MA, Guelph
BA, Waterloo
Extension:
43203
Email: dhadfield@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
My Waterloo story starts on the student side of the classroom: I first arrived here from the Niagara Peninsula for an English co-op degree in the mid-1980s. With BA in hand and 6 terrific workterms at IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and the uWaterloo archives on my resume, I moved down the highway to the University of Guelph, spending a few years as a designer and writer in the Public Relations & Communications unit there before succumbing again to the lure of scholarship. When my thesis supervisor invited me to help collect materials for the theatre archives at Guelph, I found myself literally stopped in my tracks by the experience of holding memory in my hands. I spent the rest of grad school in the climate-controlled conditions of the archives, exploring how and why history preserves some authors, plays, and literary works while others disappear. My particular interest in mapping the networks of production has brought me back into the world of digital humanities, where I’m working on a project to create an enriched online biobibliographical resource around Canadian women playwrights.
I spent several years juggling freelance work as a writer, document designer, editor, and indexer with teaching writing, communications, English, Drama, and Theatre courses at Guelph, Guelph-Humber, and St. Jerome’s before coming to Waterloo to co-ordinate the extended learning program.
Selected publications
“Beyond Married Love: Renegotiating Gender and Power Between the Wars.” Shaw: Marriages and Misalliances, ed. Bob Gaines. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 159-74.
Critical Shaw: Theatre. Editor, Rosettabooks, 2016.
“Shaw and Feminism.” Shaw in Context. Ed. Brad Kent. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 215-21.
Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off. Editor and contributor. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.
“‘The Web of Our Life is of a Mingled Yarn’: The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project, Humanities Scholarship, and ColdFusion” (with Daniel Fischlin, Gordon Lester, and Mark McCutcheon). College Literature 36.1 (Winter 2009): 77-104.
Re: Producing Women’s Dramatic History: The Politics of Playing in Toronto. The New Canadian Criticism Series. Ed. Frank Davey. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2007.
“What runs (in) the Family: Iterated Retellings, Gender and Genre in You Never Can Tell and Major Barbara.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2006. 58-78.
“The Role Power Plays in George F. Walker’s Detective Fiction.” George F. Walker, Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English 4, ed. Harry Lane. Playwrights Canada Press, 2006.
Canadian Drama and the Critics. (Assoc. Ed.) Revised Edition. Ed. L.W. Conolly. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1995.
Fellowships & Awards
- University of Waterloo: Learning Innovation and Teaching Enhancement (LITE) grant (2013-14).
- Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences: Aid to Scholarly Publications Program publishing subsidy for Re: Producing Women’s Dramatic History (2004).
- University of Western Ontario: Carl F. and Margaret E. Klinck Dissertation Prize (Best Dissertation in Canadian Literature, 1999).
Current research
As part of my work with our online program, I am researching how we can use online technologies to create rich teaching and learning environments for English courses. Beyond the online learning focus, I continue to work on fin-de-siècle feminism as it emerges in the theatrical work of Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries. I am also project co-manager (with Ann Wilson, University of Guelph) for the Online Profiles of Canadian Woman Playwrights initiative, an ongoing project component of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC).
Areas of graduate supervision
- Canadian Drama and Theatre
- Fin-de-Siecle literature and drama (British and Canadian)
- Historiography and politics of literary and theatrical production
- Online pedagogy and learning