Research Initiatives and Units | Department of English, Queen's University

Our students and faculty are innovative, creative, and rigorous. Our research expands the disciplinary horizons of English literary studies while creating rich opportunities for creative and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Our Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate students who demonstrate deep interest in independent research have the option of enrolling in ENGL 590, our Senior Essay course.

To learn more, visit the ENGL 590 course page and the FAQs.

Find out more about our undergraduate students by visiting the English Department Student Council (DSC) page.

Our Graduate Students

Our graduate students pursue path-breaking research in a variety of literary and cultural fields, and demonstrate considerable success in publishing and national scholarship competitions. Find out more about our graduate students...

Our graduate students also engage in literary internships, publishing practicums, research forums, and more. To learn more about the research opportunities offered in our graduate program, visit our graduate degrees page.

To view current research accomplishments, visit our Spotlight on Research section.

Our Faculty

Our faculty members are renowned for both teaching and research excellence, having won numerous university-wide, national, and international awards for scholarship, while publishing in a wide variety of scholarly, popular, and creative venues. Find out more about individual professors...

Research Units

The Swamp Ward

The Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project was a project which ran between 2015-2020 and documented the history of two of the oldest areas of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. For Indigenous people through centuries, Ka’tarohkwi was a good place to fish, to gather, to trade. After Europeans arrived, the Inner Harbour became industrial, complete with railroads, factories, and docks; the Swamp Ward, adjacent to it, was where workers and their families lived, went to school, went to church, shopped, and played. The area continues to evolve in new ways. Through archival research and oral history, and starting with a focus on the twentieth century, SWIHHP brings people, time periods, spaces, and issues into Kingston’s story and out of the shadow of limestone buildings and celebrated politicians.

Featured blog post from the Swamp Ward: The Art of Transcribing by Ella Mackay Singh (Undergraduate Student)

Learn more about the Swamp Ward

Indigenous Hockey Research Network

The Indigenous Hockey Research Network is a collective of researchers dedicated to uncovering and engaging with hockey’s Indigenous past, present, and future. We aim to cultivate critical understandings of hockey’s role in relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples in Canada over time. Through archival research, personal interviews, data analysis, and Indigenous community-led approaches, we take up hockey as a site for community building and Indigenous empowerment, as well as a vehicle for the pursuit of reconciliation between Indigenous Peoples and mainstream Canadians.

Learn more about the Indigenous Hockey Research Network

Strathy Language Unit

The mission of the Strathy Language Unit, a research unit housed in the English Department at Queen’s University, is to initiate, support and promote research on Canadian English from a variety of perspectives. Topics of inquiry for the Strathy Unit include dialectal variation, historical change, language and identity, standardization and the relationship between English and Canada's other languages — Canadian varieties of French, Indigenous languages, and the heritage languages of immigrant communities.

Learn more about the Strathy Language Unit

The Belle Park Project

At the entrance to an urban park in Kingston, Ontario stands an unmarked and neglected Totem Pole. The pole was carved by members of the Native Brotherhood at Joyceville Correctional Institution in 1973, and presented to the City to mark 300 years of European presence in the area. The pole marks the entrance to Belle Park, a recreational facility built on a landfill. The landfill in turn was built on a wetland. And the wetland formed a rich habitat connecting Belle Island to the shore of the Great Cataraqui River. Belle Island, a gathering place for Indigenous peoples over the centuries, is the resting place of remains of people who died 1000 years ago. None of this information is readily available in the park. To engage with this site we came together: a curator (Erin Sutherland) a Queen’s English scholar and public historian (Laura Murray) and a documentary filmmaker (Dorit Naaman).

This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Learn more about the Belle Project