English Language and Literature | University of Waterloo

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PhD Candidate Contact Info

Kent Aardse, BA and MA (University of Lethbridge), is interested in the relationship between media and narrative, particularly how digital media and ubiquitous social networking challenges longstanding narrative forms such as novels and film. His research focuses on all forms of digital textuality, from electronic literature to computer games to alternate reality games (ARGs), exploring their use of cross-media distribution and pervasive gameplay as means of transforming narrative for the new media ecology. He is highly concerned with digital technology: how this technology is woven into everyday life, and the far-reaching implications of this symbiotic relationship.

Office: HH 261

Lamees Al Ethari, BA (Al-Mamon University College-Baghdad, Iraq), MA in Modern British Literature (University of Baghdad), and Fulbright Scholarship supported MA in American Literature (Kansas State University). Her second MA thesis, titled “’ This Rhythm Does Not Please Me’: Women Protest War in Dunya Mikhail’s Poetry,” focused on the Iraqi-American poet’s portrayal of Iraqi women’s protest of war through the “de-fragmentaion” of destruction and the recollection of pre-war memories. In her PhD dissertation, she hopes to further her research in the field of Arab-North American women’s life writing, with a concentration on issues of diaspora, immigration and war in these works.

Office: PAS 2213

Jessica Antonio, BA (Thompson Rivers University) and MA (University of Saskatchewan), is working on her dissertation, which will utilize trauma theory to examine the representation of the nonhuman animal in pain.

Office: PAS 2217

David Arthur, BA (Guelph) and MA (McMaster) is studying the integral role that conversations between characters acquired in British novels throughout the 'long' nineteenth century. This project draws specific scenes for close examination from the works of a number of authors, ranging from the likes of Sir Walter Scott and Anthony Trollope to others farther removed from the central literary canon. Other literary interests include the representation of geography and physical space in fiction and the changes that texts undergo in translation.

Office: PAS 1060

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Kasandra Arthur, HBa (English with Major Concentration in Women's Studies, Lakehead University) and MA (English with Specialization in Women's Studies, Lakehead University, studies young adult literature, particularly the processes in which these texts are adapted to film. She is also interested in fandom studies and the ways in which audiences engage in various media telling the "same" story. Her doctoral research focuses on the relationship between author, audience, and interpretation in the Harry Potter universe. Other interests include gender studies, fantasy literature and literary theory.

Office: PAS 1062

Lacey Beer, Honours BA (WLU, 2010) and MA (UW, 2011) is a doctoral Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (CGS) recipient at the University of Waterloo. She is currently beginning her doctorate in the UW English department’s joint program in Literary Studies and Rhetoric. Her major research interests include the rhetoric of blame and criminality in contemporary works of Canadian historiographic metafiction by female authors.

Office: HH 261

Stephanie Bell (Wilfrid Laurier University) is conducting her doctoral research under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Schryer in the area of Rhetoric and Composition Studies with a specific emphasis on rhetorical genre theory and academic assignments. Her dissertation combines qualitative data analysis and discourse analysis in a study of reported speech in student writing. This research lends insight to the formulaic, strategic, and sometimes problematic ways students engage with other voices, orchestrate resources, echo and respect conversations in their written work.

Office: PAS 2218

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Clare Bermingham (BA Waterloo) researches emerging lesbian identities and communities in the fiction and print culture of the twentieth century, particularly in post-war, pre-Stonewall America, and including lesbian pulp fiction, medical and criminal discourses, activism and self-advocacy, butch-femme culture, and publishing histories. Her work is part of a larger interest in cultural marginalizations and discourses of resistance.

Office: PAS 1065

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Ashna Bhagwanani, BA (Hons.) (English and Criminology, University of Toronto) and MA (York University) is a third-year PhD candidate currently working on the first chapters of her dissertation. Her thesis uses canonical literature of the 1840s and 50s to historicize the sociological concept of what we now refer to as “deviance.” She considers selected texts as part of sociological history – actively engaged in the making and re-making of the concept of “deviance.” In particular, the project examines the role literary discourses of Emersonian self-reliance play in socially-sanctioning particular modes of “deviance.” She has previously presented a paper entitled “Salem: Spiritualism and the Feminist Movement of Victorian America” at the 2009 American Literature Association conference and “The Scarlet Letter: Deviance and the Construction of the Collective American Identity” at the 2010 British Association for American Studies conference in Norwich, UK.

