Editing Modernism in Canada

Gaeby Abrahams is an MA student in the Literatures of Modernity program at Ryerson University. She is the recipient of a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Master’s Scholarship. She is currently working as a research assistant on the Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Collection of Editions, edited by Melissa Dalgleish, and on an edition of Dorothy Livesay’s Right Hand, Left Hand, edited by Bart Vautour and Dean Irvine.

Nadine Adelaar completed her MA in English at the University of Alberta. She is currently working as a research assistant for the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project and as an encoder for the Editing Margaret Laurence’s Essays project, led by Dr. Nora Stovel.

Katrina Anderson completed her BA at UBC-Okanagan in Kelowna, BC. She is a first year MA student in the Print Culture program at Simon Fraser University.

Katrina is currently working on a digital collection of the short stories of Katherine Hale.

Mathieu Aubin received his BA (Honours) in English Language and Literature from Brock University. He is currently at Brock working towards an MA in English (Text/Community/Discourse). Mathieu’s interests focus on Canadian Modernism as well as Vancouver Avant-Garde poetry from the mid twentieth century. He is also interested in examining the ethical employment of textual translations in postcolonial literature. Outside Brock, Mathieu co-curates the Grey Borders Reading Series in St. Catharines, Ontario.

This project will develop a new digital critical edition of Knister’s White Narcissus to reveal its connection to recent discussions on late-modernism. The apparatus will examine the text’s link to the Canadian late-modernist movement’s concerns (i.e. the limitations of the modernist project; masculinist values in modernist writing) and its response to high-modernism. As Colin HIll argues, Knister’s realism functions beyond surface realism, and highlights human psychology, which leads him to acknowledge, and transcend the limitations of the traditional realist form. In this sense, the critical edition will build on Hill’s work to create an apparatus that examines the text’s characters’ psychology, and their negotiation with the oppressive nature of urbanization in Southern Ontario in the early twentieth century.

Emily Ballantyne is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. She is the recipient of a SSHRC Masters and Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship. As an MA student at Trent University, she worked as a Research Assistant for Zailig Pollock, editor of Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems of P.K. Page, conducting archival research and transcribing manuscript poetry for the genetic edition that will appear online in The Digital Page. In 2009, she received an EMiC graduate stipend to complete a genetic, parallel-text edition of Page’s Brazilian poetry (1957-59). Her MA thesis project socializes the Brazilian poetry with Page’s travel writing in Brazil and her retrospective Brazilian Journal published in 1987. Emily’s research interests also include eco-criticism, writing processes, travel writing, editorial theory, dystopia and human rights. She is currently working as a research assistant with Matt Huculak on the EMiC digital commons and co-op and will be editing the non-fiction volume in the Collected Works of P.K. Page.

Mina was born in Iran and has been living in Canada since 1998. She studied Literature at University of Toronto, and is currently working on an English M.A. at Trent. She is an avid cook and food blogger.

Rebecca Blakey is a MA student at the University of Alberta. She is a research assistant for the Editing Sheila and Wilfred Watson project with EMiC at the University of Alberta. Her master’s research focuses on domestic feminism in Carol Shields’ novels. Rebecca is also drawn to research involving writing pedagogy, digital archives, and contraceptive sovereignty.

Myra Bloom recently completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature. Her dissertation focuses on confessional discourse in late twentieth century Canadian and Quebecois writing, with particular emphasis on the work of Elizabeth Smart and bpNichol. She is currently working on a consideration of Smart’s late modernist aesthetic, as well as a study of Sheila Watson’s use of religious rhetoric; she will present a version of this latter project at the EMiC-affiliated Avant Canada conference in November 2014.

Matt Bouchard is currently PhD student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto studying video games from a variety of perspectives. Professionally, Matt is an implementation and technology consultant for research groups, businesses, and even a few government departments. Academically, Matt is working on video game design, experimental interface design, visualization, and implementation advocacy. Matt is also interested in video game and implementation pedagogy, and he has won teaching awards for a graduate class on web technologies and as part of a team who created a video game design course.

