Special Topic PresentationS


The Special Topic Presentations are part of the department's PhD Comprehensive Examination; for more information, see the PhD PROGRAM PAGE.

Presentations by year | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 |

2011 Presentations

4-5th May, Watson 517


Wednesday, 4 May
10:00–10:45 Agatha Hanson: “Claiming Disability in Middle English Literature”
10:45–11:30 Taryn Beukema: “Can the Suburbs Speak?: The Erotics of Shame in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm”
11:30–12:45 Lunch Break
12:45–1:30 Andrew Bingham: “Ethics and Person: Encountering the Everyday Ineffable”
1:30–2:15 Carla Manfredi: “Lady Anna Brassey’s ‘Handiwork’: Crafting the Victorian Photo-Text”
Thursday, 5 May
9:30–10:15 Julia Gingerich: “Silent Subjects: Representing the Experimental Animal in Victorian England”
10:15–11:00 Ian Maness: “Annotation and Its Hypertexts: Is There Such a Thing as a ‘hypernote’?”
11:00–11:45 Jennifer Hardwick: “Unsettling Experiences: Ethical Witnessing and the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission”
11:45– Lunch: For the presenters, their supervisory committees, and guests

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2010 Presentations

29–30 April, Watson 517


Thursday, 29 April
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, 30 April
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

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2009 Presentations

30 April–1 May, Watson 517


Thursday, 30 April
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, 1 May
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’s 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. Everyone is welcome.
Tuesday, 15 September
2:30–3:15 David Chant: “Coming to Terms: The Emergence of Literary Tourism in Scotland”
3:15–4:00 Mark Streeter: “2009: The Year Comics Broke”

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2008 Presentations

30 April–1 May, Watson 517


Wednesday, 30 April
10:00–10:45 Emily 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”
11:30–12:00 Lunch Break
12:00–12:45 Paul Saunders: “Ecocriticism and the Nature of Modernist Ecology”
12:45–1:30 Payal Taneja: “Evolutionary Zoontologies: Origin of Care among the Species”
1:30–2:15 Emily Bruusgaard: “Silk and Sexuality”
Thursday, 1 May
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”
3:30–5:30 Reception: Upstairs at the Grad Club. Everyone is welcome.
Monday, 1 December
2:00–2:45 Julia Cercone: “Museums and Mausoleums: Death, Writing and the Collecting Ethos”
2:45–3:30 Heather Cyr: “ Eden, Babel and a garden in Oxford: The Symbolic Geography of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy”

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Page last updated June 22, 2011