PhD Student Research

Rachel Bryant studies northeastern North American literatures and literary cultures. Her particular interests include early modern colonial writings, canon formation, Indigenous literatures, and the ways in which regional discourses in Atlantic Canada and New England have worked to inscribe and reinforce national boundaries.

Sara Dunton focuses her research on the exploration of inter-connectivity between modernist poetry, design theory, and visual art. Her proposed dissertation will examine the mid-twentieth century poetry and prose of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), with particular emphasis on H.D.'s fascination with the aesthetics of mid-nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite artists.

Kitty Elton's main area of interest is nineteenth-century British writing that reflects the radical destabilization of traditional belief systems by scientific research and the widening tensions between the arts and sciences as they competed to authoritatively describe life. Her doctoral dissertation, "George Eliot's Mind/Marian Evans's Head: Nineteenth-Century Realism and Science," examines the rising influence of scientific thought and how it is reflected in both the writing and the life of the Victorian realist writer George Eliot (Marian Evans).

Javad Ghatta studies English Renaissance literature with particular emphasis on drama. His specific research interests include representations of political violence and coercion in the tragedies, Persianate studies with a focus on Anglo-Islamic exchanges in the drama of the period, humanities computing, and textual scholarship. His doctoral dissertation  “A Cultural Poetics of Terror and Terrorism in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” proposes the early modernity of political terrorism and investigates its staged manifestations during England’s great age of terror and theatre.   

Lisa Jodoin's current research interests are gothic literature and contemporary Canadian literature, particularly by First Nations and Mixed-Blood writers. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Homesick: The (Un)homely Body in First Nations and Métis Gothic Literature in Canada," examines the relationship between gothic conventions in First Nations and Mixed-Blood writing and the racial politics of 'Indian Blood' in Canada. Her other research interests include postcolonial literature, gender studies, and queer theory. 

Svetlana Nedeljkov's research focuses on the poetry of high modernism and the influence of sociopolitics on the inclusivity of modernist texts. Her doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “Ezra Pound and the Shadowy Politics of Inclusivity,” investigates the influence of Ezra Pound's political agenda on his magnum opus, The Cantos, by paying special attention to the long poem's aesthetic and semantic “openness.”

Rob Ross is currently completing his thesis on representations of living, leisure, and labour in late twentieth-century suburban fiction written in Canada.