Graduate Supervision
M.A. and Ph.D. Projects
In addition to my desire to create informed and unsettling classroom experiences for my undergraduate students, I am committed to fostering a rigorous and capacious educational environment for students enrolled in our graduate program, an environment quickened by critique, responsibility, and academic professionalism. I warmly welcome M.A. and Ph.D. research projects that produce or explore connections between different disciplines, discourses, and objects of analysis. Of particular interest to me are projects that address the following concerns: questions of embodiment, subjectivity, responsibility, mourning, animality; contemporary critical theory, especially its intersections with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy; German idealism as a site of theorization about affect, desire, and loss; representations and politics of health and illness.
I especially welcome students who are working with critical theories and cultural archives from a wide range of historical periods leading up to the present day. In other words, I want to recognize and affirm the critical power and conceptual significance of critical theory developed before–as well as during–the twentieth and twenty-first century.
Moreover, because contemporary critical theories are deeply informed by their historical antecedents, I encourage research that explores the links joining what is imagined to be the “present” to what is imagined to be the “past.” How do current critical theories help us re-read earlier interrogations of and negotiations with analogous questions and problems? And how does this historical archive provide a new optic through which to consider today’s complexities? How to write what Michel Foucault calls “a history of the present”? To get a sense of the range of subjects explored by graduate students who have worked and are working with me, please see my graduate supervision below.
In 1996 I received the President’s Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, an award for which I was also short-listed in 2002. From 2001 to 2005 I was a member–and then co-chair–of the Appraisal Committee (Section II) of the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies, the body that overlooks the quality of graduate education in all of the province’s graduate programs. In 2006-7, I was chair of Section V–the committee devoted exclusively to appraising new graduate programs.
Masters
Masters
Number Completed: 30
Masters
Masters
Number Completed: 30
Masters
Masters
Number Completed: 30
Number Completed: 30
Masters
Grant Williams
Parenthetical Discourse Within and Without Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1989).
Peter Babiak
Economies of the Wor(l)d: Reading Derrida's White Mythology (1990).
Susan Murley
Derrida, Milton, and Areopagitica (1992).
Annette Abma
Writing Toward the Word: Deconstruction and Negative Theology in Beckett's The Unnameable (1992).
Neville Newman
"Instructing Simple Childhood's Ready Ear": The Genealogy of Wordsworth's Educational Philosophy (1993).
Rebecca Gagan
Jacques Derrida and the Respiration of the University (1996).
Hayley Bordo
Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Discourse of Washing (1998).
Peter Melville
Kant's Anthropology from a Foucauldian Point of View (1998).
Joanne Muzak
Witness to Responsibility: AIDS Narratives and the Question of Reading (1999).
Sonal Nalkur
Black Bodes, Queer Pleasures: Race and Sexuality in AIDS Narratives (2000).
Karen Espirtu
On the Mourning of 9/11: The Politics of Memorialization (2004).
Scott Stoneman
Gross Men: Fat Masculinities and the Violence of Embodiment (2004).
Derritt Mason
The Queerest of Citizens: Youth, Sexuality, and the Nation (2005).
Cathy Collett
Extra-Curricular Kids: The Figure of the Queer Child in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Matilda (2007).
Sarah Blacker (Canada Institutes of Health Research Grant)
Writing on the Body: The Graft in Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida (2007).
Miles Weafer
The Problems and Possibilities of Noise Production (2008).
Joanna Paddock
Reading Derrida’s “Vacant Chair” (2010).
Andrew Resytnik
Road Without End: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and The Ends of Humanism (2011).
Kurt Pabst
Immaterial Production in Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2011).
Ksenia Jourova
Incongruities: Human-Animal Relations in Victor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2010).
Pat Ramrattan
Adorno and the Animal: Humanist Remainders and Posthuman Glimpses in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2012).
Alison Watson
Reading Derrida’s “Vacant Chair” (2010).
