Editing Modernism in Canada

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.

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.

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.

Alana is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous self-representation, especially in relation to changing ecologies, and on the notion of strategic self-exoticization, primarily by indigenes but also by other racialized groups in Canada. Other interests include considering life writing as performative utterance, and contemporary Canadian expressions of self-elegy as evidence of the impossible mourning.

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.

Marc André Fortin is currently 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emily Robins Sharpe is a doctoral candidate in the English department at the Pennsylvania State University. Her scholarly interests include Canadian and international modernisms, proleterian literature, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Her dissertation—”A Better Earth: Spanish Civil War Literature and the Emergence of Multicultural Nationalism”—under the direction of Dr. Janet Lyon, examines Canadian representations of the Spanish conflict in an international context in order to chart intersections between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. With Dr. Jonathan P. Eburne, she is currently at work on a scholarly edition of Hugh Garner’s short stories. She is co-director, with Dr. Bart Vautour, of a four-phase project devoted to the recovery and presentation of Canadian writing about the Spanish Civil War.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.