Medieval to Early Renaissance Literature and Drama:

Brandon Alakas:

  • Dissertation title: "Vacare lectioni:" The Persistence of Monastic Reading Practices Inside and Outside the Cloister in Late Medieval England.

  • Areas of interest: liturgical drama and the Corpus Christi Cycle

Early Modern Drama:

Eric Carlson:

  • Dissertation title: Making Public Education: Vernacular Rhetoric Manuals in Early Modern England

  • Areas of interest: Class and canonization in early modern schools; Early modern drama

Heather Cyr:

  • Dissertation title: City Futures: The Language of Time in City Comedy

  • Areas of interest: chivalric romances and romance parody in the early modern period; cross-dressing in renaissance dramatic comedy (with specific reference to class and gender); trans-historical theories and manifestations of monstrosity; fantasy and children's literature (most recently anachronistic treatments of space and time in the novels of Philip Pullman). In Fall 2009 Heather will teach Shakespeare (ENGL 226).

Ian Johnson:

  • Areas of interest: Renaissance and Restoration drama

Renaissance Non-Dramatic Literature:

Eighteenth-Century Literature and Drama:

Breanne Oryschak:

  • Dissertation title: The Author’s Farce: Satiric Agency, Authority, and the Performance of 18th Century Satire on Film and the Stage

  • Areas of interest: Restoration and 18th century literature and drama, satire, film/theatre semiotics, performance, media, adaptation studies, and world cinema

Romanticism:

Jordan Smith:

  • Dissertation title: Reconstructing William Blake's Bible of Hell

  • Areas of interest: Romanticism, Blake, ruin & fragment literature, paratexts, media history, and cross-overs of post-structuralist theory and quantum mechanics

Victorian Literature and Culture:

Jason Boulet:

  • Dissertation title: Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads" (First Series)

  • Areas of interest: nineteenth-century literature (especially poetry); Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, and Decadence; gender, sexuality, and the body; mass media representations of male homosexuality and homosexual masculinity; Romanticism, Decadence, and youth culture in the fin-de-siecle (1890's and 1990's).

Deanna Mason:

  • Dissertation title: Piety and Exoticism: Middle-Eastern Orientalism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

  • Areas of interest: Victorian visual culture; Victorian poetry; Pre-Raphaelitism

Shannon Smith:

  • Dissertation title: Masculinity and Sport Culture in Victorian Genre Fiction

  • Areas of interest: Victorian fiction, the sociology/history of sport, gender theory and the use of technology in the humanities

Studies in Modernism:

Ben Bakhtiarynia:

  • Dissertation title: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Immoralism: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wilde

  • Areas of interest: 19th and 20th century literary modernism(s); poetry and poetics, especially Baudelaire and T.S. Eliot; intersections between ethics and aesthetics; Nietzsche and immoralism; Wilde and decadence; art and censorship; critical theory; theories of modernity and space; cosmopolitanism; the modern city; literature of addiction

Adriana Hetram:

  • Dissertation title: "The Black Imprint of Sandals in White Mosaic Floors": H.D.'s Mythomythical Poetics.

  • Areas of interest: Modernism and Midrash

Daniel Moore:

  • Dissertation title: Sons Mourning Mothers, 1903 - 1949

  • Areas of interest: modernist poetry and fiction; theories of mourning and trauma theory; the elegy; contemporary poetry of America from 1950; the Harlem Renaissance; text-image literatures; James Joyce; William Carlos Williams; Virginia Woolf

Paul Saunders:

  • Dissertation title: Modernist Ecology: Modernism and the Reimagination of Nature

  • Areas of interest: British and Irish Modernism (especially Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, and Beckett), ecocriticism, environmental ethics in philosophy (focusing on the late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century), animal studies

Raji Soni:

  • Dissertation title: Restored Relations:  Theologies of Sexuality in Modern Poetry

  • Areas of interest: modernist and twentieth-century poetry and poetics; transatlantic modernisms; relationships between Scriptural theologies and religious traditions (such as North Indian Bhakti and Sikhism, Western Christianity and its philosophers, and the Hebrew Scriptures), modern literature, and theories of sexuality; queer theory and its orientations; modes of exegesis and fundamentalisms; studies in the politics of secularism, narratives of secularization, and theories of pluralism; comparative religion and literary studies; identity politics.

