Graduate and Undergraduate Thesis 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.

a portrait photograph of Dr. David L. Clark.
Dr. David L. Clark sitting in his office speaking with someone.
Number completed: 31

Masters

Kailey Kutillo

Recognition Without Reconciliation?:  An Analysis of the Performative Nature of the Federal Government’s Adoption of National Truth and Reconciliation Day (2024).

Maneesha Wijesundara

Reading Democracy in Sri Lanka (2023).

Patrick McArthur

From Urban Renewal to the City Centre Mall: The Suburban Ideal, Consumerist Citizenship, and Hamilton’s Urban Space (2023).

Luke Beirne​

“Perspectives USA: Fostering Cultural Hegemony in the Cold War” (2020).

Ishaan Selby

‘Peterson You Can’t Fuck With Us If You Wanted To:’ Crowd Chants and Subjects at Anti-Fascist Demonstrations” (2019).

Stephanie Edwards

Spectre-in-Progress: Tracing Female Spectrality in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Falkner (2017).

Alex Bucik

On the Genealogy of the Animal-Holocaust Comparison (2015).

D. R.

What Becomes human: Sunaura Taylor’s Animals with Arthrogryposis (2013).

Jordan Sheridan

Political Sovereignty and the Figure of the Animal in Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign (2013).

Pat Ramrattan

Adorno and the Animal: Humanist Remainders and Posthuman Glimpses in Dialectic of Enlightenment (2012).

Kurt Pabst​​

Immaterial Production in Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2011).

Andrew Resytnik

Road Without End: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and The Ends of Humanism (2011).

Ksenia Jourova

Incongruities: Human-Animal Relations in Victor Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2010).

Alison Watson

Reading Derrida’s “Vacant Chair” (2010).

Joanna Paddock​

Reading Derrida’s “Vacant Chair” (2010).

Miles Weafer

The Problems and Possibilities of Noise Production (2008).

Sarah Blacker (Canada Institutes of Health Research Grant) 

Writing on the Body: The Graft in Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida (2007).

Cathy Collett

Extra-Curricular Kids: The Figure of the Queer Child in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Matilda (2007).

Derritt Mason

The Queerest of Citizens: Youth, Sexuality, and the Nation (2005).

Scott Stoneman

Gross Men: Fat Masculinities and the Violence of Embodiment (2004).

Karen Espirtu

On the Mourning of 9/11: The Politics of Memorialization (2004).

Sonal Nalkur

Black Bodies, Queer Pleasures: Race and Sexuality in AIDS Narratives (2000).

Joanne Muzak

Witness to Responsibility: AIDS Narratives and the Question of Reading (1999).

Peter Melville

Kant’s Anthropology from a Foucauldian Point of View (1998).

Hayley Bordo

Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Discourse of Washing (1998).

Rebecca Gagan

Jacques Derrida and the Respiration of the University (1996).

Neville Newman

“Instructing Simple Childhood’s Ready Ear“: The Genealogy of Wordsworth’s Educational Philosophy (1993).

Annette Abma

Writing Toward the Word: Deconstruction and Negative Theology in Beckett’s The Unnameable (1992).

Susan Murley

Derrida, Milton, and Areopagitica (1992).

Peter Babiak

Economies of the Wor(l)d: Reading Derrida’s White Mythology (1990).

Grant Williams

Parenthetical Discourse Within and Without Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1989).

Number completed: 13

Doctoral

Elizabeth Bloomfield

The Nuclear Option: Re-Storying The Anthroposcenic View of Waste/Land at Revell Lake Are (in progress)

Mik Tampold

Abject Shouts: Wasted Bodies Against the Individualized Subject (in progress)

Samuel Ikueze

Spectral Sublime Aesthetics: Mapping Contemporary West African Ecological Thinking in Art  (in progress)

Rachel Shields

After Bersani: On the Scandal of Mothers Without Maternity (2024).

Current status: Research Affiliate,  the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities.

Danielle Martak

Security after the Great Recession (2023).

Current Status: Sessional Lecturer, Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy, University of Toronto—Mississauga.

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).

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).

Current status: Educator, Editor, Instructional Designer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Neville Newman

Subject to Subjugate: The Politics of Discipline in Nineteenth-Century English Education (1998).

Current status: Retired.

Formerly: Lecturer, Department of English, Columbia College.

Adam Carter

Irony and Ideology: A Critical Genealogy (1998).

Current status: Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Lethbridge.

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.

Edward Parkinson

From There to Here: Writing, Exploration, and the Colonizing of the Canadian Landscape (1994).

Current status: Senior Educator, Open Text Corporation.

Fellowships

Post-Doctoral

Danielle Taschereau-Mamers

SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2020-2022).

Project Title: Bison Bison: On the Life and Death of a Political Animal.

Current Status: Managing Director for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, University of Toronto—Mississauga.

Noel Glover

SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2018-2020).

Project Title: Between Disillusionment and Democracy: Psychosocial Studies in Culture and Development.

Claudie Massicotte

SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2013-2014).

Project Title: Languages of Desire.

Sharon Sliwinski

SSHRC Post-Doctoral Fellow (2005-2007).

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.

Undergraduate Supervision (Arts & Science Program)

  • Helen Wu, The Haunting of Derrida and the Specter of Justice (2025-26)
  • Jack Gillies, Voices of homelessness and Hamilton’s political (in)actions (2025-26)
  • Sim Jolly, Facing Forests:  A Levinasian Reading of Richard Powers’s The Overstory. (2024-25)
  • Sofia Ferraro, Can You Hear the Music of Learning? (2024-25)
  • Alisa Faingersh, Ten Secondary Level Lesson Plans on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Politics, Pedagogy, and the Difficult Knowledge of Climate Catastrophe (2023-24)
  • Audrey Wu, Following Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2022-3) 
  • Jessica Grondin, Words of Wisdom: Ten Secondary School Lesson Plans for the 21st Century (2021-22)
  • Zoe Bernicchia-Freeman, Societal Perceptions of Disability: Deafness in Ontario (2021-22)
  • Adrienne Klein, Hospitality Towards the Difficult History of the Holocaust: An Analysis of Poland’s 2018 amendment of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (2019-20)
  • Tianqui Lei, Considerations on Freedom & the Role of the Academy: McMaster University’s challenge in responding to Dr. Jordan Peterson (2018-19)