Office: PAS 1059

Galen Bourget-Fogarty, BA (Carleton University) and MA (Wilfrid Laurier University), has scholarly interests in dystopias, technology in literature, and poetry. Since both poetry and dystopia are closely related to prophecy, I aim to see how dystopias are employed to mediate fears of technological apocalypse (or the fear of technology generally) in poetry.

Office: PAS 2212

Charles Boyes, BA (English, York University) and MA (English, Carelton University) has research interests in critical animal studies, ethics of care, politics of activism, and contemporary American Literature. He will be presenting a paper entitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Loving Animals" at this year's Institute for Critical Animal Studies conference at Brock University and has previously presented papers at the SAMLA convention and the PCA/ACA conference. He is a staff reviewer for Political Media Review.

Office: PAS 2222

Adam Bradley, BA (McMaster) MA (Waterloo), is a first year PhD student interested in the intersections between technology and traditional literary studies. His MA research project, titled “Data Visualization and the Avant-Garde Aesthetic” was a digital humanities project completed in conjunction with the English department’s Digital Media Lab and the Computer Science department’s Touchlab. His project investigated whether shifting the aesthetics of a given text can offer new insights into the study of its structure and how the integrity of that text can be maintained within this paradigm. Other interests include ancient rhetoric, classical languages, and modernist literature.

Office: HH 261

Lauren Burr, B.A. and M.A. (Carleton University) is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on the intersections between contemporary literature and digital media. Her interests include locative media, hypertext narrative, spatial theory, tranmediation and Alternative Reality Games (ARGs). Lauren's current research examines the influence of digital technologies on contemporary works of experimental print literature and the remediation of these texts as interactive digital media. Her Master's Research Essay, entitled, "This is not for you? Reading and Remediating House of Leaves as an Alternate Reality Game," conceptualized the relationship between the transmedial world or Mark Danielewski's novel and its fan base as an ARG. As a member of Carleton's Hypertext and Hypermedia lab, she constructed an applied critical remediation of House of Leaves, the location-based game House of Lexia, using the Hyperlab's proprietary StoryTrek authoring system for locative hypertext narratives. Lauren's studies of locative media at uWaterloo centrally involve the Critical Media Lab and the Games Institute.

Office: HH 261

Robert Clapperton, BA (Wilfrid Laurier University), BA (University of Waterloo), and MA (University of Waterloo), is studying the cognitive role of rhetoric in the formation of ideological belief systems, writing pedagogy, and human/technology interaction. He is especially interested in the relationship between cognitive rhetoric and persuasive technologies in the areas online education, health promotion, and social networks. His dissertation is in the early stages and will involve the development of a theoretical model of cognitive rhetorical integration that links a rhetorical situation and the mind. In 2009, he was a panel participant at the Cognitive Allegory Workshop held at UW and in 2010 will be authoring a casebook for Carolyn Meyer’s Communicating for Results 2nd Ed. (Oxford).

Islai Cote, BA (Waterloo) and MA in English with a specialization in Women's Studies (Lakehead University), specializes in gender and queer theory, focusing specifically on the discourses of the Body and what they reveal about the construction of gender and cultural identity. Her dissertation will focus on Transgender Medical Discourse. She also has additional research interests in Queer Literary History, Literary Theory and the Politics of Identity.

Office: PAS 1059

Susie DeCoste, BA (English, St. Francis Xavier University) and MA (Creative Writing, University of New Brunswick), specializes in Canadian literature, and is particularly interested in literary modernism, theories of space and place, and matters of gender and genre. She is writing a dissertation on Maritime Canadian literature that considers Elizabeth Bishop’s Nova Scotia poems as a nexus for the study of regions in a global context. Susie’s poetry and reviews have appeared in many journals including The Antigonish Review, Canadian Literature, Contemporary Verse 2, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Toronto Quarterly.

Office: PAS 1062

Morteza Dehghani MA (Iran's Shahid Beheshti University) Morteza's MA focused on the poetry and spiritual/philosophic vision of G.M. Hopkins and is currently a first-year PhD student. He has research interests in twentieth-century and contemporary literature, philosophy and history; the essentially defining elements of man in the twentieth century. As he has worked with and is interested in media, he is trying to bring New Media, philosophy and poetry together, so his work will mainly focus on the triangle of New Media (especially philosophy of technology and New Media arts and poetics), philosophy and poetry. His other interests include philosophical gaming, documentary films, world poetry and creative writing.

