The University of Western Ontario

Faculty Member, Department of English

Vice Chair

About

I am a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario where I have been a faculty member since 1995. I have also held tenure-stream positions at Carleton University and the University of Waterloo. My main general areas of expertise in both teaching and research are Canadian literature and popular cultural studies, specifically popular genre fiction, detective fiction and film.
I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to work across the field of Canadian literature, publishing work with a historical range from the early nineteenth century to contemporary writing, and spanning poetry fiction, drama, and autobiography.
My early work in Canadian literature focussed on contemporary experimental writing in a variety of genres that employed a “collage” device in order to integrate historical, non-fictional materials into the fiction text, creating a polyphonic effect and discursive/generic dissonances and conflicts.  Emerging from my doctoral research at York University, that work culminated in the book That Art of Difference: Documentary Collage and English-Canadian Writing (U of Toronto P, 1993).
In a sense, my most recent research program, on collaborative writing, which has seen publication in a variety of venues, extends and develops my early interest in composite authorship and in the ways competing desires, motives, ideologies, and historical and aesthetic sensibilities can make themselves felt in a single text. I have edited, with Marta Dvorak of the Sorbonne, a collection of essays on the dynamics of the “extra-ordinary” in that important Canadian author’s prose. My own contribution to Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007) examines Shields’ collaborative novel, A Celibate Season, and the idea of collaboration as both a desire for union and for its inhibition, suggested by the novel’s mobilization of the tropes of sexual consummation, and celibacy as a resistance to union, and acknowledgement of irreconcilable difference.
My work organizing a conference and editing the associated journal issue in honour of Frank Davey reflects both my debt to that scholar (who was my dissertation supervisor and latterly my colleague at UWO) and my interest in poetics and public culture. Etched across much of my work is an interest in gender and colonial discourses in Canada: from an essay on gender, ‘savagery’ and the colonial project in John Richardson’s 1832 historical novel Wacousta to recent work on Ernest Thompson Seton’s animal stories and the oblique ways they register a moment of cultural tension between resistant and colonizing discourses about nature in the late nineteenth century, mirroring contemporary anxieties about the inscriptive agency of Aboriginal cultural others. I have published several articles and have work in process on contemporary Indigenous writing in Canada such as Jeannette Armstrong’s “activist aesthetics” in her novel Slash, and on the complex dynamics of collaborative autobiographies such as Occupied Canada, Stolen Life, and Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (the last of these essays is in progress).
My research in popular cultural studies, which began with a collaborative book with Priscilla Walton of Carleton University on the explosion of popular women’s detective novels during the 1980’s and 1990s in which they adapted the traditionally masculine hard-boiled  genre. Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-boiled Tradition (University of California Press, 1998) understands the genre in its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs. I have also written on lesbian detective fiction, detective film, and Canadian detective fiction.

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