pain: An Ethical Criticism of Nathanael West
2013
- Ashna Bhagwanani | Deviant Society: The Self-Reliant "Other" in Transcendental America
- Jason Hawreliak | Heroism, Gaming, and the Rhetoric of Immortality
- Craig Love | Life of the Woods: A Study of Emily Dickinson
- Alexis McQuigge | Resisting Transculturation: The European Woman in English Travel Writing
- Kevin Ziegler | Drawing on the Margins of History: English-Language Graphic Narratives in Canada
Alumni Profile: Tiffany Murray (Associate at Borden, Ladner, Gervias)
Tiffany, what prompted you to choose the RPW program for your BA?
What was the topic of your MA thesis? Have you pursued this issue as a lawyer?
My major project was, at its core, a rhetorical analysis of section 6 of the Indian Act, which is the provision on the definition and registration of "Indians" (who qualifies as an "Indian" for the purposes of the Act). The fact that legislation specified who does (and does not) qualify to identify as an "Indian" bothered me. I wanted to understand what was really going on with this provision. I used different rhetorical theories to understand various motivations in and around the section. Although the word "Indian" is a legal term used in the Act, it is a term that is offensive to many. I use it here in the legal sense only. I still deal with the Indian Act on a regular basis, and have critically analyzed other sections as well. I recall that my initial proposal for the major project (which focused on the Indian Act as a whole rather than just section 6) was criticized as being too broad -- that it would take a lifetime to consider the fulsome Act. Ten years later, I'm still analyzing the Indian Act for different reasons and in various ways.
That is great to hear. I really enjoyed working with you on that thesis. In what ways do you think your training in rhetoric helped to prepare you for law school?
The rhetorical teachings made me stretch the way I thought of things. You had to work to understand different concepts, including how and why they were being presented the way they were. The ability to critically analyze is fundamental to legal training. I felt that understanding rhetoric gave me the broadest toolkit to take to law school in this regard.
And have you found your training in rhetoric useful in your legal career?
Even as a corporate lawyer, without question, I use the skill set every day in big and small ways. I find myself considering the rhetorical situation of specific matters on a daily basis, which helps in negotiations. It reminds me to always question what is behind language (text or otherwise) and the various perspectives others may unintuitively incorporate in their language. It's also very helpful to understand certain patterns within language, and the ways different meanings can be drawn from a single word, which is really helpful when drafting agreements. Moreover, the rhetorical training has built my confidence. Having worked my way through rhetorical teachings, when I encounter very difficulty questions, I remind myself that I need to be patient and consider a variety of angles. No question is too hard; it just requires consideration from a variety of perspectives.
Many thanks, Tiffany!
For regular updates on the many activities and accomplishments of our alumni, please visit , the departmental blog, Words in Place.
2013 Award Ceremony
News from Dorothy Hadfield, the Department Awards Co-ordinator
The process of getting to the ceremony, though, is truly a department-wide effort that can start again shortly after the last catering tray is cleaned up. Last summer, as part of the department web page redesign, we created an “Awards” page with descriptions of the many undergraduate and graduate awards, and it’s my hope that instructors keep the awards in mind at the end of every semester, when they are evaluating student work. The more submissions we can get, the more competitive the fields. Awards descriptions and guidelines can be found on the departmental website awards page. I’m pleased to note that we have two new awards this year: an undergraduate award for American Literature and Culture, and a graduate co-op work report award
Undergraduate:
- Grade averages: Lindsay Kroes, Unita Ahdifard, Evelyn Mak, Matthew Wilson
- Co-op Work Report: Lindsay Kroes
- 251A Exam: Kathleen Moritz
- Albert Shaw Poetry Award: Lindsay Kroes
- English Society Creative Writing awards: Lindsay Davison (poetry and prose)
- Hibbard: Nicole Kuiper
- Canadian Literature: Ralph Neill
- Andrew James Dugan Prizes: Alanna Rigby (Literature and RPW)
- History & Theory of Rhetoric: Sarah Rodrigues; Aaron Hernandez
- RPW: Pravneet Bilkhu; Matt Mendonca
- Quarry Award: Sara Kannan
- (The Rhetoric & Digital Design prize was not awarded)
Graduate:
- Creative Writing: Morteza Dehghani
- Beltz Essay prizes: Hari KC (MA); Sarah Gibbons (PhD)
- TA Award: Sarah Gibbons
- Independent Graduate Instructor: Jesse Hutchison
- Grade averages: Eric Talbot (MA); Mari Vist (PhD)
- Jack Grey Graduate Fellowship: Jack Pender
- (The Graduate Professional Writing prize was not awarded.)
This year’s awards ceremony will take place on Friday, March 28 2014.