Office: HH 261

Ryan Devitt, BA (English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo) and MA (Rhetoric, University of Waterloo) is writing a dissertation on the relation of avant-garde literature to philosophies of subjectivity. Ryan is also a researcher for the CIHR-funded City Life and Well-Being project and a past Doctoral Fellow of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Office: PAS 1060

Jennifer Doyle, BA (Mount Allison University), BFA (Mount Allison University), BEd (Memorial University), MA (Wilfrid Laurier University), has research interests that include ecocriticism, American Literature, psychoanalysis, and concepts of place and being. She has just begun work on her dissertation.

Office: PAS 2216

Kim Garwood, BA (University of Guelph) and MA (University of Waterloo), is currently completing her field exams in the PhD program. She is also the acting manager of Writing Services at the University of Guelph. Her thesis research will focus on the theory and practice of plain language in professional and academic settings.

Office: PAS 1084

Sarah Gibbons, BA (University of Ottawa) and MA (Queen's University), investigates the challenges that disability studies and theories of posthumanism present to traditional understandings of subjectivity, ability and embodiment. Her research explores how empathy operates in contemporary narratives that blur the boundaries that divide ability from disability and humanity from animality. She is particularly interested in how narrators address their imagined readership in ways that complicate our understanding of the relationship between language and empathy.

Office: HH 261

Michael Hancock, BSc (English and Mathematics, University of Saskatchewan) and MA (English, University of Saskatchewan) is a second-year PhD student. Michael's dissertation area is multimedia and information representation in video games. He also has interests in fantasy literature and literary theory.

Office: PAS 2212

Sheila Hannon, BA (Journalism, University of Western Ontario) and MA (Language and Professional Writing, University of Waterloo), has interests in Canadian Literature (especially Canadian humour) and Multimedia Critique, Design, and Theory. From her homebase in Punkey Doodle’s Corners, Sheila is researching the distinctions between traditional and online interfaces to develop a methodology for determining effective practices in online information presentation. Drawing on her journalistic career, Sheila is focusing on the interfaces of newspapers and magazines, analyzing both traditional print formats and multimedia digital versions for her doctoral dissertation.

Office: PAS 1061

Jason Hawreliak, B.A. Waterloo) and (M.A. Wilfrid Laurier University) is a doctoral candidate examining the cultural and psychological functions of new media. Drawing on the works of Ernest Becker, Kenneth Burke, and Ian Bogost, his dissertation focuses on rhetorics of heroism and immortality in video games, particularly within the First Person Shooter genre. To supplement his rhetorical analyses, the dissertation will also include studies using Terror Management Theory, which explores the psychological function of cultural belief systems. He hopes to demonstrate that gaming serves a death denying function, primarily through propagating rhetorics of heroism at the structural and narratological levels.

Office: PAS 1284

George Henry, BA (University of Illinois at Chicago), MA (San Diego State University), is a second-year PhD candidate currently reading for area exams. He feels uncomfortable discussing himself in the third person but has overcome this distress enough to declare research interests in satire, wit, and humor in American lit; theories of humor; as well as the rhetorical use-value of jokes of all sorts. George reads, watches, and listens to all types of humor with a constant sense of fascination and gratitude as he attempts to keep a balanced perspective on life and not take himself (or much of anything else) too seriously.

Office: PAS 2224

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Christine Horton, BA (English and Political Science, University of Western Ontario) and MA (Wilfrid Laurier University), has research interests in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, Discourse Analysis, Literary Theory.

Office: PAS 2217

Mohsen Hosseini, BA in English Language and Literature (Shiraz, Iran) and MA in English Lierature (Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran). The thesis topic for his master's degree was Gothic Sublimity and the Role of Supernatural and Superstition in some Ballads of Romances of Coleridge and Keats. Mohsen's areas of interest include Gothic literature and Mythology.

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Jesse Hutchinson, BA (York University) and MA (Brock University), has research interests in contemporary Canadian literature and life writing. His research explores how Canadian Mennonite authors who write memoirs or other autobiographical texts reveal the tension between traditional values of modesty and privacy and life writing genres’ demands for self construction and self revelation.

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Sam Kiani completed her BA and MA in English Literature in Iran and is currently a second-year Ph.D. student. Her interests include post-colonialism, Caribbean Literature, and the dynamics of gender and nationality.

Office: PAS 2215

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Mike Lesiuk, BA (Queen's University) and MA (University of Toronto), is interested in the nineteenth-century novel, especially in relation to questions about literary aesthetics, the role of narrative, and the peculiarities of serialized fiction.

http://www.mikelesiuk.com

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Craig Love has research interests that include poetry, modes of literary inheritance, and the whirligigs of speech. He has just set to work on his dissertation.

