I grew up mostly on the East Coast, in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Later I moved to Newfoundland, where I completed my bachelor’s degree in English in 1994. Since then, I’ve lived and worked in southwestern Ontario. I teach Canadian undergraduate and graduate courses on various issues in Canadian writing, on early, modern, and regional Canadian literatures, and on the representation of the emotions, health, and wealth in Canadian poetry and novels. My area of specialization is nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian writing.

Selected Publications

“Charm Offensive: Epideixis and a Microhistorical Reading of The Indian.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 43.3 (September 2010): 51-67.

“Telling a Better Story: History, Fiction, and Rhetoric in George Copway’s Traditional History

and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation.” National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada. Ed. Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. 99-112.

“Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Hugh and Ion: Crafting a Samsonian Hero.” Canadian Poetry:

Studies: Documents, Reviews 58 (Spring/Summer 2006): 10-35.

“Canadian Modernism, P.K. Page’s ‘Arras’, and the Idea of the Emotions.” The Canadian Modernists Meet. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers Series. Ed. Dean Irvine. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2005. 331-53.

Forthcoming Publications

“Once and Future Golden Ages: Literary Nostalgia in Fin de Siècle Canada.” Essays on Canadian Writing 84 (2010).

“Still Backwaters Run Deep: Mind and Local Colour in Crowded Out! And Other Sketches.” Crowded Out! And Other Sketches: A Critical Edition. Ed. Tracy Ware. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2010.

Grants, Fellowships & Awards

UW/SSHRC Travel Grant 2010

UW/SSHRC Travel Grant 2008

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council/University of Waterloo Seed Grant, 2006

UW/SSHRC Travel Grant 2005

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellowship 2001-02

IODE War Memorial Scholarship for Doctoral Studies in Canada 1999-2000

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship 1997-2000

Current Research

My research interests include the literary and philosophical representations of nostalgia in Canada’s Confederation and transitional periods (1867-1914, 1880-1920), the same periods’ literary discourses of emotions and memory, and the tropes that were key to naturalizing colonial dominance in late nineteenth-century Canada. This last interest helped lead me back to a focus on nineteenth-century First Nations writing and rhetoric that I originally pursued as part of my doctoral dissertation and on which I have recently published an article and a book chapter. The article I am currently preparing on Alice Munro’s short story “What Do You Want to Know For?” combines my research interests in memory and rhetoric with the question of how colonial discourse survives in contemporary times. Does the English language as spoken in Canada today convey memories of the nineteenth-century Euro-settler rhetoric used to marginalize the First Nations, and how (if at all) does it counteract that memory?

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Canadian Literature