Editing Modernism in Canada

Joel Baetz is an Assistant Professor at Trent University. He is the editor of Canadian Poetry from World War I: An Anthology (Oxford 2009), and the author of articles on modern Canadian poetry, several of which examine the renditions of war, art, and subjectivity in the work of Robert Service, Frank Prewett, Anna Durie, and Al Purdy. Since completing doctoral and postdoctoral projects on Canadian war writing, Baetz’s main research focuses on figurations of urban cosmopolitanism and citizenship in Canadian literature.

Baetz is also an Associate Editor of the Davies Project, which is creating a digital edition of Robertson Davies’s Theatre Diaries. The digital edition will complement book versions (already in development) of selected portions of his diaries by giving access to the full range of Davies’s impressions about the development of Canadian theatre (specifically) and Canadian cultural production (generally). In Davies’s own estimation, these diaries are “the stuff of which social history is made.”

Suzanne Bailey is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at Trent University. She is the author of Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry (Routledge 2010), funded by SSHRC, and is editing P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal. Her current research explores perceptual and cognitive differences and their relationship to artistic production, especially poetry. She has published on Canadian travel writing and the poetry of travel in Canadian Literature, and has articles in Studies in Browning and his Circle, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, Women’s Writing, and other journals.

Adam Beardsworth is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Fine Arts, and Music at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. His research examines how a wide range of poets, when addressing traumatic events and paradigms such as the American Civil War, the Great War, the Holocaust, nuclear threat, Cold War repression, terrorism, and most recently the crisis of global ecological catastrophe, have used images of torture, mutilation, and the biological body in pain as means of defining a vestige of subjectivity against ideologically motivated socializations of sentience. He has published on American and Canadian poetry in journals such as Canadian Review of American Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Newfoundland and Labrador Studies. His proposed project is a print and digitally based critical edition of Bliss Carman’s Sappho that focuses on divergent receptions of Carman’s work in Canadian and American modernist milieus.

Professor Neil Besner has taught Canadian literature at the University of Winnipeg since 1987, became Dean of Humanities in 2002, Dean of Arts in 2005, and Associate Vice-President, International in 2006. He writes mainly on Canadian literature, with books on Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro; his most recent books are a translation into English of a Brazilian biography of the poet Elizabeth Bishop (2002), an edited collection of essays on Carol Shields (2003), and a co-edited collection of essays on Canadian and Brazilian postcolonial theory (2003). Currently he is General Editor of a new poetry series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press, which has published volumes of selected poems by Lorna Crozier, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Christopher Dewdney, Don McKay, Di Brandt, Tim Lilburn, Dennis Cooley, and Don Domanski, and has several others in press or in preparation (Eli Mandel, F.R. Scott, and others).

Gregory Betts is an Assistant Professor at Brock University. His doctoral thesis (York University, 2005) and articles in scholarly journals consider the radical (and mystical) poetics of Bertram Brooker, Canada’s first abstract painter, and winner of the first Governor-General’s Award for Literature. He is the editor of After Exile: A Raymond Knister Poetry Reader (2004), In the Ward: The Urban Poetry and Painting of Lawren Harris (2007), and The Wrong World: Selected Stories and Essays of Bertram Brooker (2009). Professor Betts is currently working on a critical edition of Sol Allen’s 1928 novel They Have Bodies for the Canadian Literature Collection at the University of Ottawa Press.

Susan Brown is Director of the Orlando Project, a visiting associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and associate professor in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She is a Victorianist whose research centers on the application of digital technology to the pursuit of literary history, and spans aspects of text encoding, text mining, interface design, and usability. Recent work has begun to investigate the exploration and visualization of social networks as embedded in semantic encoding. Recent publications include the textbase Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (Cambridge, 2006; orlando.cambridge.org), produced collaboratively with many others including Stan Ruecker, and co-edited with Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy; meditations on when a digital project can be considered “done” for the Digital Humanities Quarterly; and a discussion of Orlando as a project in feminist knowledge representation for Women’s Studies International Forum. Current work includes a collaborative SSHRC Image, Sound, Text Technology grant on experimental interfaces and a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant for the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory.