Office: PAS 1061

Kyle Malashewski, BA (English, University of Western Ontario) and MA (English, McMaster University), has research interests in 18th-century literature and culture.

Office: HH 261

Pamela Mansutti, BA and Research Doctorate (Udine, Italy), researches the field of contemporary American literature and its relationship with Postmodern Culture. Her interests comprise Film Studies, Visual Culture, the Post-human in Literature and Film, US Politics and History, Theories of the Novel, Translation and Language Studies. She is currently at work on her dissertation “Post-9/11 Fiction and the Politics of Trauma,” which unravels the ideological and utopian implications in the narratives of the tragic event. Her Italian publications include the book La Parola Filmica. Intertestualità e cinefilia nel romanzo postmoderno americano, 2008.

Office: PAS 2218

Alexis McQuigge, BA (University of Guelph) and MA (McGill University), is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Waterloo. Her current research focuses on the ethomasquerading woman in the 18th and 19th century British literature, and addresses the role that the woman 'gone native' plays in the midst of the British colonial drive. Her dissertation engages with a variety of literary forms - female Robinsonades, travel writing, women's diaries and letters (including those of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), captivity narratives and prose fiction - to evaluate what tole the ethnomasquerading woman plays on theories of the self, national identity, and femininity. Secret literary obsessions include the works of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood and Penelope Aubin, as well as the staggeringly awful novels of Phebe Gibbes.

Office: PAS 2217

Anastasia Nelson, BA (University of Lethbridge, 2000); MA (University of Waterloo, 2005). Always interested in both the academic and professional application of her passions and interests, Asia built from her MA research on the discourse of complementary and alternative medicine in North America to found and grow her own thriving business for the past five years. As of 2010 she returned to university and is now in the PhD at UW studying rhetorical genre, theory and criticism. Her focus is on culinary genre - the history and rhetorical strategies of food writing and the current explosion of food as a subject across media, with specific interests in the 'cult of the chef', foodie culture, and food metaphor in discourse.

Office: HH 261

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Maria (O’Brien) Keller, BA (University of Prince Edward Island) and MA (University of Western Ontario), specializes in literary linguistics and American Modernist literature. Maria is also working towards a Certificate in University Teaching through the Centre for Teaching Excellence. Her other academic interests include chaos theory in literature, digital-age semiotics, and team-based and online pedagogies. For her dissertation, she is working on a literary-linguistic analysis of time representations in the poetry of Mina Loy.

Office: PAS 2218

Meredith Powell, BA (Wilfrid Laurier University) and MA (Wilfrid Laurier University), has research interests in gender studies, digital media theory and design, and post-colonial theory and literature. Her Ph.D. dissertation research embraces all three areas in a study of children and digital technologies.

Office: PAS 1064

Jay Rawding, BA (University of New Brunswick, Saint John) and MA (University of Toronto), has interests in early and contemporary Canadian literature. His research investigates how the nation’s early 20th century writers (both canonical and non-canonical) balanced regional and international spheres, thereby anticipating the expansion of Canada’s subaltern writings, as well as the postnationalism crisis that struck the United States in the 1990s. Other interests include ecocriticism, romanticism, and contemporary American literature.

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George Ross, BA (Hons.) (Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Carleton University) and MA (Applied Language Studies, Carleton University) is currently working on a dissertation project that crosses studies of rhetoric, medical communication and artificial intelligence. Other academic interests include applied linguistics and discourse analysis, multimedia rhetoric, pedagogy of academic writing and professional communication.

Office: PAS 1284

David Shakespeare, BA (University of Toronto) and MA (Wilfrid Laurier University), has scholarly interests in the history, philosophy, and literature of nineteenth-century Europe, and a secondary interest in Early Modern English drama. His dissertation aims to explore the representations of marriage in the discourses of British Romanticism.

Office: PAS 1087

Corrie Shoemaker, BSc and BA (Trinity Western University) and MAIH (Trinity Western),

is a third-year PhD student currently writing her dissertation proposal on Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare with a focus upon Ontario’s Stratford Festival of Canada and British Columbia's Bard on the Beach. Her areas of interest include Early-Modern studies related to Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, Victorian literature and theatre application. Previous conference papers include "'The Knight's Tale': Chivalric Ideals and Unbridled Passion," at Waterloo University's 2010 SAGE Colloquium, "Obsession with Possession: Control, Ownership and Release in A.S. Byatt's Possession," at Ottawa University's 2010 English Graduate Conference and "Anabella's Perverted Perception Through Unbridled Passion in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore'," at York University's 2010 English Graduate Colloquium. Having previously worked with Bard on the Beach for her BA honours thesis From the Page to the Stage: Theory and Performance in Shakespearean Drama, a thesis case study of Bard's 2006 production of Measure for Measure, and the Stratford Festival for early graduate research, Corrie looks forward to expanding her understanding of Shakespearean adaptation with both renowned festivals. Her SSHRC supported MA thesis, entitles Rejecting a Religion of Extremes" Staging the Spiritual in the Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, dealt with Shakespeare's view of religious constrains and legalism with England's volatile religious environment.