José “Tufy” Cairus is a PhD candidate in the History Department at York University. He comes to York from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he has written a Master’s thesis dealing with the Muslim diaspora in the Atlantic and more specifically in Brazil during the nineteenth century. His doctoral dissertation is a comprehensive endeavor that analyzes how a particular segment of Brazil’s white elite reinvented a Japanese martial art known as jiu-jitsu in its own image, in concurrence with the reinvention of African cultures to form a national identity. He also examines how the contemporary transnational and diasporic inroads taken by this martial art embedded in hyper-masculine rituals respond to a global demand for violent blood sports. He is a research assistant working with Suzanne Bailey on the Brazilian Journals volume in the Collected Works of P.K. Page.

Daniel Carter is a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and has an MA in English from The Ohio State State University. His work for EMiC and the Modernist Versions Project involves thinking about text encoding, versioning and interface design.

Melissa is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in English at York University. She is the current recipient of an EMiC PhD stipend for her Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Collection of Editions. She has worked as a research assistant on two EMiC-supported scholarly editons, Miriam Waddington’s Collected Poems and Translations (edited by Ruth Panofsky) and Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (edited by Marta Dvorak). Her OGS-funded dissertation traces the emergence of a Canadian mythopoeic modernist poetic, one that finds its critical expression in the work of Northrop Frye, while situating it within its larger Canadian and modernist literary contexts. Her other areas of interest are Canadian ”pataphysics, ecopoetics/ecofeminism, and digital humanities. She is one of the founding editors of Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, a digital journal that can be found at yorku.ca/pivot.

The digital Wilkinson is a social-text/genetic image-based edition of the two editions of poetry Wilkinson published in the 1950s, as well as the three edited editions published posthumously by A.J.M. Smith, Joan Coldwell, and Dean Irvine. The Waddington scholarly edition (with digital apparatus) will appear in the Canadian Literature Series, and the Buckler scholarly edition will be published by Tecumseh/Borealis.

Robert Dawson is completing his MA in Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He graduated from Bishop’s University with Honours degrees in Drama and History and has performed theatre at the Winnipeg and Edmonton fringe theatre festivals. His interests include Canadian theatre history, historiography, and the similarities between museums and theatre. Having worked at museums in Ottawa and Edmonton, his MA project will be the first scholarly analysis of Theatre Museum Canada. For EMiC, Robert works as a research assistant on Alan Filewod’s critical edition of Eight Men Speak.

After and extensive career in the professional theatre in Canada and the U.K., Ron completed his MA at the University of Toronto, Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, and is entering his third year at the University of Guelph, PhD program in Theatre Studies. Presently he is working on an interdisciplinary project in Cognitive Neuroscience and Creative Practice.

Emily Essert is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of English at McGill University, where she holds a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship. Her dissertation, titled A Modernist Menagerie, will investigate representations of animals in modern poetry, focusing on the work of American poets T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and H.D., and Canadian poets Irving Layton and P.K. Page.

Christopher Doody is an English PhD student at Carleton University. He was a co-editor on the print edition of P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal published by Porcupine’s Quill. His dissertation work focuses on the early years of the Canadian Authors Association in Canada, and the impact that it had on Canadian Literature.

His project is to start creating a digital edition of P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal as part of a larger Digital Page Project. It will be a database, containing a reading version of the text, alongside all its variant versions—there are nine manuscript versions, and three variant print versions of the text. For each variant version, the database will contain both a high-quality image and a transcription of each page. This will allow users to quickly compare changes between the different versions of the text. It will also allow users to follow Page’s creative process as the text was transformed from a personal written diary in Brazil in the late 1950s to a published public text in the late 1980s.

While at Trent University, Chris was a research assistant (MA) for The Collected Works of P. K. Page.

Leah is in the second year of her MA in English Literature at the University of Victoria after completing her first with SSHRC funding. Prior to that, she finished her BA (Hons. English) and BSc (Hons. Biology) at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.

Leah’s EMiC project involves digitizing archival secondary sources that address Wyndham Lewis’s first published novel, Tarr, from UVic’s C.J. Fox Collection and creating a Tarr resources website. The project intends to increase the accessibility of Lewis-related texts for those interested in unraveling his role in Modernism.