Jason Camlot is Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science and Associate Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University with a specialization in Victorian literature and has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in nineteenth-century British literature, literature and media, and contemporary Canadian poetry. His critical works include Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Ashgate 2008) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007; co-edited with Todd Swift). His essays and articles have appeared in such journals as Postmodern Culture, Book History, Victorian Studies, Canadian Poetry and English Literary History. He is also the author of four collections of poetry—The Animal Library (2000), Attention All Typewriters (2005) and The Debaucher (2008) and What The World Said (2013). He serves as the poetry editor of the Punchy Writers Series, an imprint of DC Books. Dr. Camlot’s present book project, “Phonopoetics: Approaching Historical Literary Recordings,” tracks the impact of sound recording technology upon the literary imagination, both in the sense of this technology’s symbolic significance for literary authors and readers, and of its implication in modes of literary production and consumption. He is currently PI on an interdisciplinary, SSHRC IG-funded team research project that explores the development of digital media tools to support research into documentary literary recordings.

Stephen Cain is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, York University, and is the co-author, with Tim Conley, of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (Greenwood Press, 2006). He was the editor of a special issue of Open Letter on “The Little Literary Serial in Canada (1980-2000)” and his academic articles have appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, Open Letter, and as chapters in the books Re: Reading the Postmodern, Sound as Sense, The Canadian Modernists Meet, Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada and State of the Arts: Living With Culture in Toronto.

Mary Chapman is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the editor of Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (U California P 1999) and Ormond (Broadview 1999). She has published essays on North American literature and culture in American Literary History, American Quarterly, Legacy, American Transcendental Quarterly and Wide Angle. She is currently editing an edition of the uncollected fiction, life-writing and journalism of Asian-Canadian author Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton.

Tanya Clement is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a PhD in English Literature and Language and an MFA in fiction. Her primary area of research is the role of scholarly information infrastructure as it impacts academic research libraries and digital collections, research tools and (re)sources in the context of future applications, humanities informatics, and humanities data curation. She has published pieces on digital humanities and digital literacies in several books and on digital scholarly editing, text mining and modernist literature in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She is a co-director of the Modernist Versions Project, the Associate Editor of the Versioning Machine (http://v-machine.org), and the editor of “In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” at http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/transition/.

Daniel Coleman teaches and carries out research in Canadian Literature, the literary and cultural production of categories of privilege such as whiteness, masculinity, and Britishness, and the literatures of immigration and diaspora. He has published Masculine Migrations (U Toronto P, 1998), The Scent of Eucalyptus (Goose Lane Editions, 2003), White Civility (U Toronto P, 2006) and In Bed With the Word (U Alberta P, 2009. He has co-edited ten scholarly volumes on various issues including early Canadian culture, Caribbean Canadian writing, masculinities, postcoloniality, race, the retooling of the humanities, and displacement for the University of Alberta Press, The Journal of West Indian Literature, Essays on Canadian Writing, Mattoid, Jouvert, Masculinities, and Textual Studies in Canada.

Associate Provost and Professor of English at McGill University, Nathalie Cooke has collaborated with McGill-Queen’s University Press on a number of editorial initiatives with MQUP. She served as Senior Co-editor for the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series from its launch in 1999 to 2002, was also acquisitions editor during 2006, and is currently Series Editor for the Arts Insights Series. Co-editor with Russell Brown and Donna Bennett of the 1990 Oxford Abridged Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, Professor Cooke has recently co-edited, with McGill history professor Susanne Morton, two reissued books with MQUP: Phyllis Brett Young’s 1960 novel, The Torontonians (2007), and her 1959 thriller, Psyche (2008). As well, Cooke is editor of What’s To Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History (MQUP 2009) and founding editor of the born digital journal CuiZine. With Fiona Lucas, she is currently preparing a reissue of The Female Emigrant’s Guide, Catharine Parr Traill’s classic 1855 housewife’s manual.

Kimberly Christen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies and the Director of Digital Projects at the Plateau Center for American Indian Studies at Washington State University. Her academic research focuses on the intersection of digital technologies, archival practices, cultural heritage movements and intellectual property rights within indigenous communities and the global commons. Dr. Christen is currently directing the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal, an online collaboratively curated site for Plateau cultural materials and Mukurtu CMS,  a free, open source digital archive and content management tool specifically designed to meet the needs of indigenous communities as they manage and share their digital cultural heritage. More of Dr. Christen’s work, including publications and projects, can be found at her website: www.kimchristen.com and you can follow her on twitter @Mukurtu.