Office: PAS 2215

Danila Sokolov has research interests that focus upon English Renaissance poetry and culture and, more specifically, intersections between medieval and early modern literatures. His thesis investigates the persistence of medieval modes of poetic subjectivity in English Petrarchan poetry. He also maintains a continuing interest in questions of literary and critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and philosophical hermeneutics.

Office: PAS 1087

Stefanie Stiles, BA (Mount Allison University) and MA (York University),

is writing her dissertation on ethical approaches to the works of Nathanael West. Her research interests include neo-humanist criticism, the Lost Generation, and American culture and religion. Stefanie has previously published in College English.

Office: PAS 1064

Danielle Stock, BA (English, University of Ottawa) and MA (Rhetoric and Communication Design, University of Waterloo), studies interactions between technology and the human body, particularly in the context of genetic science and bioengineering. Her primary research interests include technoscientific rhetoric, posthumanist philosophy, digital media studies, and scientific humanities theories.

Office: PAS 1064

Stephanie Swinamer BA (Waterloo), MA (Waterloo), has research interests in technology communications within the health care sector, and composition theory and pedagogy.

Office: PAS 1066

Morgan Tunzelmann, BA (Okanagan), MA (Alberta), has research interests in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and medicine, as well as the history of science. Her dissertation examines how eighteenth century theories of aesthetics, empiricism and the operations of the senses (haptics) blur the boundaries between ephemeral conceptions of vitalist medicine and the categorically rigid form of the scientific taxonomy. She also maintains a side interest in depictions of illness and medicine in art and narrative.

Office: PAS 2222

Karen Ward, BA (University of Toronto) and MA (Wilfrid Laurier University), is interested in medieval cycle drama and the ways in which the plays break their own mimetic frames. These mimetic breaks cause several metatheatrical moments that challenge and simultaneously reinforce the theological beliefs of their intended medieval audiences. Her dissertation is tentatively entitled “Emotion and Devotion: A Cognitive Study of Conceptual Blending and Metatheatricality in the York Dramatic Cycle." Her argument delineates the ways in which the York cycle simultaneously promoted affective piety (deep religious devotion brought about through emotional response) and a better understanding of biblical events.

Office: PAS 2216

Sarah Whyte, BSc (University of Guelph) and MA (University of Waterloo), studies the rhetoric of research and practice change in health care. She is particularly interested in applying the theories of Kenneth Burke to explore relationships between knowledge, ethics, poetic form, and social change in particular health care contexts. Her analyses have focused on team communication in the operating room, guidelines for managing hypertension, and online dialogues concerning women’s choices of birth place and birth attendant. Sarah is currently a Doctoral Fellow at the Wilson Centre for Research in Health Professions Education.

Office: PAS 2213

Stephen Wilcox, BA (English, University of Guelph), MA (Rhetoric and Communication Design, Waterloo) is currently exploring semiotics in relation to digital media. More specifically, he is interested in exposing the linguistic substructures of a diverse range of media (from web design to videogames) in order to establish a dialogue with semioticians and poststructuralists, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Such research follows the work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan by continuing to explore the transformative capacity of media themselves, though from a decidedly more linguistic perspective.

Office: PAS 1087

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Sarah York, B.A (U Toronto), M.A. (WCU), M.A. CRW (UToronto) is writing a dissertation on 'liminal landscapes' as interstitial and generative aesthetic realms in American literature and writing. I look for connections between literary scholarship, creative writing, and compositional pedagogy as sites of transformation. My research in unusual bodies, sexuality, and "freaks," as well as Southern Appalachian literature and culture, are sources for other writing, lectures, and curious digging.

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Kevin Ziegler, BA (University of Saskatchewan) and MA (Queen's University), researches contemporary Canadian literature, life writing, and historical narrative. He is currently writing his dissertation, which examines developments in nonfictional Canadian graphic narrative. His other interests include experimental poetics, ecocriticism, and nineteenth-century horror.

Office: PAS 1059

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