PhD, Western Ontario
MA, Western Ontario
BA, Memorial
Email: shulan@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
In my research, I often trace the history of ideas through their literary representations. Sometimes, as in my article “Civility and Fantasies of Anglosphere,” I do this because I want to know why certain ways of expressing an idea persist long after we think we’ve left them behind. I ask what this persistence tells us about structures of power. Sometimes, as in “Early Canadian Queer Literature,” I am curious about how early Canadian writers imagined ways of being that didn’t yet have the names recent generations have given them.
Literary representation can make us question everything we think we know about even the most familiar ideas. Take nostalgia, a concept I’ve been thinking about ever since my graduate school days. We usually treat nostalgia as a sort of comfort food for the mind: tasty, but not good for you. Yet late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian stories and poems often suggest that we should instead approach lost-past longing as a kind of speculative fiction. Depictions of that longing help us picture the worlds we want to live in, not just times gone by, and that means that nostalgia isn’t about comfort. I’ve found that instead, it’s about figuring out what we want the future to be even when—maybe especially when—we aren’t at all sure tomorrow will come. Instead of letting us escape into yesterday, literary nostalgia pushes us to confront our uncertain tomorrows.
Selected publications
Editorial Work
With Randy Harris, and Murray McArthur, ed. Literature, Rhetoric, and Values: Selected Proceedings of the University of Waterloo Conference. Stoke-on-Trent: Cambridge Scholars P, 2012.
Publications
“Civility and Fantasies of Anglosphere: Reading Meghan Markle and Jessica Mulroney through Sara Jeannette Duncan’s His Royal Happiness.” English Studies in Canada 47.4 (2021 [2024]): 1-28.
“Not for Entertainment Purposes Only: Ethnicity and Alice Munro’s ‘Powers’.” Alice Munro Country: Essays on Her Works. Vol. I. Ed. J.R. (Tim) Struthers. Montreal: Guernica, 2020. 263-79.
“Canadian Criticism in English: Literature and Nation.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. 283-99.
“Early Canadian Queer Literature, or In and Out of the Fur-Lined Closet: Susan Frances Harrison’s The Forest of Bourg-Marie.” Studies in Canadian Literature 42.1 (2017): 31-49.
“My Letter of Confession: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Late Imperial Rhetoric and Risk-Taking.” University of Toronto Quarterly 84.1 (Winter 2015): 1-18.
“Afterword.” The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation. By George Copway/Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. 1850. Early Canadian Literature Series. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 191-207.
“Yours to Recover: Mound Burial in Alice Munro’s ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’” Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 260-73.
“Counter Revolutions: Susan Frances Harrison’s Textual Recycling.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 71 (Fall/Winter 2012): 52-67.
Grants, fellowships and awards
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant 2018-20
- Shastri International Collaborative Research Grant 2017-19
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences in Canada Grant 2011
- UWaterloo/Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Seed Grant 2012
- UWaterloo/SSHRC Travel Grant 2010
Current research
- Early queer Canadian literatures
- Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of nostalgia
- Early Canadian women’s writing
- The afterlives of empire
Areas of graduate supervision
- Canadian literature