Alicia Fahey is currently completing her MA at Trent University in the English Literature Public Texts program. Alicia received an EMiC stipend to complete her thesis project; she is working on a critical edition of Sheila Watson’s novel The Double Hook. Her research interests include Canadian literature and poetry, visual culture, feminist theory, and ecocriticism.

Kristin Fast is a first year PhD student at the University of Alberta. She works on the Editing Sheila Watson Project and the Editing Wilfred Watson Project based at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral research focuses on Sheila Watson’s short stories, particularly “Brother Oedipus,” “The Black Farm,” and “Antigone.” Kristin is also interested in investigating digital delivery of print materials and ways in which digital tools and environments can help facilitate editorial work.

Nadine is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at The University of Western Ontario, and works under the supervision of Drs. Manina Jones and D.M.R. Bentley. Her dissertation, Transnational Conversations: The New Yorker and Canadian Short Story Writers, explores the publication histories of stories by Morley Callaghan, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro in order to delineate the nature of Canadian short story writers’ relationships with their American editors at The New Yorker, and to theorize how conceptions of nation and national identity have informed the development and reception of Canadian writers’ contributions to the magazine.

Alana is a doctoral candidate in the department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University (Kingston, ON). Her dissertation examines the role of re-mediation in legitimating the discounted perceptions of environmental risk held by a small Indigenous community in Canada’s North. For the last two years Alana has received EMiC support to work with Michael DiSanto on building a database for, and creating a digital edition of, the writings of George Whalley.

Natalie is working her way through the annotations of P.K. Page’s unpublished Mexican Journal and her M.A. thesis on adaptations of Jane Eyre. Her current interests include the subjects of perception and influence (and the anxiety that accompanies them), especially for women as writers and readers. These interests have led to the analysis of women writers whose fictional works share common themes, and the consumerism and commodification of this common ground.

James is a research assistant to Dr. James Neufeld on “the digital edition of the diaries of Robertson Davies — the Davies Diaries. Davies, a prominent Canadian novelist and man of letters, was a prolific writer. Dating from 1935 to 1995, the entries — which Davies divided into categories such as Personal Diaries, Theatre Diaries, Travel Diaries, Massey College Diaries, and day books — contain approximately three million words.”

Marc André Fortin is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. His work deals with the connections and epistemological ruptures between literature and science, and how divisions between these two discourses have produced textual investigations into their interconnectedness through postmodern ideas of difference. Marc is currently working on a dissertation that focuses on the representations of scientific discourse, literary theory, evolution, and knowledge in Canadian literature, titled “Science Imagined | Literature Realized: Truth and Fiction in Canada.” Marc is also preparing a scholarly edition of Marius Barbeau’s anthropologically-focused modernist novel, The Downfall of Temlaham (1928), when he is not biking around the Netherlands.

My dissertation, “1934: Generic Hybridity and the Search for a Democratic Aesthetic,” focuses on Woolf, Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. My article on Lewis and Canada appeared in The Walrus in October, 2011. My article on Bakhtin and Auerbach is forthcoming in Style, and I have a chapter in the forthcoming Rereading the New Criticism (Ohio State UP).

I am currently exploring the connections between Wyndham Lewis and the development of Canadian multiculturalism, particularly through the influence of America and Cosmic Man (1948) on McLuhan and Frye. I am also planning a critical edition of America and Cosmic Man.

Lee Hannigan recently completed a combined BA in English and Creative Writing at UBC (Okanagan). He is currently working on an MA at Concordia University, where his research focuses on poetry’s sound recordings and their archival inscriptions.

Lee is a research assistant for SpokenWeb, an online poetry archive that uses digitized live recordings of a Montreal poetry reading series from 1966-1974 to investigate scholarly engagement with recorded poetry recitation and performance.

Amanda is a Master’s student at the University of Victoria. Her areas of interest include early twentieth-century African American literature and the digital humanities. Amanda provides web design and social media support for the Modernist Versions Project and is an EMiC Research Assistant.

