My major research interest is early modern poetry, specifically, the work of John Milton. However, because I’m fascinated by the relationship between God and humanity, as well as the human condition more generally, I’m also interested in the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne, and in modern playwrights, such as Samuel Beckett. My research explores how self-identity emerges and becomes fully realized only through relationships with others. I’m deeply interested in Nancy Selleck’s The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture (c2008), where she discusses “the sixteenth-century coinage in which ‘self’ is used in a transferred sense, to signify not oneself but one’s other self’ – a beloved or supremely … indispensable other” (5). I’m also interested in research related to teaching or pedagogy because I’m invested in improving the learning experience for undergraduate students.

Emily Goodwin (Van Haren) is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Cultural Studies. Her doctoral research explores the remediation of food-related labours, knowledges, and values in contemporary digital culture. She has many research interests across the fields of food cultural studies, digital media studies, auto/biography studies, and cultural theory–including a long-standing interest in ASMR culture and ambient media–and enjoys bringing these interests to the undergraduate classroom. Through her experiences as a research associate (2020-2021) and graduate resident (2019-2021) with the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, Emily has also developed resources for exploring the ethical and methodological considerations of social media-based research projects.

My research dwells in the possibilities of multi-species literatures. How do non-human creatures tell their stories, and how do they write their way into human texts? What does it mean to “read” the marks left by another species? My work is especially interested in place-markings of local silkworms and other web-spinning creatures.

My research focuses on 20th century texts written in the traditions of surrealism, modernism and magical realism, with a special focus on themes of desire and eroticism.

Johannah Bird is a PhD candidate in English at McMaster University, studying Indigenous literatures. Johannah has spent much of her life in the Prairies, growing up in Manitoba, and she currently resides in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a member of Peguis First Nation in Treaty 1 territory. Her SSHRC-funded research considers Indigenous writing of the prairies as relational practice that mediates and negotiates different relationships in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Her research interests include Indigenous literatures, archives, early Indigenous writing in English, life writing, and poetry.

I research the cultural, ecological, and aesthetic affordances of plastics and plasticity. My dissertation offers a conversation between the environmental humanities and crip and queer materialisms, pursuing what I call the polymerization of life. I ask what kinds of human and non human relations flourish and which do not when plasticity is the taken for granted of healthy body-minds.

Kaitlin works on the long and ongoing history of communal walking practices, and is allied with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in her firm belief that “theory isn’t just for academics…it’s for everyone.”