Graduate Profiles

Current PhD Students' Research Interests

Marc Acherman
Marc Acherman's research interests include contemporary American fiction and cultural studies. His dissertation examines ideological constructions of terror, terrorism and "post-9/11" America through forms and practices of popular culture. He has been an active member of the Vancouver Lacan Salon since 2009.

Ranbir Banwait
Ranbir's research interests are in biopolitics and postcolonial theory. She is interested in the intersections of medical and legal discourses, particularly as they pertain to Asian Canadian subjectivities.

Sarah Bull
Sarah's research interests include Victorian literature and print cultures, obscenity, sexuality and affect theory. Her dissertation focuses on intersections of obscenity and sexual science in Victorian print culture. Sarah's article "A Purveyor of Garbage? Charles Carrington and the Marketing of Sexual Science in Late-Victorian Britain" will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of Victorian Review.

Sarah Creel
Sarah is interested mostly in women writers who have only recently been added to the canon of the long 18th century, especially the little known writer, Eliza Haywood. Her work on Haywood includes a focus on print culture, specifically ideas of authorship and leadership. These topics converge in her dissertation to examine the ways in which Eliza Haywood's reception and subsequent canonization by feminist scholars in the 1970s has affected the way we read her today, and will provide new ways to approach Haywood scholarship and pedagogy.

Meagan Dallimore
Meagan's research interests include contemporary Asian North American literature and Canadian literature, as well as theories of diaspora, transnationalism and globalization. Meagan's dissertation will engage transnational circulations of nondiscursive material objects, as represented in Asian North American writing and performance. She is primarily interested in the relationship of material objects and affect for individual and communal subject formation.

Alison Dean
Alison’s research interests include photography, literary modernism, and visual culture. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between the discursive frames that surround photography and the performance of the photographic event (portrait photography, in particular). Her research, which combines theory and visual analysis, examines canonical portrait photographers as well as contemporary digital image making (and sharing).

Nico Dicecco
Nico's research brings play theory to adaptation studies in an effort to unpack the complexities of experiencing and interpreting intertextuality in its many forms. Since the study of adaptation is inherently both interdisciplinary and intermediary, he has written and presented on topics as diverse as the following: intertextual surveillant narration in Enemy of the State, the ostensible film remake of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation; the adaptive queering of Alice in Wonderland in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls; anonymous authorship and the performativity of publication in early modern England; and satire, casting decisions and commodity fetishization in the Hollywood treatment of Mark Millar’s Wanted.

Chris Ewart
Chris's critical and creative work often interrogates disability and normalcy in narrative and popular culture. In addition to disability studies/theory, his research, practice and teaching interests include modern to contemporary literature, creative writing, film and rhetoric. He is also working on a collection of poems and a second novel. His first novel, Miss Lamp (Coach House, 2006), was shortlisted for a 2007 ReLit Award. He has taught at U of C, ACAD and written for the arts in the Calgary Herald.

David Gaertner
Dave is currently working on his dissertation, entitled Beyond Truth: Materialist Approaches to Reconciliation in Canadian Literature and Social Theory. His research focuses on discourses of reconciliation, apology and forgiveness in Canadian literature and political practice. He has published work in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and Shift and has presented his research internationally, most recently at the Global Reconciliation Summit in Amman, Jordan.

Alana Gerecke
A professional contemporary dancer, Alana specializes in performance and dance studies. Her dissertation examines site-specific dance in North America with relation to theories of affect, the senses, urban topography, publics, and counterpublics. Alana is currently writing an article for Allana C. Lindgren and Kaija Pepper’s anthology, Political Bodies / Social Movements: Canadian Dance in the 1970s (forthcoming from Dance Collection Danse Press/es, 2011). In recent years, she has been published numerous times in The Dance Current.

Stanley Green
Stanley's dissertation is concerned with impressionism in British painting and literature,1870s-1914. He is exploring an apparent gap in critical commentary about artistic production between late Victorian painting and literature and emerging postimpressionism in 1910. He will argue that the impact of artistic experimentation by transitional figures such as Ford Madox Ford and Walter Sickert has been overlooked.  

Patty Kelly
Patty studies the history and theory of rhetoric and the methods of discourse analysis. Her dissertation examines the classification Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition (DSM-III, 1980) in order to identify the discourse features of a DSM classification and to show how these features come to function as medical-scientific knowledge for particular discourse communities and audiences.

Graham Lyons
Graham's research focus is Modernism and 20th century intellectual history--though his research interests wander into such areas as media theory, popular culture, and William Shatner. His dissertation focuses on post-WWI reimaginings of history in literature and philosophy, and it "brushes" the political affiliations of prominent Modernists (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Woolf) "against the grain", to use Walter Benjamin's phrase. He is not as pretentious as his research might suggest.

Alison McDonald
Alison’s research interests lie in Canadian Literature, travel writing, and gender theory, with a particular focus on issues of identity formation and the narration of displacement in contemporary Canadian autobiography. Her dissertation examines the autobiographical writing of celebrated Canadian poet, prose writer, and visual artist P.K. Page (1916-2010).

Kim Minkus
Kim's research focus is on contemporary feminist poetics and the archive. Her areas of interest include new media, twentieth- and twenty-first century poetics, cultural politics, and bibliographic studies. Her reviews and poems have appeared in a variety of national and international journals. She teaches creative writing and literature courses at Capilano University and also serves on the board of The Capilano Review.

Jennifer Scott
Jennifer's research interests include 19th century literature, particularly Canadian travel writing and female-authored settler narratives. She is currently working collaboratively with Myka Tucker-Abramson and Naava Smolash on a project that examines the first Canadian immigration acts.

Michael Stachura
Michael is currently researching Norse influences on modern Scottish literature. Other interests include: (post)Modernism, Medieval literature, and UK history and politics.

Jason Starnes
Jason is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Simon Fraser University. A Co-organizer of The Charles Olson Centenary Conference, Jason studies North American poetry, spatial theory and cultural studies, with emphases on radical geography, Lacanian topologies, and Marxism.

Nathan Szymanski
Nathan's primary interest is poetry from the English Renaissance. His current research considers the intersection of verse satire and erotica during the final decade of Queen Elizabeth's reign. His favourite poet of the era is John Donne.

Myka Tucker-Abramson
Myka is working on her dissertation entitled "Novel Shocks." Her research looks at the relationship between the US novel in the 1950s, shock, and the rise of neoliberalism. Her work draws on Marxist and psychoanalytic theory, and political economy. She has published articles with Jennifer Scott and Naava Smolash on Studies in Canadian Literature. Her work has also appeared in Modern Drama, Edu-Factory, and is forthcoming in Rethinking Marxism.

Jonathon Wilcke
Jonathon's research areas include: contemporary poetry, poetics, literary theory, cultural theory, rhetoric, and music-poetry interdisciplinary practices. His dissertation investigates improvisation and its various conceptualizations in North American poetry, specifically in sound poetry, American jazz poetry and Beat poetry, as well as the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, The Four Horsemen, Steve McCaffery, David Antin, and Lyn Hejinian. Jonathon is also an accomplished saxophonist and composer.