Recent Research Activities – Fall 2013

We usually post recent publications by English faculty on the bulletin board in the English Corner (Seton 5th floor between rooms 510 and 511). You have a couple of days left in which to read the first article posted this semester: Rhoda Zuk‘s essay (co-written with Donna Varga) on “Golliwogs and Teddy Bears: Children’s Popular Culture and ‘Innocent’ Racism” which was published in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Popular Culture.  You can also hear Dr. Zuk talking about her research in an interview on BBC Radio’s “Thinking Allowed” program, which aired a couple of times this summer.

Next up on the Recent Publications bulletin board will be Reina Green‘s essay, “Educating for Pleasure: The Textual Relations of She’s the Man.”  This article presents Dr. Green’s research on Shakespeare, film, and fanvids, and appears in Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance, edited by Sarah Annes Brown, Lynsey McCulloch, and Robert Lublin, published by Palgrave (2013).  The essay will be available in the English Corner until the end of the fall term.

Members of the English Department have also been busy this semester giving talks and conference papers. Most recently, Karen Macfarlane gave a talk to a packed house at Hal-Con on November 8.  She was on a panel, along with Dalhousie professors Jason Haslam and Julia Wright, called “Creature Feature: The Meaning of Monsters.”  The week before on November 1st, she gave a talk in the Dalhousie English Department’s Speaker Series on “Life’s a Scream: American Horror Stories.”

A few weeks ago on October 26, Anna Smol gave a paper at the Annual Atlantic Universities’ Teaching Showcase at Mount Allison University.  Her presentation, “Voicing Interpretations: Peer Learning and Self-Assessment in a First-Year Literature Assignment,” discussed a recitation and review assignment that her English 1170 students do every year. An abstract is available here.

Clare Goulet gave a guest lecture on October 24 at the University of King’s College on metaphor/nonmetaphorical thinking and scientific discovery, for a seminar in Contemporary Aesthetic and Critical Theory – Lyric Philosophy.

As part of Celebrating Writing / Publishing Week last month, the English Department sponsored its annual “Blurbs: Conversations about Research and Writing” session organized by Mackenzie Bartlett — an informal gathering in which faculty and students talk briefly about their research in progress. This year’s session on October 17 included a “blurb” by Tina Northrup, who talked about a large interdisciplinary project she is planning to conduct on the relationship between ecopoetics and ecopedagogies in Canada, exploring the intersections between poetics, education, and environmentalist discourses. Honours student Skye Bryden-Blom talked about her thesis research on film adaptations of Jane Eyre, particularly on how the relationship between Jane and Bertha is presented in terms of Lacan’s theory of the gaze. Charlotte Kiddell discussed her directed study project, supervised by Dr. Northrup, on the politics of poetic language, with a specific focus on feminist and anti-racist scholarship.

If you’re interested in our department’s research, you can find a  more complete list of faculty publications and conference papers on our Recent Research Activities webpage and on some individual Faculty Profiles.  And don’t forget to check the English Corner bulletin board regularly for new publications; we have quite a lineup for the new year, which will see work posted by Jackie Cameron, Lynne Evans, Clare Goulet, and Anna Smol.

Congratulations to Clare Goulet!

We’d like to congratulate Clare Goulet on having a manuscript accepted for publication by Wolsak and Wynn.  Her book, Lift, is part novel / part creative nonfiction, and is slated for publication in 2014 – 2015.

Clare Goulet is a contributing co-editor with Mark Dickinson of Lyric Ecology (Cormorant 2010), a collection of essays on the work of Canadian poet-philospher Jan Zwicky.  She is currently the co-ordinator of the Mount’s Writing Resource Centre and continues to teach various courses in the English Department, such as creative writing, editing, and poetry.  You’ll also find her organizing the MacDonald Room Reading Series this fall (watch for an announcement about the next event in the series on this blog in a day or two).

Guest Post: English grad Chantelle Rideout on becoming a writer

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. While going through old photos and books recently, I found this note I wrote when I was eight:

[“Ambitions to be a writer, a Olympic figure skater”]

Granted, I was a little slow mastering indefinite articles, but I kind of can’t believe that today I am actually on my way to achieving one of those goals (my apologies to the abandoned pile of flesh-coloured tights and sequined skirts in my attic). It might sound a bit nostalgic, but I really think it was during my time at the Mount that I began to take my writing seriously.

When I first came to MSVU, I bounced around in a few different programs before I found my place. While making shoebox dioramas for a Child and Youth class, I ran into an old friend from high school who said she’d always thought I’d major in English and I realized, oh yeah, I’d always thought I would too. Somehow I had just forgotten. After (not much) deliberation, I switched majors again and, with a mad dash of intro English courses, I managed to catch up with everyone else in the program. By fourth year, I found myself writing a thesis on contemporary Canadian poetry while writing my own poetry in the Creative Writing course and something just clicked.

