Special Topic Presentations, 2010


Thursday, April 29

9:15–10:00 Matt Scribner

“A Presentation on Disguise in Thirteenth-Century Romance… Or So It Seems”

10:00–10:45 Brett Roscoe

“Prolegomena to the Study of Emotion in Old Icelandic Literature: Problems and Possibilities”

10:45–11:30 Kimi Hamada

“ ‘Desiring Comfort, Desiring Coziness’: Recuperations and Intersections of Diaspora and Nostalgia Theory

11:30–1:30 LUNCH BREAK

1:30–2:15 Fraser Hawkins

“Reading the 2010 World Cup: Fictions of Development in and around the Cape Town Stadium”

2:15–3:00 Jelena Marelj

“Intueor ergo sum: Plotinus, Cognition, and Descartes’ Cogito”

3:00–3:15 COFFEE BREAK

3:15–4:00 Laura Kinderman

“The Symmetry of Uncertainty: Aporia in Romantic Musipoetics”

4:00–4:45 Andrew McKendry

“A ‘Sober, Useful, and Industrious’ People: Trade and Nonconformity in Seventeenth-Century England”

Friday, April 30

9:30–10:15 Marc Foley

“The Hurting Chime: Addiction, Allegory, Inertia”

10:15–11:00 Dale Tracy

“Breathy Dialogues, Bleeding Dyes: Compassion in Proxy Witness Poetry”

11:00–11:45 Laura McGavin

“Medical Diagnostics and Literary Close Reading”

11:45–12:45 LUNCH BREAK

12:45–1:30 Jess Roberts

“ ‘Save the Children’: Child Soldiers, Life Narrative, and Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone”

1:30–2:15 Leslie Stobbart

“Dismantling the Bomb: Trauma and Articulation in Contemporary War Fiction”

2:15–3:00 MaryAnne Laurico

“Violent Biopolitikin’ and Metabolised Ecologies: The (Non)Human-As-Resource, Biotechnology’s Agency, and Aesthetic Activisms”

3:00–4:00 Reception: English lounge, all welcome

Special Topic Presentations, 2009


Thursday, April 30

10:00 – 10:45 Cara Fabre

Stigma and Subjectivity: Plotting Poverty in Canadian Literature

10:45 – 11:30 Marc Fortin

Everything is Connected?: Mind/Body, Nature/Culture,and the Missing Link

11:30 – 12:15 Kate Hallemeier

Cosmopolitanism and Sympathy

12:15 – 12:45 LUNCH BREAK

12:45 – 1:30 Jaime Denike

Writing Narrators

1:30 – 2:15 Don Bourne

“To the Reader”: Paratext in Gulliver’s Travels

2:15 – 3:00 Ben Bakhtiarynia

Are Ethics and Aesthetics One?: The Ancient Quarrel Renewed


Friday, May 1

10:00 – 10:45 Aaron Mauro

“The Sphinx Must Solve Her Own Riddle”: The Metaphors of History in the Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

10:45 – 11:30 Dan Pinsent

e. e. cummings’ EIMI: Giving an Account of Is/Self

11:30 – 12:15 Stephen Guy

You’re So Mean, Mary McCarthy

12:15 – 12:45 LUNCH BREAK

12:45 – 1:30 Darren Springer

“The Fleshy Matrix”: Antebellum America and the Body in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee

1:30 – 2:15 Jon Gaboury

The Enthusiasts: John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, and the Number One

2:15 – 4:00 Reception English Lounge, all welcome

Special Topic Presentations, 2008


WEDNESDAY, April 30

10:00 – 10:45 Emmy Anglin

"For I am the Lord's News-Writer:" Madness and Confinement in the Poems of Christopher Smart and Allen Ginsberg

10:45 – 11:30 Jordan Smith

Making Time: Sham Ruins and Fragments of the 18th Century

12:15 – 12:45 LUNCH BREAK

12:45 – 1:30 Paul Saunders

Ecocriticism and the Nature of Modernist Ecology

1:30 – 2:15 Payal Taneja

Evolutionary Zoontologies: Origin of Care among the Species

2:15 – 3:00 Emily Bruusgaard

Silk and Sexuality

THURSDAY, May 1

10:00 – 10:45 Raji Singh Soni

Comparative Ascetics: Syncretism, Secularism, and the Politics of Doing Without

10:45 – 11:30 Allison Smith

“A plea, a petition, a kind of prayer”: Intersections of the sacred and the erotic in Nick Cave's love songs

11:30 – 12:15 Daniel Moore

"Like dull narcotics, numbing pain": Mourning, Consolation, and Sedatives

12:15 – 12:45 LUNCH BREAK

12:45 – 1:30 Jon McKay

“Who, among you, deserves eternal life?": Authorship, Sexuality and Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island

1:30 – 2:15 Tim McIntyre

From Ethics to Phenomenology: Derrida, Levinas, and the Ethical Turn in Literary Criticism