Andrea is a second-year PhD student at the University of Alberta, where she holds a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her research is grounded in the area of print history, with a focus on the intersections between print, politics, and propaganda. Her dissertation work will examine labour and leftist pamphlets circulating in Western Canada during the 1930s and 1940s. This project seeks to open a dialogue between literary modernism and pamphleteering print culture to better understand their shared linguistic tactics and common readership. As part of EMiC, Andrea is currently editing a collection of Canadian manifestos that will set political declarations alongside their literary counterparts.

Catherine Jenkins is a second-year PhD student in the joint graduate program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson-York Universities. For the EMiC project, she is assisting Professor Ruth Panofsky in compiling a critical edition of the poetry of Miriam Waddington. Jenkins has published two books: blood love & boomerangs (poetry) and Swimming in the Ocean (fiction) and is currently writing a work of non-fiction, The Wisdom of Aging Gracefully. Her work has also appeared in numerous Canadian, British, and American literary journals. Additionally, she has edited over fifty books and other commercial publications and is a former member of the Editors’ Association of Canada. Fostered by her experience teaching communication skills to healthcare students and professionals at the University of Toronto, her scholarly research explores the impact of healthcare technologies on patient-practitioner communication. Jenkins holds an MA in Theory, Culture and Politics, as well as an Honours BA in Cultural Studies and Philosophy from Trent University.

Thomas Jenkins has completed his MA in the Public Texts program at Trent University. His thesis project studied the relationship between community, religion, and musical texts in creating dynamic “publics”. Specifically, Thomas’ research was based in post-colonial Jamaica and focused on the Rastafari movement and it’s interaction with indigenous musical styles from Nyahbinghi to Dub. Thomas is currently working as a research assistant for Margaret Steffler, who is editing the Mexican Journals volume in the Collected Works of P.K. Page. This work has informed his personal interests, which include editorial theory, life-writing, travel writing, and gender politics

Thomas has been accepted in a post-degree program in museum and curatorial studies at Sir Sanford Fleming in Peterborough, Ontario, and will be attending in the fall of 2012.

Graham Jensen is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Dalhousie University, where he will continue to study Canadian modernist poetry. He currently holds a SSHRC Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship. At Dalhousie, he will be working with EMiC on a digital edition of Louis Dudek’s Continuation that brings its various fragments together in a single text.

Andrea graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English (honours) and with a minor in History. She is now a first year Masters student at the University of Alberta studying Library and Information Studies and Humanities Computing. She is very interested in ghost stories, mobile apps, psychoegeography, visual poetry, and physical computing. Her favourite holiday is Halloween

She is a Research Assistant with the Wilfred Watson project. Their research team is experimenting with a wide variety of “big data” techniques as they continue a SSHRC funded project to digitize the archives of Wilfred and Sheila Watson, two 20th-century Canadian writers. Andrea has been working on the digitization process that uses a topic modeling visualization interface to allow scholars to browse archival contents more intuitively. Specifically she has scanned over-sized documents in the archive, transcribing letters, compiling essays for a book, and editing an online timeline of events.

I am Uyghur – one of China’s larger ethnic minorities – and I live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the remote northwestern part of China. I have long been fascinated by the amazing cultures of Xinjiang’s various ethnic groups, especially their oral literature and history. With my Bachelor of Education Technology and Masters of Folklore, I have been working in Xinjiang University’s Center for Anthropology and Folklore, and I have undertaken collecting anthropological and ethnographical data and relevant fieldwork throughout the region. I have been particularly interested in learning how to use digital technology to archive and make this knowledge available not only to scholars and the general public, but also to the indigenous people themselves so that generations to come can be enriched by this heritage. My field work responsibilities have included filming various rituals and collecting oral literature and endangered cultural materials via multimedia technology. In the office I have categorized and archived these texts and edited films as well as making databases of these cultural heritages. My ethnographic films have won awards in film festivals in China. I have recently been admitted to the Doctor of Philosophy program in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Canada for the 2012 Fall term, under the supervision of Dr. Kate Hennessy in the Making Culture Lab.

