About Me
About Me
My research work began with the poetry and designs of the radical English visionary, William Blake, and with the intersection of contemporary critical theory, post-Enlightenment philosophy, and Romantic literary practice. From there I moved into projects exploring diverse topics, including: the mourning work of German idealism, especially the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling; the question of extraordinary forms of embodiment; representations of HIV/AIDS; and queer theory after the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Contemporary critical theory remains a principal concern, especially the later work of Jacques Derrida. Although I still consider myself an active Romanticist, my focus has shifted towards symptomatic readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophy, notably the later political and social writings of Immanuel Kant. Engaging philosophical texts as sites of conflicted desire, disavowal, and self-difference, my research addresses the complex imbrication of rhetoric and culture that quickens Kantian and post-Kantian thought, and in particular dwells upon the cultural excesses and conceptual remainders that trouble philosophical and theoretical narratives. My current project on Kant explores the ways in which the resistant negativities of history haunt the philosopher’s late, “anthropological” work. I am also pursuing research projects on Derrida, Levinas, and animals, focusing on the nexus of non-human life, violence, and the testamentary. Can an animal bear witness to suffering?
At the undergraduate and graduate level I primarily teach courses in critical theory, critical animal studies, social and political thought, as well as Romantic literature and culture. (See Courses.) I have also offered courses (in both the Department of English and Cultural Studies and in the Department of Health, Aging and Society on the discourses of HIV/AIDS–a topic about which I have also supervised several undergraduate and graduate theses. I have taught a fourth-year seminar in the Department of Health, Aging and Society called “Narratives of Illness” and have recently begun teaching another fourth year seminar entitled “Under the Gaze of the Nonhuman: Critical Animal Studies.” I am currently teaching a graduate seminar on the catastrophe of climate change, “Last Things: Life and Death in the Anthropocene.”
I warmly welcome M.A. and Ph.D. research projects that forge or explore connections between different disciplines, discourses, and objects of analysis. Of particular interest to me are projects that address some of the following concerns: questions of embodiment, subjectivity, responsibility, mourning, and 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, illness, and well-being. 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. Questions that I invite my graduate students to explore include: What are the limits of knowledge? What are the histories, politics, and ethics of being-embodied? What relationships obtain between knowledge, action, and the matter of responsibilities for others? What does it mean to dwell with others, including non-human others? Why war? Or to recall Kant’s great queries: What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope for? 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?”
In recent years I have begun writing Op-Eds with a distinctly autobiographical side (Please see Op-Eds).
A founding member of the Plurality and Alterity Interdisciplinary Research Group (1991-7), I have twice been Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism (Western University). I was Halls-Bascom Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during November 2003, and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Humanities at Washington University in April 2009. In 2012 I was George Whalley Visiting Professor in Romanticism in the Department of English at Queen’s University and Lansdowne Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria.
For many years I was co-editor (with Henry A. Giroux) of The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies. Founded by Henry A. Giroux and Patrick Shannon in the early 1990s, the Review is the only journal which publishes critical essays that explore pedagogy and its relation to a wide variety of political, social, cultural and economic issues.
In addition to my desire to create informed, inclusive, and unsettling classroom experiences for my undergraduate students, I am committed to fostering a welcoming, rigorous, and capacious educational environment for students enrolled in our graduate program, an environment quickened by critique, responsibility, and academic professionalism. In 2006 I was honoured to be the recipient of the McMaster Student Union’s Annual Teaching Award. And in two national surveys, I was listed as one of McMaster University’s “Popular Professors” (Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities, 2005 and 2006), but this is a description about which I have deep reservations. Popularity with my students is not what I seek; what I seek is curiosity and intellectual courage and a commitment to the task of becoming a public intellectual. Mindful of what Socrates teaches, my goals are to encourage certain forms of impiety in students, and to corrupt their minds. In 1996 I was pleased to receive 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. I am actively involved on several university-level committees devoted to addressing the health and well-being of students.
