Dr. Karen Macfarlane invited to give keynote at International Gothic Association

Dr. Karen Macfarlane

Dr. Karen Macfarlane was an invited speaker at the 15th International Gothic Association conference, which was held at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois from July 30 to August 2. She presented a keynote address, “Where Have All the Monsters Gone?” on July 31st.

Dr. Macfarlane explains the topic of her presentation:

Monsters are undergoing an identity crisis in twenty-first century popular culture. In this paper, I explored the layered and problematic rethinking of the monstrous in contemporary Gothic and horror. Where there were once creatures that terrified and preyed and menaced there are now lovers who sparkle, victims, saviours and, sometimes, just everyday people with slightly odd proclivities. Because the monster has functioned traditionally as a sort of barometer for the fears and anxieties that plague a culture, warning of potential transgressions and allowing a cathartic removal of threats to social order through conflicts with human protagonists, the disappearance of the truly monstrous seems to be a particularly troubling trend. Without them, how can a culture imaginatively identify and work through threats to its world view? In this talk I argued that the disappearance of the traditional monster might be evidence of the ways in which neoliberal social practice works to limit political and collective action through an apparently benign discourse of “sameness” that denies the value of difference, specific historical and cultural experiences in the name of “equality” and obscures the fact that operations of power are systemic. As many critics have noted, “sameness” almost inevitably means “mainstream” (that is, “white”) in the contexts in which it is used. To be equal is to conform to mainstream definitions of identity. By looking at the ways in which monsters have been “mainstreamed”, I explore the possibility that with all of the monsters safely relegated to the spaces of human-like sameness, they are unable to warn us of the threat of those imperatives of individualism, competition, and conformity and that true monster is the one that absorbed and silenced all of the others; the one that is too big to see and that threatens to devour us all as we speak.

Dr. Karen Macfarlane speaking at the 2019 IGA conference

photos: Dr. Jason Haslam @JazzlamHazzlam

Faculty to present at 2017 Atlantic Teaching Showcase

Teaching award winner David Wilson will be sharing some of his best ideas at the 2017 Teaching Showcase, to be held at the Mount on Saturday, October 14. Professor Wilson will be presenting in what is known as the “Furious Fives” session — a quick series of five-minute talks packed with ideas to take away from the conference. David Wilson offers this summary of his talk:

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David Wilson, recipient of the 2017 MSVU Part-time Teaching Award

Does your class often end with a fade to black?

Rather than merely telling students during the last 5 minutes of a class what will happen in the next one, a more effective teaching practice is showing them. This “Furious Five” session will quickly demonstrate tips on how to briefly preview (and promote) a topic during the closing moments of a class that bridges what students have just learned, so that they will be curious and look forward to learning more in the next class. The final five minutes of a class can serve as a memorable pivot point that keeps students motivated. The key to accomplishing this goal is to capture students’ attention. Moreover, the best way to make these connections between classes is by using a lively activity that encourages participation. Thus, attendees at this session can expect to be involved in the fun.

 

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The experiential learning opportunities offered by our department will be on display during the conference as well.  Dr. Anna Smol will be organizing a display that features the English Department’s many hands-on learning activities, from participation at the Atlantic Undergraduate English Conference, to part-time jobs as writing tutors and research assistants, to the many course-related activities that our students engage in.

David Wilson‘s talk will be given on Saturday, October 14 in a session scheduled from  4:25 to 4:50 in McCain 105.

Anna Smol‘s experiential learning display will be in the Rosaria Terrace from 11:30 to 1:30.

The Saturday Teaching Showcase conference is part of a three-day series of events. On Thursday night at 7 p.m. a public lecture by special guest and keynote speaker James Lang, author of Small Teaching and Cheating Lessons, will take place in the Rosaria Multipurpose Room. A workshop with Dr. Lang will be held on Friday morning before the Showcase takes place on Saturday.  For details, including the schedule, see more information here.

 

Peter Schwenger interviewed in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Peter Schwenger, who is a Professor Emeritus in our department, was recently interviewed in  The Chronicle of Higher Education about his research presentation on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. In the Chronicle article, Tom Bartlett interviews Dr. Schwenger and the other speakers on a Knausgaard panel at this year’s MLA (Modern Language Association) convention held in Austin, Texas.