Melba Cuddy-Keane is a member of the Department of English and the Collaborative Progamme in Book History and Print Culture. Her areas of specialization are modernism, narratology, globalism/internationalism, and book history/print culture. She also developed and taught for several years the course on pedagogy in the graduate Department of English. Professor Cuddy-Keane’s research falls into four main areas: Virginia Woolf (with a focus on communal models, readers and readership, and public sphere history), internationalism-globalism (communal and cognitive modelling in global terms), narratology (pluralism, embodiment and flexible cognitive processes), and modernist historicism (both theories of history and the study of cultural keywords).

Richard Cunningham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and director of the HHC at Acadia. The HHC marshals existing campus resources, creates a forum for exciting new kinds of collaborative research, teaching, and learning, and reinforces and extends Acadia’s presence throughout cyberspace. HHC is built upon the foundation of the Acadia Humanities HyperMedia Archive, or AhHa! AhHa! is a database of digital objects and projects created by Acadia faculty and students. It gives students access to each other’s work and provides them with opportunities to contribute—and to know they are contributing—to the creation of a substantial digital archive of scholarly work. AhHa! also allows faculty members to share teaching and research material in a more efficient manner than has been available previously. The pedagogical and research model of the HHC provides a working example of the methods employed in the training of students and scholars involved in the EMiC project. Professor Cunningham works with Zailig Pollock and Ray Siemens to coordinate the EMiC summer institute in digital editing (DEMiC).

Michael John DiSanto is Assistant Professor of English at Algoma University and teaches literature and thought of the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism (2009), published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He is the editor of Criticism of Thomas Carlyle (2006) and the co-editor, with Brian Crick, of Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold (2004) and D.H. Lawrence: Selected Criticism (2009), all published by Edgeways Books. He is also the co-editor of the online, peer-reviewed journal The New Compass: A Critical Review (2003-4). His periodical writing includes contributions to The Dalhousie Review, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Cambridge Quarterly. He is currently working on the life and writings of George Whalley, the eminent and accomplished Canadian man of letters.

Kit Dobson is an Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University. His book Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization was published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2009. He has published articles — or has forthcoming work — in the journals Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, Open Letter, English Studies in Canada, and Callaloo, as well as several forthcoming books. He is currently working on questions of cultural diversity in Canadian writing as they connect to issues of cultural production in the literary marketplace, and maintains an interest in intersecting theories of the transnational with notions of the modern in Canada.

Scott Duchesne is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. His primary research interests are the Theosophical movement and the Little Theatre movement in English Canada from 1891 to 1939, and the work of theatre director and theorist Roy Mitchell. He is currently editing a critical edition of Mitchell’s Creative Theatre (1929) for the Electronic Text Centre at the University of New Brunswick, and a collection of English Canadian plays from the interwar period for the University of Ottawa Press. He is also writing a history of the Great Canadian Theatre Company for McGill-Queens University Press.

Marta Dvorak is Professor of Canadian and Commonwealth literatures at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. She is the author of Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment (2001) and editor of Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions by Ernest Buckler (2004). Professor Dvorak has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004) and The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2008). She has edited numerous books on Canadian literature and culture, including Carol Shields and the Extra-ordinary, co-edited with Manina Jones, and Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, co-edited with W.H. New (2007). Professor Dvorak is currently working on a project with Professor Diana Brydon entitled Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (2011). She has a contract with Tecumseh Press to produce a critical edition of Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952) for its Canadian Critical Editions series. In addition, Wilfrid Laurier University Press is interested in publishing a series of critical editions (at intervals between 2012 and 2016) of other works by Buckler which have been out of print for decades: (1) a novel, The Cruelest Month (1963); (2) Ox Bells and Fireflies: A Memoir (1974); and a collection of satirical essays, Whirligig (1977). In 2012 she will co-organize (with Dean Irvine and Kit Dobson) the second EMiC conference and co-edit a volume of essays by conference participants.

