Kasia Van Schaik
Dr. Kasia Van Schaik is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Co-director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of New Brunswick. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century North American literature, creative writing, autobiography, experimental writing, eco-feminist poetics, and cultural theory. She is particularly interested in the intersections between narrative, gender, and the environment.
Dr. Van Schaik’s first book, the linked story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth (University of Alberta Press, 2022), was nominated for the 2023 Giller Prize, the Concordia University First Book Prize, the ReLit Prize for short fiction, and was named a best book of 2023 by the Miramichi Reader.
Her next book, a work of cultural criticism and memoir entitled Women Among Monuments (Dundurn Press, 2026), explores 20th century histories of female genius, asking what, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for artmaking. Through a lyrical examination of female solitude, constraint, and perseverance, this book charts a path for more inclusive artmaking practices, communities, and monuments.
Dr. Van Schaik has also co-edited with Dr. Myra Bloom (York University) an academic essay collection, Shelter in Text, which investigates the relationship between shelter and narrative. Forthcoming with the University of Alberta Press in October 2025, this collection examines texts from across literary, film, and Indigenous studies, foregrounding considerations of care, disability, and decolonial approaches to land, space, and storytelling.
Dr. Van Schaik holds a PhD from McGill University, where her doctoral thesis, Small Dislocations: Narrative Acts Beyond the Home in North American Women’s Fiction post 1945, won McGill’s 2023 Arts Insights Dissertation Award. This project argues that the mid-century’s enduring domestic symbol of the good life—the quest for wealth, social success and wellbeing represented by the free-standing suburban house—has been one of the most significant factors in determining North America’s current unviable model of living. Exploring how narrative depictions of unsettled and unsettling domesticity challenge, and also participate in, the good life ideal, this project asks: what new stories—in both the narrative and architectural sense—become available to us if we recalibrate our relationship to the home? Dr. Van Schaik is currently adapting this project into an academic monograph.
Dr. Van Schaik’s critical and creative writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, This Magazine, Maisonneuve Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Best Canadian Poetry, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Jacket2, Canadian Studies in English, the Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Sea Burial Laws According to Country, received the Mona Adilman Prize for poetry related to ecological concerns.
Before joining UNB’s English Department, Dr. Van Schaik held a two-year FRQSC postdoctoral fellowship at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology and taught literature, film, and creative writing at McGill University. At UNB, she teaches graduate and undergraduate-level courses on literature, film, and creative writing, and supervises graduate students working on literary fiction and nonfiction.
