Department of English
Graduate Students
Some of our PhD Candidates
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Meghan Blythe Adams
MA (U of T), BA (Western) My chief areas of interest include space, death and the body in video games. More broadly, I am interested in theories of play, particularly in relation to identity. My previous teaching experience includes courses on Effective Writing, the Graphic Novel, Science Fiction and Madness in Literature. |
UC 56 |
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Madison Bettle MA (Western), BA (Queen's) Victorian/19C. Secondary field: Postcolonial. I specialize in adventure fiction, masculinity, and the Indian Mutiny. My secondary interests include postcolonial ecocriticism. |
UC 56 |
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Donald Calabrese MA (Western), BA (Cape Breton) My primary research surrounds the manuscripts and "avant-texte" of James Joyce's Ulysses. I'm currently studying (re)naming in the Ulysses avant-texte and how it complicates the printed text of the novel. My secondary interests include Frank O'Hara, comix, Christopher Marlowe and the philosophy of language. |
UC 8 |
Graduate English Society (GES) Co-Chair |
Jeremy Greenway MA (Carleton), BA (Western) My research takes place primarily in twentieth-century literatures of British and Irish origin. Additional interests in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and gender and sexuality studies inform my doctoral project on musical soundscapes and sexualities in the modern and postmodern fictions of both the UK and mainland Europe. Supervisor: Dr. S. Bruhm |
UC 206D |
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Frederick D. King MA (Western), BA (UNBSJ), BBA (UNBSJ) Victorian and Edwardian Literature and Culture; History of the Book and Textual Studies; Queer Theory; intersections of Nineteenth-Century Sexology and Erotica; Nineteenth- and Twenty-First Century theories of Progress and Capitalism. Supervisor: Dr. C. Keep |
UC 60 |
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Jeff King MA (Alberta), BA (Alberta) Romantic poetry and prose (especially Blake, Godwin, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley); eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought and culture; deconstruction; psychoanalysis; ethics; history of ideas; theology. Supervisor: Dr. T. Rajan |
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Rebekah Ann Lamb MA (Western), BA (Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, New Hampsire) Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature. My primary work is on Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. Other interests: “The House Beautiful”; Dickens; Victorian and Modern art, culture, ethics, and theology; Studies of the city; Psychoanalysis; Phenomenology; Holocaust testimony and memorialization; and genre studies. Supervisor: Dr. D.M.R. Bentley |
UC 168 |
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Mélissa LeBlanc MA (Western), BA (Moncton) Mélissa's primary interest is in literary adaptation, life writing, and contemporary 20th century British representations of Romantic and Victorian writers. She also has a strong secondary interest in Acadian literature and its presence in Anglophone literary criticism. Mélissa has been TA for Introduction to English Literature, the Storyteller's Art I & II, 20th Century British Literature, and Science Fiction. |
UC 7 |
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Erica Leighton MA (Carleton), BA (Carleton) Research interests: The entire medieval period (500-1500) with a focus on mid-late medieval England; specifically, the ars memoria (art of memory) and its interpretations in the rhetorical narrative constructions of hagiography. Teaching experience: 5 years of teaching assistantships in a range of courses. I regularly teach on writing in video games, and guest lectured on Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Supervisor: Dr. R. Moll |
UC 61 |
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Riley McDonald MA (Dalhousie), BA (Trent) Contemporary horror and science fiction, with specific emphasis on virality and its influence on political and social movements. |
UC 8 |
 Graduate English Society (GES) Co-Chair |
Darren Monteith MA (Western), BA (Guelph) My research focuses on how narratives of childhood and growing up in contemporary Canadian literature speak to an increasing cultural awareness of queer identities, and to the politics of food as well. I’m also interested in uses of the postcolonial gothic, queer studies, and the pedagogy of PC/video gaming. |
UC 170 |
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Ali Narafshan MA (Western), BA (Bahonar) Ali Narafshan is specializing in early modern English drama. His areas of interest include domestic spaces, hospitality, gender, identity, male companionship, and construction of masculinity. His current project examines the homosocial economies of male friendship in relation to the privacy of the household and the heterosexual relationships it embodies. |
UC 58 |
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Meghan O'Hara MA (Western), BA (McMaster) My research focuses on 20th and 21st century British & Irish literature. More specifically, I’m interested in contemporary British drama, performance theory, and the wider role of theatre in contemporary society. |
UC 171 |
