PhD, University of Waterloo
MA, University of Waterloo
BA, University of Waterloo
Email: cgiannak@uwaterloo.ca
Biography
I grew up in Stratford, Ontario, working in busy restaurants and practicing martial arts. After studying architecture for a year, I planted myself at the University of Waterloo, earning my BA (Rhetoric and Professional Writing, 2013), MA (Literary Studies, 2016), and PhD (English, 2025).
Publications
A review of Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant. Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century in English Studies in Canada. (forthcoming).
A review of Anirudh Sridhar. Agon: Poetry’s Challenge to the Mathematization of Reality (1920s–1960s) in Modern Philology. (forthcoming).
Selected Conference Presentations
Giannakopoulos, Christopher. “Made under constraint: literary tensions in ‘poetry as architecture’.” Association of College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). Concordia University, Montreal, June 2026.
Giannakopoulos, Christopher. “The bell-like quality of the writing: Reading Tractatus as lyric philosophy.” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). Gannon University, Pittsburgh, March 2026.
Giannakopoulos, Christopher. “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.
Giannakopoulos, Christopher. “The (In)accessible Archive: Freud, Don Paterson, and the Mnemic Signifier.” Association of College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE). University of British Columbia, Vancouver, May 2019.
Selected Awards
- NeMLA CAITY Travel Grant (2026)
- Doctoral Thesis Completion Award (2024)
- Arts Graduate Senate Award (2023)
- Lea Vogel-Nimmo Graduate Professionalization Award (2020)
- Rhetoric Essay Prize (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 on Jan Zwicky, Don Paterson, T. S. Eliot, J. H. Prynne, and others at Rhetoric Canada, the Modernist Studies Association, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the London Arts-Based Research Centre (UK). This year, I will be presenting a paper on Jan Zwicky and Wittgenstein at NeMLA (Pittsburgh) and a paper on ‘poetry as architecture’ at ACCUTE (Concordia, 2026).
Although I continue to explore the epistemological and rhetorical relations between poetry and other disciplines (philosophy, history, theology), I extend the work done in my PhD with a renewed interest poetry and the physical sciences (poetry as architecture, chemistry, biology, etc). My second objective, which is more properly a project in the digital humanities, focusses on how traditional forms of literary criticism - eg: close readings on key primary texts - can be historically represented through the use of interactive digital and computational tools; I intend to build a digital platform to enable this process.
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.