Jonathan Eburne teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and English at the Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book is Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Cornell University Press, 2008). With Emily Sharpe, he is working on an edition of Hugh Garner’s short stories.

Janice Fiamengo is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. She has published widely on early Canadian women writers, most recently on Sara Jeannette Duncan and L.M. Montgomery. She has published a chapter on regionalism and urbanism in The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004) and a chapter on journalists, novelists, suffragettes, and performers in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2008). She is the editor of Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (2007) and author of The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008). She is the Director of the Anthology Collection at the University of Ottawa Press.

Alan Filewod is Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. He is the author of Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (2002); with David Watt, Workers’ Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970 (2001); and Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (1987). Professor Filewod is the former editor of Canadian Theatre Review, former president of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, and former president of the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures. For the EMiC project he will prepare a critical edition of the collaboratively written agitprop play, Eight Men Speak (1934), for publication in the Canadian Literature Collection.

Marc Andre Fortin is an Assistant Professor of Canadian Literature at the Universite de Sherbrooke. Marc originally joined EMiC as a Doctoral Fellow. My research for a critical edition of Marius Barbeau’s The Downfall of Temlaham has led to a larger interest in indigenous modernity, archival studies, and the close link between ethnography and modernism.I plan to continue to work towards the publication of a critical edition of Barbeau’s novel, while furthering my work in the area of ethnographic modernism and indigenous archives in Canada.

Sherrill Grace teaches Canadian Literature at UBC. She has published widely in the field, and extensively on Malcolm Lowry.

Carole Gerson is University Professor and a member of the English Department at Simon Fraser University. She has published extensively on Canadian literary history and was a co-editor of the multi-volume project, History of the Book in Canada, issued in both French and English. With Gwendolyn Davies, she co-edited Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War. Her ongoing research on early Canadian women writers has yielded two books on Pauline Johnson, the second a co-edited volume of Johnson’s Collected Poetry and Selected Prose, and many publications about other authors, including Susanna Moodie and L. M. Montgomery. Her most recent book, Canadian Women in Print, 1750-1918, issued by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2010, examines the work and context of Canadian women writers from a print culture perspective. She is currently directing the updating and expansion of her bio-bibliographical database of Canadian women writers (from the beginnings to the 1950s) in order to seed the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) at the University of Alberta, and she is co-authoring a history of Canadian women’s writing during the Modernist period, from 1918 to the 1950s.

Michael Groden is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is a genetic critic who did pioneering work on the manuscripts for James Joyce’s Ulysses and also works in various forms of textual studies in relation to Ulysses. He is the author of Ulysses in Progress (Princeton University Press, 1977), general editor of the 63-volume James Joyce Archive (Garland Publishing, 1977-79), compiler of James Joyce’s Manuscripts: An Index (Garland Publishing, 1980), and co-editor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; second edition, 2005) and Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). He served as an advisor to Hans Walter Gabler on his edition of Ulysses (1984) and as a consultant to the National Library of Ireland as it acquired newly discovered Ulysses manuscripts in 2001-02. On Bloomsday 2004 University College Dublin, Joyce’s university, awarded him an honorary doctorate, and in 2007 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His newest book is Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views (2010).

Kate Hennessy an Assistant Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. She is an anthropologist with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. As the director of the Making Culture Lab, Hennessy’s research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. Her video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies to address indigenous and settler histories of place and space. As assistant editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review, she designed its first multimedia volume (2003). Her work has been published in journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Museum Anthropology Review, and Visual Anthropology Review. Recent digital projects include ‘Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs’, produced in collaboration with the Doig River First Nation, and ‘Inuvialuit Living History’, produced in collaboration with the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre and the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center.

She is also producer and designer of the Inuvialuit Living History (http://inuvialuitlivinghsitory.ca). This project is being produced in collaboration with the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre and the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center. As a virtual exhibit, it recontextualizes institutional collections data from the National Museum of Natural History’s Inuvilauit Macfarlane Collection, re-presenting the objects from an Inuvialuit perspective. As a living archive, it reconnects tangible objects to intangible knowledge and practices, and explores issues related to ownership, repatriation, and digital cultural heritage.

