University of Calgary

Faculty Member, English

Professor of English

Faculty of Arts

About

I am currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics.  I am also a Professor of English at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada and the author of three books. My first book, Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference, appeared with Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 1991.  With Pauline Butling, I am the co-author of both  Writing in our Time: Radical Poetries in English Canada (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005), and Poets Talk: Interviews with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah (Edmonton: University of Alberta P, 2005).  I have recently begun to carry out digital humanities research and am the editor and compiler of The Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca). Montréal poet and translator Erín Moure and I are developing what we're calling a “Living Knowledge Site,” an on-line, fully searchable, digital archive and portal to the comprehensive body of Moure’s textual, audio, and video work. Other current research includes a book project entitled Poetries of Enactment on the work of Moure and the London-based French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall (for more information about Bergvall see her website, carolinebergvall.com).

I'm also an editor and most recently worked with translator Dr. Anne-Marie Wheeler of the University of Saskatchewan to prepare an edition of Quebec poet Nicole Brossard's essays in English entitled Fluid Arguments (Mercury, 2005). While I was on sabbatical in Oxford in 2009, I organized and chaired a two-hour panel featuring Brossard and two of her translators; entitled “Feminist Translation as Creative, Interpretive, and Community-Building Process in the Production and Reception of the Work of Nicole Brossard.” The panel was a highlight of the March 2009 meeting of the British Association of Canadian Studies at St. Anne’s College, the University of Oxford.

My most recent publications include “Why Postmodernism Now? Toward a Poetry of Enactment,” which appears in Re:Reading the Postmodern (University of Ottawa P, 2010), edited by Robert Stacey.

I have served as Chair of the Canadian Literature Discussion Group of the Modern Languages Association and President of the Canadian Association of Chairs of English (CACE) in (2008. 2007) and as President of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures / Association des literatures canadiennes et québécoise (1994-96). In the winter term 2002 I was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Research and Teaching on Women, McGill University and in the fall 1999 a Killam Resident Fellow, University of Calgary.

My research interests include North American Poetry and Poetics, Canadian Literature, Experimental Writing, Feminist Theory, Literary Theory, and Women's Writing in English (particularly modernist and postmodernist). I have supervised to completion many students at the PhD, MA, and undergraduate Honours levels in these areas. My  undergraduate teaching interests include introductory courses in poetry and literary theory and advanced courses in poetry, the history of women's writing in English, and literary, feminist, and cultural theory.

I will be on leave in London, England from 1 July 2011 - 31 December 2014.

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