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Christine Penhale MA (UBC), BA (UFV) Research Interests: Victorian period, botanical language, floral symbolism, Charles Darwin, John Ruskin, Virginia Woolf, theory. TA for Dr. Jonathan Boulter, UWO, Sept–Dec 2012. TA for Dr. Tiffany Potter, UBC, Jan–Apr 2011. TA for Dr. Bryan N.S. Gooch, UBC, Sept–Dec 2010. TA for Dr. Robert Rouse, Jan–Apr 2010. TA for Dr. Larissa Lai, UBC, Sept–Dec 2009. Dept of English Teaching Certificate, UBC, December 2010. |
UC 8 |
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Emily Pez MA (Western), BA (King's UC, Western) Research interests: Primary: Old and Middle English language and literature (particularly Chaucer, Lydgate, and ekphrasis). Secondary: Nineteenth-century British and Irish literature. TA Experience: Medieval Studies 1020E (2012-13), English 3114E (Medieval Language and Literature), English 2230G (Studies in Poetics), English 1024E (Forms of Fiction: Introduction to Narrative), English 1020E (Introduction to Literature and Composition) Supervisor: Dr. Russell Poole |
UC 168 |
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George Ramos MFA (Michigan at Ann Arbor), BA (Dartmouth College) Interests: Early Modern English Literature, Creative Writing (Poetry and Playwrighting) Teaching Experience: College Writing (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Washtenaw Community College, Michigan), Creative Writing (University of Michigan) Teaching Assistant Experience: Renaissance Literature (Western University, Canada), Shakespeare’s Principal Plays (University of Michigan), Senior Poetry Workshop (Dartmouth College) |
UC 3A |
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Kirin Rogers MPhil (Oxford), BA (UVic) Medieval (particularly Old English and Old Norse) and history of the English language. |
UC 8 |
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Diana Samu-Visser MA (Western), BA (Calgary) Canadian literature, abjection, eroticism, testimony, queer theory, gender and sexuality, postcolonial studies |
UC 8 |
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Leif Schenstead-Harris MA (Dalhousie), BA (Saskatchewan) Research interests by subject: ghosts, hauntings, death, exchanges, silences, intensities, oceans, mourning, absence. Research interests by region: Anglo-Caribbean, South African & Afrikaner, and Irish literatures. Research interests in theory: affirmative deconstruction, transnational poetics, the global gothic & the weird, hauntologies, ecstatic identities. Teaching experience: introductory English courses, 2009 -- 2013. Joint Supervisors: Dr J. Boulter & Dr. S. Bruhm |
UC 125 |
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Megan Lynn Selinger MA (York), BA (York) My primary research in early modern drama investigates how performance disrupts the stability of play endings and enhances the narrative of the plays themselves. I also have interests in contemporary theatre and Shakespearean adaptation. My secondary field is the 19th century. Teaching experience: Shakespeare, Introduction to English, The Contemporary Gothic, and Madness and Culture. Supervisor: Dr. M.J. Kidnie |
UC 122 |
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Derek Shank MA (Western), BA (Waterloo) My primary research interests lie in Romantic period literature, particularly with regard to intellectual history and engagement with the Classical tradition. I also have interests in Renaissance and Medieval literature, especially poetry. I have been a teaching assistant for Children's Literature (English 2033E) and Speculative Fiction: Fantasy (English 2072G). |
UC 3A |
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Kevin Shaw MA (Windsor), BA (Western) My research interests include Canadian literature, poetry and poetics, life writing studies, and gender and sexuality studies. I also have an interest in creative writing and experience as a writing centre tutor and composition instructor. |
UC 171 |
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Andy Verboom MA (Alberta), BA (Dalhousie) My research links the history of colonial archiving with contemporary discourses of closure (e.g., settlements, political apology) in North American and Pacific settler states, foregrounding indigenous conceptions of time and repertoire that resist or evade archival closure. Broader interests include contemporary poetry, indigenous literature, affect theory, and the cultural politics of time. |
UC 8 |
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Andrew Wenaus MA (Regina), BA (Regina) 20th Century British and Irish Literature; 20th Century American Literature; Postmodern Science Fiction; the Avant-Garde and experimental literature; technology and literature; Phenomenology; the Cognitive Sciences; Ambience and invisibility. Supervisor: Dr. J. Boulter |
UC 7 |
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Mary Eileen Wennekers MA (U of T), BA (York) Mary Eileen Wennekers is interested in symbolic circuits of exchange and in the history of modernist optics. She is researching late nineteenth and early twentieth century narrative point of view in order to effect a reconfiguration of the notion of the modernist gaze within its material and visual contexts. Supervisor: Dr. A. Pero |
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Anne Young MA (Windsor(, BA (UNB), BFA (Mount Allison) I dissertate on the subject of fetishized fatal phantom females while studying nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory and criticism, and all things Gothic. In my capacity as Teaching Assistant, I have Tirelessly Assisted undergraduates navigating Composition, Contemporary Gothic, Madness and Culture, Introduction to British Literature, and Understanding Literature Today. Supervisor: Dr. S. Bruhm |
UC 52 |