Teaching
I regularly teach courses in energy and environmental humanities, island studies, Australian and other world literatures at the graduate and undergraduate levels, as well as core English offerings in first and second year.
Recent Graduate Courses
All at Sea: Writing and Visualizing a Changing Ocean (English 7310) considers imaginative responses to the exploitation of oceans from a range of cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts–including our own North Atlantic circumstances. We will examine literature, documentary film and other media in our efforts to better understand the ways in which different human communities perceive the sea. In the process, we will draw heavily on the insights of environmental humanities’ sub-fields including the blue humanities and critical ocean studies.
Islands, Literature, and Climate Change (English 7302) investigates the ideas islands have recently helped generate, and how. To do so, we will read work from a variety of literary contexts and genres, ranging from decolonial poetry from the Pacific, to a re-written version of The Tempest situated in Atlantic Canada, to speculative fiction imagining former oil production platforms as island city states. Physical islands around the world are under increasing pressure, even as they remain a robust element of contemporary cultural imaginations.
Petrofictions (English 7087) Informed by the rapidly emerging field of the Energy Humanities, this graduate course examines literary figurations of the most important energy source of the twentieth and (so far) twenty-first centuries: petroleum. Students consider texts from around the world in which oil and its industries are an explicit concern. However, thinking about oil also necessitates looking beyond just the more visible (often intensely contested and violent) aspects of its production. Thus, we also read work that addresses the ways in which petroleum is entrenched within our everyday lives. In addition, we think about texts which, taking seriously the imperative of climate change, speculate about new modes of human existence after oil. Collaborative work is an important element of this course. Former Petrofictions students have collectively produced a "."
Recent Undergraduate Courses
Imagining Islands (English 4819) Figured as utopias and dystopias, paradises and penitentiaries, islands have long proved a rich and malleable imaginative terrain for creative writers. Because islands are quintessential colonial spaces, the theoretical framework for the course is drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from decolonial studies. Our broad aim is to focus on islands both as sites of lived histories, as well as suggestive grounds for shifting metaphoric constructions.
Literature and Environment: Writing Climate Change (English 3009) addresses relationships between humans and the nonhuman world. The course examines the ways in which differently located creative writers of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama are currently imagining the implications for people and the planet of anthropogenic-induced climate crisis. It is especially interested in how the phenomenon of climate change challenges predominant human notions of time and space, as well as flawed assumptions about nature’s role as a passive, endlessly exploitable backdrop. Questions of social and environmental justice, and literature’s capacity to prompt meaningful change, are front and centre.
Australian Literature (English 3161) focuses on contemporary writing by established Australian authors. It pays particular attention to the after effects of colonialism and the formulation of national identities. Set texts have included work by Meilssa Lucashenko, Richard Flanagan, Amanda Lohrey, Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas.
Empire and After (English 3160) examines writing which responds to the short and long-term consequences of historical British imperialism. The course looks at literary responses from around the world to questions like: What happens when cultures collide? How do people deal with the fracturing of their languages, their philosophies, their economies? What is a hybrid identity? How do new nations emerge? How important is a sense of home?
Introduction to World Literature in English (English 2122) addresses contemporary literature consciously pre-occupied with global cultural identities and practices. The writers studied address transnational issues such as migration, environmental and human rights, travel and tourism, and the legacies of European colonialism.