Featured research projects

Our department features a number of ongoing research projects that graduate students can become involved in.

Canadian Journal of Disability Studies

The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (CJDS) is hosted by uWaterloo English and edited by Professor Jay Dolmage. It publishes peer-reviewed original articles that advance research in the multidisciplinary, international field of disability studies. The journal embraces a wide range of methodologies and perspectives, values collaborative and cross-disciplinary work, community partnership, and creative approaches to scholarship. It's freely accessible online and speaks to academics and to anyone involved in disability arts, advocacy, community organization or policy.

Deciphering Digital Life Writing

Exploring how and why individuals use Internet media platforms to fashion representations of themselves.

Deciphering Digital Life Writing brings together rhetorical genre theory, new media theory, computer-mediated communications (CMC) research, and autobiography studies to examine the social web. It explores why so many people provide so many details of their lives—photos, memories, feelings, desires, ancestry, and more—to an anonymous audience of strangers online, and how these strangers become communities.

First Person Scholar

First Person Scholar is an online game studies periodical created and maintained by graduate students at the University of Waterloo through The Games Institute. Every Wednesday we publish essays, commentaries, and book reviews in the niche between games journalism and games journals. At First Person Scholar we encourage our contributors to take calculated risks with their submissions; we want to hear scholars think out loud about gaming in a way that challenges accepted definitions and practices. If journals document where games studies has gone, we are about where games studies is going.

Romeo and Juliet Games

With the Stratford Festival and local game producers at Industry Corp, a team of uWaterloo researchers is developing a suite of games about Romeo and Juliet. Professor Katherine Acheson's first-year Shakespeare course, ENGL 190 (fall 2012), developed the game design document for a mystery game about R&J, and Professor Jennifer Roberts-Smith (uWaterloo Drama) has been working with her team to produce a stage manager game that lets players build a production of the play, complete with lights, sound, and action. Look for the stage manager game to be released in the spring of 2013, and the mystery game in the fall. Romeo and Juliet runs at the Festival from May 1 to October 19.

The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals

Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals is a a subject-inclusive, language-inclusive bibliography of 50,000 publications, 48,000 personal names, 4,572 issuing bodies and 756 subjects. It is a directory for cultural historians, genealogists and other subject specialists to the largest single body of historical documents arising out of nineteenth-century England at the height of the British Empire.