In the first two years I will work with Dr. Kate Hennessy on the “Inuvialuit Living History” Project in Canada contributing to the study of Indigenous archives, oral traditions, protocols and ownership. Dr. Hennessy has extensive experience in working with First Nations in the fields of digital archiving, visual documentation and revitalization, ethnographic representation, and repatriation. I will be modelling her methodological approach and working with one of the Inuvialuit communities to document oral traditions and practices related to the MacFarlane Collection. I will also dedicate myself to literature review in the digital humanities, museum studies, and area ethnography in anticipation of my field work and writing on the oral literature of Uyghur people in China.

E. M. Kondusky is a second-year doctoral student at the University of New Brunswick. His dissertation focuses upon the construction and mediation of literary celebrity within the context of social media and digital environments. A TEMiC alumnus, he also worked as a research assistant and developer on The Selected Fred Cogswell: Critical and Creative under Tony Tremblay at St Thomas University.

Shannon Maguire recently defended a thesis of innovative poetry to earn her MFA in Creative Writing through the University of Guelph. This fall she will be pursuing an MA in English (Text/ Community / Discourse) at Brock University. Her research interests are in modernist and contemporary women’s poetry, theories of translation, gender and sexuality, and digital literature. Her manuscript Fur(l) Parachute was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry (2011).

Joe is completing his course-based MA and studying Mandarin at the University of Alberta. He received his BA from the University of Toronto. Primarily interested in modernism and Canadian literature, he is currently investigating the impact of music on narrative style and form in works by Ondaatje and Forster. With the EMiC team at Alberta, he is developing a succinct chronology for Wilfred Watson.

Dancy finished her Honours B.A. degree in English Literature at McGill University in Montreal, writing her thesis on Marianne Moore. She is currently a graduate student at Dalhousie in Halifax, specializing in 20th Century Poetry and working on her thesis on Mina Loy and consumerism.

Brandon McFarlane is a University of Toronto PhD candidate. Canadian Literary Urbanism, his doctoral thesis, theorizes the philosophy the nation’s urban literature under the supervision of George Elliot Clarke, Colin Hill, and Ato Quayson. The Malahat Review and Canadian Literature have published his critical writing; he also manages the (highly casual) literary blog icanlit.ca. He has presented papers at Harvard, University of Toronto, York University, Mount Allison, and Carleton University; he is currently organizing a session, on literary urbanism, for the 2010 ACCUTE conference. His past contributions to EMIC include serving as an editorial assistant for Colin Hill’s edition of Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage and is currently co-editing Hugh MacLennan’s, previously unpublished, A Man Should Rejoice.

Hannah McGregor is a second-year PhD student at the University of Guelph and a doctoral fellow at TransCanada Institute. Her research focuses on contemporary Canadian literature, discourses of humanitarianism, and the ethics of reading and representation. As an EMiC doctoral fellow she is involved in a collaborative research project supervised by Dr. Paul Hjartarson (University of Alberta), investigating the collaborative authorship of Martha Ostenso and Douglas Durkin through a combination of archival research and computer-assisted stylistics analysis. Hannah completed her MA in English at the University of Alberta, where her major research paper focused on ethnography, diaspora and hybridity in Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly; this paper is now forthcoming as an article in ESC. Her work on Nelofer Pazira’s documentaries is also forthcoming as a chapter in Basements and Attics: Explorations in the Materiality and Ethics of Canadian Women’s Archives. Hannah holds the Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship.

Elena Merrill is in the second year of her MA degree in the Public Texts program at Trent University. She currently holds a Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC) and has accepted an Ontario Graduate Scholarship for the 2010-11 academic year. Her thesis project studies the private and public voices and identities of P.K. Page as conveyed in her Mexican Journals. Elena is working as a research assistant for Margaret Steffler, who is editing the Mexican Journals volume in the Collected Works of P.K. Page. This work has informed her thesis project and research interests, which include women’s life-writing, travel writing, gender politics and maternal theory.

Kaarina Mikalson completed her BA at Dalhousie University and will soon begin her MA at the University of Alberta. She is co-editor of a digital edition of Right Hand Left Hand, alongside Dean Irvine and Bart Vautour. She is also collecting and digitizing the poetry of F.R. Scott, and assisting Bart Vautour and Emily Robins Sharpe with their project, “Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment.”   She has previously worked as a research assistant on Travis Mason and Erin Wunker’s Caesura project, and assisted Matt Huculak in the digitization of Le Nigog, an avant-garde, French-Canadian periodical.