According to Bartlett, Dr. Schwenger “eschewed the political for a close reading, arguing that in Knausgaard’s work we ‘recognize the dense material accumulations that make up our lives, and which are essentially trivial. This hardly ever happens in literature, where details do not go to waste but are charged with some degree of significance. But here, as in life, details present themselves only to come to nothing'” (Chronicle). Want to know more about Knausgaard? Read Bartlett’s article to see what Dr. Schwenger and other critics are saying about this author.

To find out more about Dr. Schwenger’s research, you can view his  Mount faculty profile or the website for his current position as a Resident Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in London, Ontario.

The MLA convention is the largest annual conference for humanities scholars and is held in a different American city every year in January.

Dr. Peter Schwenger.  Image from http://publish.uwo.ca/~pschweng/Site/Main_Page.html

A Congress of Academics and the inevitable Controversy

The Globe’s Margaret Wente (not exactly as illustrated) Credit: http://yuzahunter.deviantart.com

The Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences takes place every year in late May, early June. It is the premier gathering of Canadian academics in those areas – sharing their research and scholarship, discussing the state of the academy, and engaging in passionate debate. The scheduling of the Congress is a major challenge: over roughly two weeks, approximately seventy societies meet, some of them generalist and some specialist. An academic may belong to several societies and want to attend sessions or present at all of them. This year it is Ottawa which is swarming with scholars with large nametags, looking for wifi and seminar rooms and colleagues and possible research partnerships and the best party.

In addition to the societies’ meetings, there are public lectures, receptions, book launches, tours, poster sessions, film festivals, book expositions, and, yes, the occasional party.

Our English faculty are well represented: Dr. Green, as chair of the department, attended the Canadian Association of Chairs of English. In addition, she was a participant in the intriguingly titled discussion “Peripatetic Explorations of Monuments and Moose Droppings in Ottawa,” under the aegis of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

Dr. Fraser organized and chaired a panel called “Ghostwritings” for ACCUTE: the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English; Dr Macfarlane presented “Zombies and the Viral Web” as part of the “Digital Stories” panel, also at ACCUTE. She also organized and chaired a joint session with the International Gothic Association on “Gothic Fathers,” and another joint session (this time with the Margaret Atwood Society) on “Margaret Atwood’s Children.”

As predictable as the meeting of Congress is the media focus – in addition to serious attention paid to the work of Canadian scholars, there is always a cheap shot or two from a columnist who finds the wonderful titles of presentations impossible to resist. For example, the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente took aim at Congress on June 1st:

“Who needs another boring monograph about Jane Austen? Time to break new ground. The presentation called ‘Sexed-up Paratext: The Moral Function of Breasts in 1940s Canadian Pulp Science Fiction’ does just that. It is not atypical.”

She provoked the usual range of responses.

“Margaret Wente takes aim at the same old fish in the same old barrel. Every year, pundits cherry-pick a few papers or presentations …that appear, by virtue of their titles alone, to be goofy. It’s an easy game to play. … English literature programs in high schools and universities continue to teach the works of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Austen, Dickinson, James, Joyce, Beckett etc., but they look at other cultural artifacts as well.” (Dale Churchward, June 3) The writer is an English teacher at Upper Canada College in Toronto.

Stephen Toope, the president of the Federation of the Humanitites and Social Sciences, remarked: “Seemingly without talking to any of the nearly 9,000 researchers at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Margaret Wente decided to single out descriptions of conference sessions that she deems silly.  In doing so, she ignores the tough, often uncomfortable questions being raised at congress about who we are and where we may be heading as a society.” (June 4)

Colin Norman, on the other hand, agreed that “Margaret Wente has it right about the state of English studies. They used to be about the best that has been thought and said; now that approach is replaced by twaddle of the kind she describes.” (June 4) Norman is retired from the English Department at Queen’s University, Kingston, and sounds as if he is relieved to be so!

For more, visit the Globe and Mail opinions or the Congress website.

The Book Expo at Congress

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.

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.