Research

Jennifer Andrews	Jennifer Andrews’s areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century English-Canadian and American literature, Native North American literature, literary theory, and cultural studies (especially in relation to fashion and television). She has published over fifteen book chapters and articles in a variety of scholarly journals including American Literary History, ESC, American Indian Quarterly, ECW, The Canadian Review of American Studies and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Her SSHRC-funded co-authored book, Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2003 and her SSHRC-funded book on Native North American women poets, titled In the Belly of a Laughing God, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press in fall 2010. She is currently co-authoring a book, with Professor Priscilla Walton of Carleton University, on fashion and television from a Canadian perspective. Jennifer has been the co-editor of Studies in Canadian Literature since 2003.
John Ball	John C. Ball has published two monographs on contemporary postcolonial fiction and is editing the World Fiction volume of the forthcoming Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction.  He is also co-editor, with Jennifer Andrews, of the scholarly journal Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en literature canadienne.  His research interests include urban and historical postcolonial fiction, and he has been working lately on representations of the sea in postcolonial literature.
Christa Canitz	Christa Canitz specializes in middle English and Middle Scots poetry, with a sideline in 20th/21st-century medievalism.  She is the editor of Florilegium, an international, peer-reviewed journal of medieval studies.  She has also co-edited two interdisciplinary collections of medieval and medievalist papers entitled From Arabye to Engelond (1999) and Confronting the Present with the Past (2006, published as a special issue of Florilegium and has written articles and book chapters on subjects as diverse as Beowulf, Chaucer, the poetry of the Middle Scots "makars," the short stories of Alice Munro, and medievalist movies including Braveheart.
Triny Finlay	Triny Finlay’s creative work coincides directly with her research and teaching interests, which include contemporary Canadian literature, poetics, genre theory, writing by women, and creative writing.  She is the author of the poetry collections Splitting Off and Histories Haunt Us, and she is currently writing a book-length long poem entitled Scavenge.
Randall Martin	Randall Martin is a Shakespearian with related research interests in English Renaissance drama, women’s literature, cultural history, and ecology.  With the support of his latest SSHRC Standard Research Grant he is writing a book on Shakespeare’s theatrical uses of early modern discourses related to St Paul, provisionally entitled Shakespeare, Paul, and Cultural Dialogue.  Oxford University Press has also commissioned him to write a volume on Shakespeare and Ecology for their Shakespeare Topics series.  And he is preparing an online critical edition of Antony and Cleopatra for the ground-breaking Internet Shakespeare Editions (ise@uvic.ca).
Mary Rimmer	Mary Rimmer’s major current project is a book on allusion in Thomas Hardy.  Her research interests centre on Victorian Studies and on Hardy, though she also works on post-colonial literature, narrative and women’s writing.  She edited Hardy’s Desperate Remedies for Penguin Books and collaborated on editions of four early Trinidadian novels; other publications include articles on Hardy, Nono Ricci and Margaret Laurence.  She has supervised MA and PhD theses on a number of topics, including Hardy, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, sensation fiction, and fairy-tale motifs.
Stephen Schryer	Stephen Schryer’s teaching interests cover all areas of American literature, with a particular emphasis upon post-World War II fiction.  His research interests focus on the intersection between American literature and the politics of the post-New Deal welfare state.  His first book, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II Fiction, explores one of the central fantasies of post-World War II literary and intellectual culture: the idea that writers could influence the expanding professional class (the “new class”) and thereby transform the U.S. welfare state.  He has also begun work on a new project, tentatively titled “Cultures of Poverty: American Literature and the Politics of Welfare.”  This project explores poverty discourse in post-World War II literature, social science, and public policy debates.
Edith Snook	Edith Snook's research and teaching focus on early modern English literature, with a particular interest in writing by women. She is the author of two books: Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2005) and  Women, Beauty and Power in Early Modern England: A Feminist Literary History (Palgrave, 2011; SSHRC funded). Named a 2011 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, this book looks at print and manuscript materials to explore how women linked their understanding of cosmetics, clothing, and hair to medicine, politics, religion, motherhood, and gender, class, and racial identities.  Her current SSHRC-funded research project is a study of how women's medical practices informed women's writing in seventeenth-century England.  This project is grounded in the study of evidence of women's medical knowledge and work, in manuscript domestic recipe collections, needlework, and advertising, and considers their influence on life-writing, letters, poetry, and fiction by women such as Grace Mildmay, Lady Mildmay, Elizabeth Isham, Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway and Kullutagh, and Jane Barker.  The book explores issues around midwifery, maternal pediatric health-care, scientific study, professionalism, and disability.