2:15 – 3:00 Jeremy DeChavez

The Unbearable Enlightenment of Becoming: Modernity, Transition, and the Southeast Asian Novel

3:30 Reception Grad Club upstairs, all welcome

Special Topic Presentations, 2007

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday April 30, May 1 & 2 Watson Hall 517

MONDAY, April 30

10:00 - 11:00 Matt Strohack

"I Say to You that I am Dead!": Economies of Death in the Literature of Horror

11:00 - 12:00 Shalini Khan

Imperial Science: Inoculations and Bacterial ‘others’ in Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute

Lunch

1:00 - 2:00 Paul Barrett

The problems of being human: Dionne Brand's Liquid Sublimity



2:00 - 3:00 Dheepa Sivakumaran

Tensions, Ambiguities and Paradoxes in Contemporary North American Trauma Narratives

TUESDAY, May 1

10:00 - 11:00 Linda Quirk

Too Transgressive for Can. Lit.: Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves

11:00 - 12:00 Marieke Kalkhove

Fetishizing the Foreigner: The Colonial Uncanny in Forster’s A Passage to India and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

Lunch

1:00 - 2:00 Breanne Oryschak

This Talk Has 30 Minutes: Canadian-ness and Satire on CBC television.

2:00 - 3:00 Jason Bourget

What You Hold In Your Hands Is More Than A Book": Situating the sexual in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions

WEDNESDAY, May 2

10:00 - 11:00 Roula Salam

Re-Inviting Guests for More than Just Coffee: The Dregs of Memory at the Borders in the Lebanese Post-War Novel

11:00 - 12:00 Ryan Porter

New Hamburg and its Grandstand: a Community's Loss, a Community's Strength, a Community's Nostalgia

NB: There will be a light lunch reception at the Grad Club after the last presentation on Wednesday.

Everyone is welcome.

Special Topic Presentations, 2006

Monday, Tuesday May 1 & 2 Watson Hall 517

MONDAY, May 1

9:00 - 10:00 Elisabeth Oliver

“Beauty unmans me”: Aesthetic Decoration in American Literary Culture, 1880–1910

10:10 - 11:10 Kiley Kapuscinski

The Limits of Labour: Intersecting the Prostitute and the Female Proletariat in Progressive Era American Fiction

11:10 - 11:30 Coffee Break

11:30 - 12:30 Ian Johnston

Dangerous Pleasire: The Story of O, Lesbian S/M, and the Articulation of Submissive Desire

Lunch

1:30 - 2:30 Heather Joyce

Coming to Terms: Real-izing 9/11

2:40 - 3:40 Craig Smith

American Catastrophe (?): Refiguring the Holocaust in America

TUESDAY, May 2

10:00 - 11:00 Caitlin Charman

“It’s a primitive island”: CBC’s Canada Reads and the marketing of Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound

11:15 - 12:15 Ryan Melsom

Generation X and the Dance of Unstable Irony

NB: There will be a light lunch reception at the Grad Club after the last presentation on Tuesday.

Everyone is welcome.

Special Topics Presentations, 2005

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday May 2, 3 & 5 Watson Hall 517

MONDAY, May 2 10-11

10:00 - 11:00 Rosa Barker

Magic Realism: Decolonizing the Literary Imagination

11:15 - 12:15 Heather Emmens

"Cham Swells and Sham Swells:" Male Impersonation in Postmodern Victorian Fiction

Lunch

1:15 - 2:15 Jennifer Esmail

Flying Words and Fixed Bodies: Theories of American Sign Language and its Poetry

2:30-3:30 Brandon Alakas

Abbot John's Dream and Brother William's Apostasy: Monastic Reading Practices and Scholastic Literary Tradition in John Whethamstede's Registers

TUESDAY, May 3

10-11 Lindsey Banco

"Trafficking in Snobbery: Drugs and the Contemporary Anti-Tourist Novel"

11:15-12:15 Dana Olwan

"Split Affinities? Arab Women between Feminist and Nationalist Discourses"

Lunch

1:15-2:15 Jason Boulet

"He Flung Himself Upon the Divan and Wrote Perversely Off in All Directions:" Going A Rebours in Nineteenth-Century Literature

2:30-3:30 Veronica Blackbourn

"Ein urgemütliches Völkchen, or The Original Good-Natured Little Race:" Austrian National Identity in the Postwar Volksstück

THURSDAY, May 5

9:30-10:30 Kirsten Martin

"Botanic Muse!": Poetic Science in Erasmus Darwin's "The Loves of the Plants"

10:40-11:40 Shannon Smith

"Having feasted my eyes with one more look": Consumption, Masculinity and the Medical Gaze in Victorian Fiction

12:00-1:00 Cheryl Cundell

The Disorder of Things: Empiricism and the Cartographic Enterprise, or, the Observations of Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie



NB: There will be a light lunch reception at the Grad Club after the last presentation on Thursday.

Everyone is welcome.

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.