Post-Colonial Studies:

Rosa Barker:

  • Dissertation title: Literal War: Fictions of the New Imperial Order

  • Areas of interest: Post-colonial literatures; Literary theory; Marxism; Feminist theory and praxis; Critical race theory; Globalization and neo-imperialism

Shalini Khan:

  • Dissertation title: “Infectious Entanglements: Literary and Medical Representations of Disease in the Post/Colonial Caribbean”

  • Areas of interest: Post/colonial literatures and theory; the history of medicine; medical and scientific discourses in Caribbean literatures in English; early Caribbean medical texts. 

Roula Salam:

  • Areas of interest: Representations of national and post-national identities within spatial contexts (primarily) within the Arab world. The primary authors I'm working on are Egyptian and Sudenese, including Naguib Mahfouz, Tayeb Salih, and Alaa Aswany.

Canadian Literature and Culture:

Caitlin Charman:

  • Areas of interest: Canadian literature, Maritime literature, marketing and Alice Munro

Jeremy Lalonde:

  • Dissertation title: Nation, Elegy, and the Work of Mourning in the Poetry of Al Purdy.

  • Areas of interest: Canadian literature and the short story

Ryan Melsom:

  • Dissertation title: West Coast Apocalyptic: Revelation and the Making of Region

  • Areas of interest: the prevalence and significance of apocalypse in Canadian West Coast Literature and the idea of the "new male" and the various ways it has been deployed and exploited in contemporary North American literature and culture.

Linda Quirk:

  • Dissertation title: Women's work: the performance of authorial identity in English Canada, 1880-1920

  • Areas of interest: Canadian Literature and Book History

Contemporary Literature:

Jason Bourget:

  • Dissertation title: Making the Men of Tomorrow: Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1959 – 1976

  • Areas of interest: Contemporary American and British Science Fiction; Gender Studies and Masculinity Studies; Cultural Studies; post-WWII American and British Fiction; Soviet Science Fiction and Russian Literature; History of Publishing and the Book; Renaissance Literature and Manuscript Studies.

Heather Emmens:

  • Dissertation title: Queer Identities in BBC Television Adaptations of Contemporary British Novels.

  • Areas of interest: Gay and lesbian literature; contemporary literature; British literature; television and film adaptations; queer theory

Aaron Mauro:

  • Dissertation title: The Languishing of Terror in America: Tragedy, Metaphor, and the Contemporary American Novel

  • Areas of interest: American and Canadian Literature.

Jonathan McKay:

  • Dissertation title:  Death Threat Letters: Terroristic Allegories of Authorship in the Postmodern Novel

  • Areas of interest:  Representations and theorizations of authorship, Postmodern literature and theory, Gender and Sexuality studies, Contemporary and American literature, inluding Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Roberto Bolano, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Philip Roth, Will Self, etc.

Roula Salam:

  • Areas of interest: contemporary and comparative war and post war literature

Allison Smith:

  • Dissertation title: "'Another way to pray': the sacred and the erotic in popular music."

  • Areas of interest: feminist theory; performance and identity; theories of the sacred; French feminism; popular music; cyborg feminism.

Theory and Criticism:

Jeremy De Chavez:

  • Dissertation title: Eros and Liberation: Love as a Political Concept in Badiou, Fromm, Fanon, and Zizek

  • Areas of interest: Psychoanalytic Theory, Theories of Affect, Postcolonial Theory/Literature, Post-Marxism

Recent Graduates:

Lindsey Banco

Sandy Bugeja 

Jennifer Esmail

Eugene Johnson

Kiley Kapusinski

Sheetal Lodhia

Elisabeth Oliver

Sara Mueller

Jessica Riddell

Colleen Shea

Cheryl Cundell

Welcome Week!

The Welcome Week 2010 Schedule for new and returning grad students is now online.

Incoming Grad Student FAQ

For those new to the Queen's University English Department grad program and to the city of Kingston. A list of Frequently Asked Questions about the grad program and finding your way around Kingston.