Michael Nardone is managing editor for Amodern and assistant editor for Jacket2. He is a doctoral student at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, where he writes on poetics, media and sound. With Jude Griebel, he is author of O.Cyrus & the Bardo. Recent writings have appeared in The Dark Would, Camera Austria, The Coming Envelope, Le Merle, and Gauss PDF. He lives in Montreal.

Phonotext.ca is a project initiated for the creation of a comprehensive open-access digital index of sound recordings related to modernist and postmodernist Canadian poets and poetry. The site will index recordings in all available formats, document any relevant bibliographic information, list where recordings are physically located, and provide links to access recordings that have been made digitally available.

Charlotte is in the first year of her MA at the University of Alberta. She completed her BA in Honours English at the University of British Columbia in 2010, and, in her honours thesis, she examined ship imagery and metalepsis in Malcolm Lowry’s Ultramarine, “Through the Panama,” and October Ferry to Gabriola. In 2009, she gave a paper on the layered diegetic structure of Lowry’s Under the Volcano at the Malcolm Lowry Centenary International Conference. Charlotte is primarily interested in media theory, modernist literature, and, in particular, modernist Canadian literature.

Kait holds a CGS doctoral fellowship at McGill University where she studies Canadian modernism. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario. Kait is currently working on a dissertation that considers the philosophical investments of Canadian modernist novelists.

I am a published poet, short story writer, and novelist. I recently returned to academics. It is a great pleasure and an intellectually fascinating project to work on the Robertson Davies fond. My Masters Degree is in Public Texts, with a special interest in biography and autobiography, notions of which are troubled by the Public Text frame: what is public? What is private? The Davies Diaries provide important information.

Part of the Davies fond at Trent University are Davies personal diaries. I am preparing these for digital publication, using TEI. At the same time, I am reading them as a scholar of Public Texts, a field of literary scholarship. Professor James Neufeld heads this project.

Julia is currently a doctoral student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University. She holds an MA in Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts (Brock) and a BFA in Visual Arts with a Concentration in English (University of Ottawa). Her research examines the intersections between Vancouver avant-garde movements and the multidisciplinary work of Douglas Coupland.

Lauralee Proudfoot completed her MA in English (Public Texts) at Trent and is now a doctoral candidate in the Canadian Studies program, also at Trent. A computer programmer in a previous life, she is particularly interested in the design and construction of the digital archives and apparatuses of the various EMiC projects. As a research assistant, she is working with Zailig Pollock on the digitization of the P.K. Page fonds held at Library and Archives Canada.

Michèle Rackham is currently a doctoral candidate in English at McGill University. She currently holds a Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC). Her dissertation investigates the biographical and interartistic relationships between Canada’s modernist poets and visual artists and the socio-historical and aesthetic intersections between their poetry and paintings. She is a founding editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, for which she served as reviews editor from 2008-2009. Since 2008, she has also been a docent at the National Gallery of Canada, where she regularly guides elementary school tours and where she has delivered public lectures on the Contemporary Arts Society and the work of such artists as Paul-Émile Borduas, Marian Scott, Alfred Pellan, and John Lyman.

Renaud Roussel is a doctoral candidate in English at McGill University. His recent work dealt with retellings of John Franklin’s lost expedition in contemporary Canadian literature. Renaud is in the early stages of his dissertation, which will focus on iconic figures of the North. He is also an associate editor for The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism and the French language editor for Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Culture. As well, he is currently working with Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas on a reissue of The Female Emigrant’s Guide, Catharine Parr Traill’s classic 1855 housewife’s manual.

Eric Schmaltz received his B.A. (Honours) in English Language and Literature from Brock University. In the fall, Eric will be back at Brock working towards an MA in English (Text/Community/Discourse). Eric’s interests focus on Canadian Modernism as well as Canadian Experimental and Avant-Garde poetry. Outside of the academy, Eric curates the Grey Borders Reading Series in St. Catharines, Ontario. His own creative work has appeared in numerous online and print journals.

