Witch, Please is a fortnightly podcast I make with Marcelle Kosman (U Alberta). A feminist rereading of the Harry Potter series, the podcast takes up Rowling’s novels, the film adaptations, and the larger world of fandom and media expansion. I have presented in a variety of venues on podcasting as public pedagogy and on the intersections between criticism and fandom. For more on my podcasting work, see media.
Digital Feminist Counter-Publics
Co-edited with Marcelle Kosman and Clare Mulcahy (U Alberta), this forthcoming special issue of open-access feminist journal Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice addresses the intersections of feminist politics and digital publics in the contemporary world. Featuring interviews with activists and public intellectuals as well as contributions from an interdisciplinary range of feminist scholars, the special issue promises to make a valuable contribution to urgent conversations about how we might work resistantly within and against digital media to create publics of our own.
Modern Magazines Project Canada
An extension of my SSHRC-funded postdoctoral research, Modern Magazines Project Canada bridges the areas of periodical studies, middlebrow studies, Canadian literature, and digital humanities. In partnership with the University of Alberta Libraries and the Manitoba Legislative Library, it has facilitated the digitization of The Western Home Monthly, a household magazine printed out of Winnipeg between 1899 and 1932, while also examining the early twentieth century middlebrow magazine as a print culture form that challenges familiar narratives of authorship, nationality, genre, literary quality, and medium. It has thus far produced two events and two journal special issues.
The Complicit Witness: Canadian Middlebrow Literature and Distant Suffering
My dissertation, “Complicit Witnessing: Distant Suffering in Contemporary White Canadian Women’s Writing,” engaged with a cross-genre archive of mainstream novels, poetry, and life-writing representing “foreign” sites of crisis. Selections from this work have been published in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, and University of Toronto Quarterly. I am currently revising my dissertation into a book manuscript; The Complicit Witness: Canadian Middlebrow Literature and Distant Suffering reconsiders the role that the institution of Canadian literature plays in our understanding of transnational ethics and our complicity in the suffering of distant others. Taking as its starting point the 2014 Canada Reads theme “One Novel to Change Our Nation,” it offers a model for the study of contemporary literature that is attentive to both its representational strategies and the diverse ways in which it is framed by middlebrow institutions, including Canada Reads and Goodreads.