Up until then, I’d had no idea what I was going to do after I graduated. I had thought about applying to a Master’s program, but I just wasn’t sure what to focus on. My heart didn’t feel completely in it. Once I found out about the MA in Creative Writing, I knew it was exactly right for me. An MA in Creative Writing allows you to take both academic and creative courses, write a book-length creative thesis, and, unlike many MFA’s, qualifies you to continue on to a PhD if you choose. I chose to do my MA at University of New Brunswick (Fredericton), but many universities in Canada offer a similar program (a very detailed list can be found at http://www.wheretowrite.ca/).

I really enjoyed the hybridity of the program. I loved getting the opportunity to improve both my critical and creative writing. I got to take interesting, focused academic classes like Medieval Women Mystics, while also doing workshops in types of writing I hadn’t tried before, like play writing. I spent the first year of my program doing coursework and workshops and devoted the second year to the book-length poetry manuscript for my thesis.

One of my absolute favourite parts of the program was getting to work with the writers in residence. During my two years at UNB, award-winning poets John Barton and Sue Sinclair held the position. Working with poets of their stature was incredible and I learned so much. UNB also hosts a “poetry weekend” every fall and poets from all over Canada come for two full days of readings. Last year, I even got to sit down and talk about poetry with renowned Canadian poet Jan Zwicky at the event, something I had been dying to do since being introduced to her work in Clare Goulet’s class at the Mount.

Another aspect of the program that I really enjoyed was the experience working on literary journals. As a graduate student in English at UNB, you have the opportunity to work on QWERTY, the student-run magazine and The Fiddlehead, the oldest literary journal in Canada, which runs out of UNB. During my first year I got to be on the editorial boards and during my second year I got to be an editorial assistant for The Fiddlehead and a poetry editor for QWERTY. Getting that experience in publishing and seeing how litmags work from the inside was really great for me, especially as I was getting to the point where I was ready to start sending my poetry out into the world.

After graduating from UNB last Spring, I started sending out poems from my thesis to literary magazines. After getting several accepted to publications like The Malahat Review and Room Magazine (along with my share of rejection letters!), I sent the majority of the poems to Frog Hollow Press as a chapbook manuscript. And they accepted it! We worked together on some of the poems that still needed editing and then all of a sudden I was choosing typeface and cover art and paper type and all of these things I had never even thought of. I had more than one nightmare (WHAT IF I PICKED THE WRONG FONT?) but it has been an absolutely incredible experience.

Sotto Voce is a collection of poems that engage with music, philosophy, history, and literature. Learning about lyric scholarship from MSVU’s Clare Goulet and living the two antiphonally in the hybrid MA program really helped me forge the connections between the lyrical and the scholarly in my poems. I hoped that in writing a bit about how my chapbook came to be and what happened after my English degree at the Mount, I could answer some questions for anyone with similar considerations. And if anyone wants to ask me anything further, I’d be happy to talk more about it. My email is chantelle.rideout@gmail.com.

My chapbook is available for purchase online with Paypal at
http://froghollowpress.com/catalogue.html#sotto

—Chantelle Rideout

English student Nolan Natasha to read at Company House

Rae Spoon along with Halifax poet laureate Tanya Davis and Mount English student Nolan Natasha will be reading/performing at the Company House in Halifax on Thursday, December 6, 7:30 p.m.  Nolan, an experienced artist and performer, will be reading work that is being developed in an advanced creative writing directed study course at the Mount (with Clare Goulet).  Check the Facebook event page for more details.

Celebrating Writing Week: Thursday highlights

English students will once again show off their creative talents in a couple of Celebrating Writing Week events on Thursday, November 15.

Politics, Passion, and Poetry translates the Victorian passion for social justice to 2012. Students of Susan Drain’s ENGL 3327 course perform their original poems in the tradition of Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children” and Hood’s “Song of the Shirt.”   All members of the Mount community (staff, students, faculty) are welcome.  Thursday, November 15, 1:30-3:30 p.m.  Margie O’Brien Faculty Lounge, Seton 404. Refreshments will be provided.

Creative Non-Fiction readings by Jessalyn Burke, Sadie Perron, and Rebecca Power, students from Clare Goulet’s 4000-level Directed Studies in Creative Writing course, will take place in the MacDonald Room, the Library, EMF Centre Main Floor. Thursday, November 15. 1:45-2:45 p.m. All members of the Mount community and the public are welcome to attend. Refreshments provided.

In addition to these English Department events, other Celebrating Writing sessions today include the daily writing session Write Here. Right Now; a story time with BOOG for children from the Mount’s Child Study Centre; Making Books Real with Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press; an open class in Mandarin Chinese (Seton 308; 3:05-4:20 p.m.); the Scholartistry Celebration; and a workshop sponsored by the Writing Resource Centre on “Choosing the Best Words” from 6:00-7:00 p.m. in Rosaria Student Centre 404.