Bronwyn Scott is a fifth year English student at Simon Fraser University who has been working with Sandra Djwa on Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page and the Letters volume in the Collected Works of P.K. Page. Her primary interests are Canadiana, modernist literature, and literary criticism and theory.

Katherine Shwetz completed her BA at the University of Saskatchewan and is completing her MA at Dalhousie University with the assistance of a SSHRC grant. Her thesis looks at the ways that HIV/AIDS is narrativized in Canadian Aboriginal literature, and her research interests focus on postcolonial studies, Canadian literature, and interdisciplinary work. She has presented at the Canadian Association of HIV Research and at the Canadian Association for Comparative Literature.

Valerie Silva is currently in her final year of the Master’s program at McGill University, where she studies contemporary Canadian literature. Her current research focuses on affect, objects, and the body in contemporary Canadian life writing.

Kristine Smitka is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation—“The Writer, the Reader, and the Paperback: Canadian Writers, Remediation, and the Mass Market”—analyzes Canadian publishing firm McClelland & Stewart’s move toward paperback publishing as the process gained prominence in the post-war nation-building period and the varying effects this had on three writers: Sheila Watson, Leonard Cohen, and Pierre Berton. In collaboration with the University of Alberta’s EMiC group, she is currently investigating Marshall McLuhan’s dialogue and collaboration with Sheila and Wilfred Watson.

Jacquelyn Sundberg is a Master’s student at McGill. She is working with supervisor Prof. Brian Trehearne on a contextual exploration of Dorothy Livesay’s early poetry.

Katie is a Research Assistant for Dr. Stephen Ross and is working on the pilot project for the Modernist Versions Project, which is marking-up and versioning two editions of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Melanie Unrau has a BA (Hons.) from the University of Winnipeg. She worked for several years as a copy editor before entering the master’s program in English with a focus in Cultural Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She holds a Manitoba Graduate Scholarship. Melanie is interested in women”s poetry, motherhood studies, and peace studies. A selection of her poetry appeared in Exposed, an anthology edited by Catherine Hunter in 2002.

Sarah is currently finishing dual Master of Library and Information Studies and Master of Arts – Humanities Computing degrees at the University of Alberta. Her thesis research examines the Information Behaviour and Information Retrieval needs of Classics scholars when accessing museum artefacts digitally. She has previously completed a Bachelor’s degree in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, and has worked on projects for the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) research group and the Kastro Kallithea Archaeological Project. Her research interests include Information Architecture, user-centric website design, and Museum Informatics.

The Wilfred Watson Archive is a project to digitize and describe the letters,journals and other documents of Wilfred Watson housed at the University of Alberta. Sarah is helping create the framework to input and store metadata for the material.

Nick is a PhD student in the English and Film Studies program at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on the collision of virtual spaces and literary forms.

Amanda Visconti is Webmaster at MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) and a Literature Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland; she also holds a master’s degree specializing in DH from the University of Michigan School of Information. While interested in modernist artists’ books and complex novels, Amanda’s main focus is designing interfaces and developing modules for CMSs as literary frameworks (e.g. Drupal, WP, and Omeka as both traditional online editions as well as less traditional literary “engagements”). She loves web and game design and works toward mashing up game studies, e-lit experiments, and critical web design/visual rhetoric with digital edition theory and creation.

I am interested in two areas of design and development coding for digital editions:

1. Developing modules to supplement some of Modernist Commons’ more traditional functions. I think about digital texts as spaces of literary play, participation, and discovery, and I’d like to develop tools that allow Modernist editions to do things such as juxtaposing pages from different works and recording comparisons of the different approaches in those pages, creating textual interventions within a text to prompt new readings (e.g. n + 7 transformations, comparison of the interpretive effect of different stylesheets on a single text), and intertwining games and pedagogy to get a wider audience invested in acting reading (e.g. the Choose Your Own Edition tool I discussed with Dean Irvine at DHSI). I’d be interested in hearing more about the supplemental modules the EMiC community would like to see; I’m hoping to create tools that balance the playfulness of Modernity (e.g. typographical and stylistic experimentations) with pushing editions to be more participatory, more thought-provoking, and better at reaching out to a wider audience of “amateurs” in the traditional sense of invested readers outside mainstream academia.

