Literature and Rhetoric Faculty | English Language and Literature

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Here are some of the faculty members who teach courses for the Literature and Rhetoric degree. Click on the faculty member's name to view his or her full profile. All faculty in the department participate in some capacity in the literature and rhetoric 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.

Danielle Deveau

Danielle Deveau's research focuses on creative industries and cultural labour, cultural production studies, the politics of humour and laughter, and Canadian popular culture
festivals, public space, and creative cities. Her current research explores the role of culture and the creative economy in smart growth and talent attraction and retention in the Waterloo Region. She teaches courses in academic and business writing and digital media.

Jennifer Harris

Jennifer Harris's areas of interest include Nineteenth-century American literature, African American literature, and cultural studies. Her work concentrates on recuperating overlooked or understudied writers as a means of expanding the understanding of cultures of print. She teaches courses in American literature, cultural studies, and popular literature.

Ken Hirschkop

Ken Hirschkop's research areas are cultural and literary theory, politics and language, modern philosophy of language, critical media studies, and urban culture. His current work examines how various linguistic turns were taken (or almost taken) in the human sciences between 1890 and 1951 and how cities tell their own stories. He teaches courses in literary criticism, linguistics, and media studies.

Kate Lawson

Kate Lawson's areas of interest are Victorian literature and culture, especially fiction from the 1840s and 1850s. She has published on representations of middle-class domestic violence and on the figuration of strangers, belonging, migration and nationality in the novels of the Brontë sisters. She teaches courses in mid-nineteenth-century British fiction and is currently chair of the Department of English Language and Literature.

Heather Love

Heather Love's research and teaching often bring literature into dialogue with ideas from fields like science and technology studies, the medical humanities, and sustainability. Her research focuses particularly on early twentieth-century American and transatlantic modernism, and she emphasizes cross-disciplinary connections between literature and technology.

Kevin McGuirk

Kevin McGuirk's research areas include American literature and culture after the Second World War, especially poetry, and post-romantic poetics and 20th-century literatures and film. His current work focuses on the poet A. R. Ammons, non-literary poetics, art and persuasion, and sound and voice. He teaches courses in American literature, poetry, literary adaptation, and film.

Carter Neal

Carter Neal researches antebellum and Reconstruction American literature, with a focus on Emerson studies, Transcendentalism, and social welfare or reform movements. His work considers the changing tensions between relationships of choice, such as friendship, adoption, and love, and more rigid structures of social and personal organization, like gender, race, and religion. He also has interests in pedagogical methods and theory and teaches courses in science communication.

John North

John North's literary interests include Victorian studies, Shakespeare, literature and the Bible, and children’s literature. His primary research has been in nineteenth century British newspapers and periodicals bibliography, and he is the editor of two major directories of nineteenth-century periodicals. His also supervises projects involving the Oxford Inkings (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and others), and the poet Margaret Avison. He teaches courses in Victorian literature, Shakespeare, and the Bible and literature.

Megan Selinger

Meghan Selinger's research in early modern drama investigates how performance disrupts the stability of play endings and enhances the narrative of the plays themselves. She specifically looks at the lingering questions or problems at the end of Shakespeare’s texts, and discuss how performance tackles these issues.

Vershawn Young

Verhawn Young's research areas are African American Performance, African American Studies, African American literature, and rhetoric and composition. His current research examines the performance of black masculinity in the media by successful African American men. He is also a solo performer and actor. He is cross-appointed with Drama and Speech Communication, and teaches courses in performance studies.