Colin Hill is an Asssociate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and Director of the Canadian Studies program at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. He is the author of a book on the interplay of modernist and realist aesthetics in early twentieth-century Canadian fiction entitled Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (2011). He is editor and director of the Modernist Canadian Fiction Recovery Project (MCFRP) at the University of Toronto, which is preparing for publication several critical editions of lost and/or previously unpublished works of modern Canadian fiction. The first of these critical editions, Irene Baird’s 1939 novel Waste Heritage, was published in fall 2007 by the University of Ottawa Press as part of the Canadian Literature Collection. Other editions currently in progress as part of the MCFRP include Hugh MacLennan’s two unpublished novels of the 1930s, So All Their Praises and A Man Should Rejoice, and Raymond Knister’s unpublished and experimental modernist novel of the 1920s, Group Portrait.

Martin Holmes is a programmer and consultant at the University of Victoria’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre. He is also a director and founder of Half-Baked Software, Inc., and the author of several commercial and open-source software packages. He is working on a new version of the Image Markup Tool that can be used for the creation of image-based digital editions.

Paul Hjartarson is Professor of English and Film Studies and EMiC project leader at the University of Alberta. With Tracy Kulba, he edited The Politics of Cultural Mediation: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Felix Paul Greve (2003). He is a contributor to volumes two (2005) and three (2007) of the History of the Book in Canada/Historie du livre et de l’imprimé au Canada. With D.O. Spettigue, he edited Baroness Elsa (1992), the autobiography of Dada poet and artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. He is currently engaged in a SSHRC-funded study of the institution of English-Canadian literature during the Cold War, particularly of the conjuncture of nation-building and artistic modernism that placed modernist discourse at the centre of postwar state culture. He is the General Editor of the CrossCurrents series at the University of Alberta Press.

Anouk Lang is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, UK, where she teaches digital humanities, Anglophone modernisms, and twentieth-century literature. She is also an honorary research fellow in the School of English, Drama, and American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her edited collection From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century is coming out with the University of Massachusetts Press in 2012. Her EMiC project is a sourcebook of correspondence between writers and editors who were important to the development of modernist thought in Canada, which will be modelled on an Australian volume, As Good as a Yarn with You (1992, ed. Carole Ferrier).

Mark Leggott

Gerald Lynch is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. In 2001 the University of Toronto Press published his second book on Canadian literature, The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles, and in 2002 the compilation Leacock on Life. He is General Editor of the Canadian Critical Editions series at Tecumseh Press and Reappraisals: Canadian Writers series at the University of Ottawa Press.

Travis V. Mason teaches Canadian Studies and English in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After completing a PhD at The University of British Columbia, he undertook a Mellon and a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at Rhodes University, South Africa, and Dalhousie University, respectively. In addition to articles on Canadian and postcolonial writing, ecocriticism, and poetry, he has a book, Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay, forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He is at work on a public poetics book project with Erin Wunker and on research related to literary responses to science in Canada.

Mason is creating a digital edition of Carter’s unique book, in which the novelist and science writer makes a case for the positive role the modern science would play in twentieth century political, economic, and social spheres. Written in 1947 and unable to find a publisher, Science and Revolution was revised and published in 1966 and aimed at “the people” in whose hands science might enable social revolution, which Carter foresaw as a necessary movement to counter global capitalism. A digital edition of Carter’s little-known book will bring new light to bear both on how Canadian intellectuals respond to science and on the way shifting political and cultural ideas during the modern period shaped what C.P. Snow called the two cultures of art and science.

Robert G. May is an assistant professor (adjunct) in the Department of English at Queen’s University, Kingston. He is a Canadianist who has written on D.C. Scott, F.R. Scott, Gary Geddes, John Barton, and others. His 2009 edition of D.C. Scott’s In the Village of Viger is published by Tecumseh Press. He is currently co-editing, with Dean Irvine, a critical edition of the complete poems and translations of F.R. Scott for Canadian Poetry Press.

Linda Morra is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Bishop’s University. She specializes in twentieth-century women’s writing and archives. Her publications include Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (2006) and a collection of essays co-edited with Jessica Schagerl, titled Basements and Attics: Explorations in the Materiality and Ethics of Canadian Women’s Archives (2010). She is working on three other projects: a SSHRC- and FQRSC-funded project related to women and the publishing industry in Canada, the biography of Ira Dilworth, and a collected edition of Lawren Harris’s letters.