2. Assisting with interface and design possibilities for the final display of Modernist Commons digital editions. I’m interested in treating digital edition design as a critical activity, pulling in ideas from visual rhetoric, e-lit and artists’ book design, and game interfaces to visually replicate the virtual environment of a text.

Carl Watts is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University. His dissertation is on nation and ethnicity in Canadian literature, and his work with EMiC involves Laura Goodman Salverson. Outside of his academic work, Carl also publishes poetry.

In addition to works of autobiography and realist fiction, Laura Goodman Salverson published a little-known novel called The Dove (Ryerson Press, 1933), in which a group of Icelanders is kidnapped by corsairs and sold as slaves in Algiers. While much has been written of the arrangement of realism and romance that informs Canada’s modernist literature, The Dove is unique in that its peculiar historical romance registers a radical inversion of commonly expressed relationships between Europeans and non-Western peoples. It is for this reason that I am proposing a digital edition of the long-out-of-print novel. Based on the first edition as well as the novel’s typescript at Library and Archives Canada, this edition will also include an introduction and notes that draw from archival materials and critical work on Salverson’s corpus.

J. A. Weingarten is a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University where he is studying Canadian modernist writing after 1960. He is also the co-editor of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism.

Freeda Wilson is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC Okanagan where she is studying Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion from the perspectives of translation and digital humanities. She completed her MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC Okanagan and her BA in French, with Spanish and Computing Science minors, at Okanagan University College.

Description of project:
This project will produce a digital visualization of the evolution of a chapter of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion. Under the supervision of Dr. Karis Shearer, I will focus on the major editions between 1945 and 1977, as well as the two English translations (The Tin Flute), and identify the differences (additions, changes, omissions) which occur between each of the editions and the first edition, and then proceed to determine the source (author, editor, translator) and reason (language, text length, etc.) for each change. The resulting data will be organized and structured in a digitized, 3D format in which the data can be re-organized, allowing for further research. Roy scholars will be able to build on this work, expanding the research to cover an entire text, to include several or all of Roy’s texts and to incorporate this research in larger projects.

Katherine has just completed a combined honours in English and creative writing. In the upcoming academic year, she will be pursuing a Masters of Arts in English at Dalhousie and immersing herself in the world of bpNichol. She also works as a museum assistant and a journalist. Katherine is currently assisting Dean Irvine with the digitization of the Complete Works of F.R. Scott. Katherine has received an EMiC MA Stipend for her digital project “Editing Evolution: Assembling and Analyzing bpNichol in a Digital Edition”.

Kailin Wright is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s English Department. She holds a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and is currently writing her dissertation, entitled “I am what I am”: Re-Identifications of Race and Sexuality in Revisionist Canadian Drama, under the supervision of Mary Nyquist and committee members Colin Hill and Ric Knowles. Kailin also received an EMiC Doctoral Stipend to write a scholarly edition of Carroll Aikins’s play The God of Gods (1919). Kailin has delivered papers on her dissertation research at conferences, such as ACCUTE, CATR, CACLALS, and she will be presenting two papers at the MLA Convention in 2011. She worked as an editorial assistant on Colin Hill’s edition of Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage and Hugh MacLennan’s A Man Should Rejoice; she also worked as a research assistant on Alan Filewod’s forthcoming edition of Eight Men Speak, and as a bibliographer for Magdalene Redekop’s book on Mennonite literature. As Co-Chair of the Canadian Literature Group at the University of Toronto, Kailin co-organized an open conference “Reasserting the National? Questioning Origin(al)s in Canada” last year. She worked as an organizational assistant for EMiC’s Conference on Editorial Problems.

Reilly Yeo is completing her MA at the University of British Columbia, working with Professor Mary Chapman on a project on Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton. Reilly brings a diverse professional and academic background to EMiC, one that includes work with The Walrus magazine, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the SFU Centre for Dialogue, and an MA in comparative politics from McGill University. Her particular interests include social media, online collaboration and communication on the digital side; and authorship, citizenship and the relationship between the political and the literary on the theoretical side. While pursuing her MA she also works as the Managing Director of OpenMedia.ca, a not-for-profit that aims to revitalize and open the Canadian media system.