Our research clusters – Department of English & Cultural Studies | Faculty of Humanities

Our department’s welcoming intellectual community includes faculty and students whose research spans diverse theories, methodologies, and models.

We are known for combining long-standing commitments to traditional areas of literary study with approaches that challenge disciplinary isolation, geographic division, and historical periodization.

We share our research and creative work widely: in peer-reviewed books and journals, and through talks, presentations, readings, performances, and workshops on campus and at local, national, and international conferences. We are particularly well known for our departmental commitments to collaborative community engagement and the Public Humanities.

Our community is large enough to support graduate research across a range of specializations. Areas of particular strength include early literatures; critical race studies; critical pedagogy studies; environmental humanities; gender, feminist and sexuality studies; Indigenous literatures and cultures; decolonial studies; and global Anglophone literatures and cultures.

Please note: additional supervisors may be available. Contact the program: englgrsc@mcmaster.ca for more information.

Research clusters and supervisory areas

Please note: additional supervisors may be available. Contact the program for more information.

British Literatures and Cultures (Medieval through 21st Century)

Faculty members:

Sarah Brophy View Profile

Iris Bruce View Profile

David Clark View Profile

Ronald Cummings View Profile

Melinda Gough View Profile

Grace Kehler View Profile

Peter Walmsley View Profile

Eugenia Zuroski View Profile

Canadian and American Literatures and Cultures

Faculty members:

Ronald Cummings View Profile

Ki’en Debicki View Profile

Jeffery Donaldson View Profile

Grace Kehler View Profile

Richard Monture View Profile

Susie O’Brien View Profile

Lorraine York View Profile

Creative Writing

Creative writers in our department publish actively in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, among other genres. Through our Centre for Community Engaged Narrative Arts, faculty and students connect with a number of groups, initiatives, organizations, and projects in and around Hamilton, Ontario that are doing community-engaged narrative work. We also enjoy lively connections with creative writers both in the local Hamilton area and nationally, through our longstanding the Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer in Residence program. This residency brings well-published Canadian authors to both the Hamilton Public Library and the McMaster campus. Writers in Residence work closely with individual writers, providing feedback on submissions in one-on-one meetings and helping with creativity and revision. Graduate students working in creative writing also often work as TAs in courses offered through our department’s Concurrent Certificate in Creative Writing and Narrative Arts.

Faculty members:

Ki’en Debicki View Profile

Jeffery Donaldson View Profile

Catherine Grisé View Profile

Eugenia Zuroski View Profile