Education:
BA Liberal Arts College and English, Concordia University
MA and PhD English, New York University
I work on modernist literature,testimonial narrative, and comics and graphic novels. My current SSHRC-funded research project focuses on the representation of pain in comics. Through a combination of image and words comics can both show and tell pain, bridging the confines of both and providing a liminal space able to mobilize a broad range of representational tools while meta-textually gesturing towards their inadequacy. Indeed, comics present a historically dense and sophisticated vocabulary for pain language, synaesthetic and defined as much through its absences and exclusions as through what it represents. The medium contains discursive possibilities which respond to what Elaine Scarry calls the“unmaking” power of pain and its overflow of our usual modalities of representation.
I am also a novelist, with two novels in press and a third in process. Arabic for Beginners (Linda Leith Press,2017) won the J.I. Segal/ Mona ElaineAdilman English Fiction and Poetry and was a finalist for the QWF first book prize in 2017. A Joy to be Hidden (2019) was a finalist for the QWF/Paragraphe prize for fiction. I have published poetry, essays, and reviews alongside my academic work, and am a member of the Quebec Writer’s Federation and a frequent presenter at the literary festival Blue Metropolis.
I am interested in supervising graduate work in literary modernism,comics and graphic narrative, and the health humanities. I am also open to research-creation projects in fiction.
Books
Death, Men and Modernism (New York: Routledge Press, 2003)
Arabic for Beginners (Montreal: Linda Leith Press, 2017)
A Joy to be Hidden (Montreal: Linda Leith Press, 2019)
Selected Articles
“Charlotte Salomon, Degenerate Art, and Modernism as Resistance.” Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 41, No. 1 (Fall 2017), pp. 3-18
"'Yes I Said Yes': Eros, Sexual Violence and Consent in Joyce and Yeats." Joyce Studies in Italy, n.s. 4: Joyce,Yeats, and the Revival (December 2015): 181-96.
Ed. and introd.: Comicsand the Canon [Special Section]. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (13:2), 2015, 251-358.
“Chris Ware's Epiphanic Comics.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (13:2), 2015, 337-358.
“Charlotte Salomon, Graphic Artist,” in Lightman, Sarah, ed. Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews. North Carolina: McFarland, 2014.
“Sorting Through my Grief and Putting it into Boxes: Comics and Pain,” in Cohen, Esther, Leona Toker, Manuela Consonni and Otniel Dror, eds. Knowledge and Pain. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012.
“Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative:A Review.” Literature Compass, 8:2011, pp. 28–46.
“Global Joyce.” Literature Compass, 7: 2010, pp. 798–809.
“Dorothy Sayers and the Case of the Shell-Shocked Detective” Partial Answers, Volume 8, Issue 2, June 2010, pp. 365-387.
“The Metamorphoses of Ulysses” Joyce Studies Annual 2009, pp. 67-88
“Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home,” Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 32, Number 4, Summer 2009, pp. 125-140.
“Theories of Memory: Developing a Canon,” Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 32, Number 1, Fall 2008, pp. 77-85
“Skindeep Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 46, Number 3-4, Spring-Summer 2008, pp. 455-468.
“Did it Flow?: Bridging Aesthetics and History in Joyce’s Ulysses,” Modernism/modernity 13:1 January 2006. pp. 107-122.
“Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone:Women’s Writing from No-Man’s Land” Modernism/Modernity 9:1. January2002. pp. 109-124.
