My research centres on modern Canadian writing, print culture, and book history. I am nearing completion of a book called Finite Centres: Modern Skepticism and the Reinvention of Canadian History in Poetry, which explores writers’ various adaptations of the lyric mode during an era that was intensely nationalistic. The book studies the ways in which Centennial-era lyric poets expressed their fascination with and skepticism about Canadian history. My primary argument is that Canadian writers such as Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Lorna Crozier, Andrew Suknaski, and several others embraced family writing because it validates the personal experiences of the lyric poet, unlike a national history that aspires toward objectivity; these writers held that family history is best articulated by an “I.” For some authors, this genealogy was literal (Suknaski wrote about his father); for others, it was figurative (Atwood wrote about her nineteenth-century foremother, Susanna Moodie). In either case, poets found the familial link empowering: it gave them the confidence to produce, for the first time in their careers, long poems about history. Tracing poets’ move from nation-focused writing to family-focused long poems, the book accounts for the popularity of Centennial-era “family writing,” the continued importance of lyric after the Second World War, and the broad move away from strictly nation-focused histories in Canada.
I am also undertaking new research into the personal library as an archive. This work will be part of my contribution to “The Personal Collection as Liminal Archive: Processing, Digitizing, Theorizing, Creating Mordecai Richler's Library” project, which is based at Concordia University and spearheaded by Dr. Jason Camlot. Richler’s library is an ideal case study of Quebec writers’ libraries more generally, including the libraries of F.R. Scott, P.K. Page, Hugh MacLennan, Louis Dudek, A.J.M. Smith, D.G. Jones, and many others. This study theorizes personal collections as archives in a way that provides research methods distinctive of the personal library (how do we read the personal library? what can marginalia tell us as researchers? what makes the library an archive?), while also showing how the personal library is not just a record of an author’s individual reading tastes but also a record of the intellectual and cultural development of his or her era (what common texts did each author keep in their libraries? how do reading and collecting habits intersect or diverge? what do these commonalities and differences tell us about the cultural interests of the eras during which these authors read and wrote?).
As well, I am the co-managing editor and co-founder of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism.
Education
PhD (2013)—Department of English, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
MA (2008)—Department of English, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
BA (2007)—English (Specialization) and History (Major), University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Research and teaching interests
Canadian Literature and Culture, Print Culture and Book History, Historical Fiction and Poetry, Recovery Projects in Creative Writing and Critical Studies, Epistolary Collections, Personal Libraries, Modernist Archives, Romanticism and Modernism in Canadian Writing, Review Culture in Canada
Research related web links
http://www.thebullcalfreview.ca/
Recent articles
“Postmemory and Canadian Poetry of the 1970s.” Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2014. 151-68.
“Reading the Personal Library, Rereading F.R. Scott” Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and Digital Media. Ed. Dean Irvine et al. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2014. 351-76.
“‘A Half-Understood Massiveness’: Revisiting John Newlove’s ‘The Pride.’” Studies in Canadian Literature 28.1 (2013): 113-35.
“‘Stories in the Poems’: Al Purdy and the Editing of Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 71 (2012): 68-87.
“Modern Noise and Poetic Authority in John Newlove’s Poetry.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 69 (2012): 40-58.
“‘The Coherence of Canadian History was Lost’: Al Purdy, George Bowering, and the Factitious Louis Riel.” Open Letter 14.4 (2010): 131-51.