Jordan Sheridan
Political Sovereignty and the Figure of the Animal in Jacques Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign (2013).
D. R.
What Becomes human: Sunaura Taylor’s Animals with Arthrogryposis (2013).
Alex Bucik
On the Genealogy of the Animal-Holocaust Comparison (2015).
Stephanie Edwards
Spectre-in-Progress: Tracing Female Spectrality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Falkner (2017).
Ishaan Selby
“‘Peterson You Can’t Fuck With Us If You Wanted To:’ Crowd Chants and Subjects at Anti-Fascist Demonstrations” (2019).
Luke Beirne
"Perspectives USA: Fostering Cultural Hegemony in the Cold War” (2020).
Patrick McArthur
From Urban Renewal to the City Centre Mall: The Suburban Ideal, Consumerist Citizenship, and Hamilton’s Urban Space (2023).
Maneesha Wijesundara
Reading Democracy in Sri Lanka (In Progress).
Number Completed: 12
Doctoral
Edward Parkinson
From There to Here: Writing, Exploration, and the Colonizing of the Canadian Landscape (1994). Current Status: Senior Educator, Open Text Corporation.
Robert Alexander
The Diversions of History: A Non-Phenomenal Approach to Eighteenth-Century Linguistic Thought (1996). Current Status: Associate Professor, Department of English, Brock University.
Adam Carter
Irony and Ideology: A Critical Genealogy (1998). Current Status: Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Lethbridge.
Neville Newman
Subject to Subjugate: The Politics of Discipline in Nineteenth-Century English Education (1998). Lecturer, Department of English, Columbia College. Current Status: Retired.
Kevin Hutchings
Imagining Nature: Blake's Vision of Materiality (1998). SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario (1998-2000). Current Status: Professor, Canada Research Chair in Romantic Studies, Department of English, University of Northern British Columbia.
Sarah Brophy
Strange Burdens: AIDS Memoirs and the Politics of Inconsolability (2000). Governor General’s Gold Medal. SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley (2000-2002). Current Status: Professor, Department of English, McMaster University.
Peter Melville
Romantic Hospitality: Theorizing the Welcome in Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley (2003). SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cornell University (2003-2005). Current Status: Professor, Department of English, University of Winnipeg.
George Grinnell
On Romantic Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (2005). SSHRCC Post-Doctoral Fellow, Cornell University (2005-2007). Current Status: Associate Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, University of British Columbia-Kelowna.
Jessica Carey
Humane Disposability: Rethinking “Food Animals,” Animal Welfare, and Vegetarianism as a Response to the Factory Farm (2011). Current Status: Professor, Literary and Cultural Studies, Sheridan College.
Andrew Reszitnyk
Uncovering the Anthropocenic Imaginary: The Metabolization of Disaster in Contemporary American Culture (2015). SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of English, Brown University (2015-2017); Instructional Designer, Scotiabank.
Roshaya Rodness
Imagining A Non-Queer Theory: Non-Philosophy and the Crisis In Queer Theory (2019). SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Media Studies, University of Toronto (2020-22); Visiting Assistant Professor, Cinema & Media Studies Program Boston University(2022-23).
Danielle Martak
Security after the Great Recession (2023).
Rachel Shields
Mothers Without Maternity: the Ethics of “impersonal narcissism” in the Mother-Child Relation (in progress).
Fellowships
Post-Doctoral
Sharon Sliwinski
SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2005-07). Project Title: Regarding the Suffering of Animals: An Uncanny History of Ethics. Current Status: Professor, Visual Culture, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University.
Claudie Massicotte
SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2013-14). Project Title: Languages of Desire.
Noel Glover
SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2018-2020). Project Title: Between Disillusionment and Democracy: Psychosocial Studies in Culture and Development.
Danielle Taschereau
SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2020-2022). Project Title: Bison Bison: On the Life and Death of a Political Animal.