PhD, University of Waterloo
MA, University of Waterloo
BA, University of Waterloo
Email: cgiannak@uwaterloo.ca
Website: chrisgiannak.com
Biography
I am Visiting Fellow at Western’s Centre for Theory and Criticism and a sessional lecturer at the University of Waterloo. At the Centre for Theory and Criticism, I present research on poetry and interdisciplinarity and the epistemology of literary criticism. At Waterloo, I teach courses in communications, rhetoric, and literary studies.
Publications
A review of Tom Docherty. Geoffrey Hill and the ends of poetry in Essays in Criticism (commissioned).
A review of Johanna Winant. Lyric Logic: How Modern American Poetry Reasons in Modern Philology (forthcoming).
A review of Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant. Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century in English Studies in Canada. (forthcoming in ESC 49:2).
A review of Anirudh Sridhar. Agon: Poetry’s Challenge to the Mathematization of Reality (1920s–1960s) in Modern Philology. (Link)
Selected Conference Presentations
“Made under constraint: literary tensions in ‘poetry as architecture’.” Association of College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). Concordia University, Montreal, June 2026.
“The bell-like quality of the writing: Reading Tractatus as lyric philosophy.” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). Gannon University, Pittsburgh, March 2026.
“From ‘bean’ to ‘been’: lexical commodification as poetic encoding in J. H. Prynne’s The Plant Time Manifold Transcripts.” Science and Sensibility: A Transdisciplinary Conference. London Arts-Based Research Centre, London, UK, October 2025.
“Parallel Rhetorical Figures in Jan Zwicky’s Poetry and Poetics”. Rhetoric Canada. University of Alberta. 2021.
Selected Awards
- NeMLA CAITY Travel Grant (2026)
- Doctoral Thesis Completion Award (2024)
- Arts Graduate Senate Award (2023)
- Lea Vogel-Nimmo Professionalization Award (2020)
- Rhetoric Essay Prize (Doctoral) (2017)
Current Research and Work
My dissertation, “Knowing Language: The Poetics of Epistemology”, examined the epistemological relations between poetry and other disciplines—especially philosophy, history, and theology—in the works of Jan Zwicky, Paul Muldoon, and Geoffrey Hill, respectively. My project achieved two ends: first, it showed how poetry discloses the particular - and sometimes peculiar - ways that knowing is represented according to gestalt, riddling, and apophatic rhetorical modes; second, it answered questions about how poetry materializes—and in some cases necessarily complicates—notions of truth, thinking, and knowing in language.
I have presented papers at RhetCanada, the Modernist Studies Association, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, ACCUTE, the London Arts-Based Research Centre (UK), and the Northeast Modern Language Association.
Although my research continues to explore the epistemological and rhetorical relations between poetry and other disciplines, my role at the Centre for Theory at Western helps me extend my research in two important ways: it provides the resources not only for an additional study of poetry and the physical sciences (poetry as architecture, chemistry, biology, etc), but also the resources for exploring the critical and theoretical implications of close reading as a fundamentally epistemic practice in literary criticism.
Teaching
I currently teach literature, rhetoric, and professional communication courses at Waterloo. Since 2019, I have been actively involved in Waterloo’s University Communication Requirement (UCR) program, which provides accredited communication training for students in STEM fields.
My teaching portfolio (as instructor-of-record) includes courses for students in:
- Civil, Electrical, Management, Architectural, Environmental, Geological, and Computer Engineering
- Physical/Life Sciences and Mathematics
- English, Arts, and Interdisciplinary studies programs
My pedagogical approach emphasizes practical applications in rhetoric, audience analysis, genre studies, and technical writing. I specialize in helping students translate complex disciplinary knowledge into clear, persuasive, and responsible communication, particularly in proposals, reports, and other forms of professional documentation. On the literature side, my teaching emphasizes close reading, research development, argumentation, and practical criticism.