Lady Gaga, Victorian seance rooms, Canadian theatre, and more….recent research by faculty and students

Ever wonder what professors are doing when they’re not teaching? In addition to the work involved in preparing and delivering courses, professors are also expected to contribute to the administration of the university and to do research. In fact, a professor’s teaching is informed by her or his research. Our Recent Research Activities page will give you details on what faculty — and some students — have been up to since classes ended last April.

For example, you will find two recently published articles on our Recent Research page that share a Gothic theme. “Mirth as Medium: Spectacles of Laughter in the Victorian Seance Room” by Mackenzie Bartlett has been published in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult. And Karen Macfarlane‘s article, “The Monstrous House of Gaga,” is one of the essays in The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture: Pop Goth.

In addition, Reina Green has published  “’No good. Go home’: Past Lives and Disrupted Homes in Catherine Banks’s Three Storey, Ocean View” in Theatre Research in Canada.

Full bibliographical details about these articles are posted on our Recent Research Activities page. You can also read these articles if you check out the English Corner bulletin board (between Seton 510 and 511).  Dr. Macfarlane’s article has been posted there for several weeks and will be there for another week, and then Dr. Bartlett’s essay will be available from late October into November; Dr. Green’s article will be posted in January.

Professor Emeritus Peter Schwenger has a new book coming out from the University of Minnesota Press: At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature. Follow the link to learn more about Dr. Schwenger’s book and his previous publications.

While professors are doing research and preparing for publication, they often present conference papers on those topics as a way of sharing their preliminary research and seeking feedback. You will find on our Recent Research Activities page that since the end of classes in April English faculty — and a couple of students —  have been busy at various regional, national, and international conferences.

Back in April, for example, Rhoda Zuk spoke about her children’s literature research at the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in Boston, specifically about white girl owners of black male dolls.

May is always a busy conference month for English faculty. Early in May, David Wilson, who has created an app for the study of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, spoke about using apps in class to the Creative Learning and Teaching conference at Dalhousie. Chris Ferns, who has extensive experience in collective bargaining in Nova Scotia universities, gave a paper at the Canadian Industrial Relations conference in Calgary. Susan Drain, along with Writing Minor student Kim Dunn, gave a presentation at the Canadian Association for Language and Learning, which met in Toronto near the end of May.

May is also the month in which many professors attend the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which brings together over sixty Canadian scholarly associations for their annual meetings in a selected university. The 2012 Congress was held in Waterloo, Ontario at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University.  As part of the Congress, Reina Green gave a paper on the Canadian playwright Catherine Banks to the Canadian Association for Theatre Research; Karen Macfarlane spoke about her Lady Gaga research to the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English and gave a talk to the Canadian Association of Chairs of English. English student Kim Sheppard delivered her first Congress paper, also to the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, on the topic of  “The Epistemology of the Plus-Sized Closet: Fatness as Being, Fatness as Meaning.” Finally, the Canadian Society of Medievalists heard Anna Smol speak about children’s versions of Beowulf.

In June, Graham Fraser gave a paper at the Interdisciplinary/ Multidisciplinary Virginia Woolf Conference in Saskatoon.

The conference season continues into the current academic term. In September, Anna Smol gave a paper on J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence on criticism of the Old English poem Battle of Maldon at the Atlantic Medieval Association conference at Acadia University. Both Clare Goulet and Reina Green spoke in October at the Atlantic Universities Teaching Showcase conference in Fredericton. Clare Goulet’s presentation was titled “The Thirty-Minute Talking Cure” and Reina Green spoke about  “Workin’ Groups: Strategies for Successful Cooperative Learning.”

These have been busy months for English Department researchers who, even when not presenting at conferences or publishing articles, are engaged in their individual research programs. You can find out more about faculty research in the Faculty Profiles on our website and on our Recent Research page. You can also visit this blog regularly for updates on recent research in the English Department.

English grad Crystal Vaughan awarded first place in Atlantic Writing Competition

Mount grad and former English Honours student Crystal Vaughan was awarded first place for creative non-fiction in this year’s Atlantic Writing Competition. Crystal read from her winning piece at the Word on the Street festival, with Mount students and faculty there to cheer her on. As Crystal points out, her winning submission was born in Clare Goulet’s creative writing class at the Mount. (Crystal is shown with Clare in the picture on the left). Here is Crystal’s account of her experience at Word on the Street, via her blog at pebblesandbuttons.com.

A word about Word on the Street  Pebbles & Buttons

Crystal Vaughan, Halifax Word on the Street, Atlantic Writing Competition Reading

When I was a kid I loved watching the children’s television show Fred Penner’s Place. My favourite part of the show was when the “Word Bird” stopped by to deliver the word of the day. Who knows, but maybe this is where my love of words first originated!

Read more… 634 more words