Donald Moses is the Collections and eResources Librarian at the Robertson Library, University of Prince Edward Island. His work at the library straddles the traditional and the digital and he manages many of the digitization projects at the Library. Much of that digitization work is transformed as it flows into Islandora – a digital asset management system that leverages Fedora Commons and Drupal.  He works with the Islandora team to test and extend the code they are developing to meet an evolving set of needs, including those of Digital Humanists.

Laura Moss is an associate professor at UBC, the associate editor of Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, and the former Director of the UBC International Canadian Studies Centre. She is the co-editor (with Cynthia Sugars) of the two-volume Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts, the editor of Is Canada Postcolonial: Unsettling Canadian Literature, and of a scholarly edition of Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, and author of articles on cultural memory, postcolonial reading strategies, Canadian multiculturalism policies, iconicity, and magic realism, among other topics.  Recently published in the Wilfrid Laurier University Press Poetry Series (fall 2011) is Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected, introduced, and edited by Laura Moss, with an afterword by George Elliot Clarke. She is currently in the early stages of creating an edition of previously unpublished work by Laura Goodman Salverson.

Miguel Mota, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, has published a number of editions of Canadian modernist texts, including (with P. Tiessen) The 1940 Under the Volcano (1994), (with P. Tiessen) The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry’s ‘Tender Is the Night’; (1992), Malcolm Lowry and Conrad Aiken Adapted: Three Radio Dramas and a Film Proposal (1992), (with P. Tiessen) “On Malcolm Lowry” and Other Writings by Gerald Noxon (1987), and (with P. Tiessen) Teresina Maria: A Novel by Gerald Noxon (1986). He is General Editor, with Paul Tiessen, of MLR Editions Canada. In addition to his editorial collaborations with Professors Tiessen and McCarthy, Professor Mota is working with Richard Lane on a multimedia book, Lowry and Space, and is directing a film, After Lowry.

James Neufeld retired from the Department of English at Trent University in 2010, after a thirty-eight year career that included various administrative positions as well as teaching. He is the author of Power to Rise: the Story of the National Ballet of Canada (1996), Lois Marshall: a Biography (2010), and Passion to Dance: the National Ballet of Canada (2011 – a revised and expanded edition of Power to Rise). He has published articles about such subjects as Robertson Davies, film, theatre, and dance, in journals including the Journal of Canadian Studies, Queen’s Quarterly, and Religion and the Arts.

Project Description:

The Robertson Davies Diaries Electronic Edition

Editor in Chief: James Neufeld

Project Consultant: Zailig Pollock

Partners: Pendragon Ink (the Davies Estate), Trent University, Library and Archives Canada

This project will digitize and present online a critical edition of the complete diaries of Robertson Davies. Davies kept voluminous diaries from 1933 until just before his death in 1995, amounting to an estimated 3 million words in all. One of the major Canadian novelists and men of letters of the twentieth century with an international readership and reputation, Davies was also a professional newspaper editor, actor, playwright, teacher, and the founding Master of Massey College, the graduate college within the University of Toronto. His personal and professional network included the cultural worlds of both Canada and Britain. As Davies himself wrote: “my diaries are the stuff of which social history is made, and I cannot imagine that Canada has an embarrassment of such material.” This body of material may also be one of the last significant, continuous sets of diaries in Canadian letters, given the changes in literary habits and literary production that have occurred in the twenty-first century. As such, it constitutes an important document in the genre of life-writing as well.

Davies organized his diaries into four separate categories: Personal, Massey College, Travel, Theatre (including opera and ballet). Because of their length and complexity of organization, these materials are far better suited to online presentation than to conventional print publication. The longterm goal of the project is to present an image of every page in the diaries, accompanied by fully searchable transcripts with notes and links to other textual, graphic, and sound materials in the Davies collection of Library and Archives Canada. By the terms of the Davies bequest, the Robertson Davies Diaries in Library and Archives Canada are closed to access until the year 2015. Online publication of these materials will proceed as authorized by Davies’ literary executor.

The scope of this project is large and complex. As it develops, the editor in chief will seek to recruit other scholars with an interest in Davies and his cultural world in order to build a team capable of accomplishing the project’s goals.