The 2023-2024 University of Waterloo Department of English Language and Literature Awards Ceremony was held on Friday, April 5, 2024. Congratulations to all our award winners!
Undergraduate
Albert Shaw Poetry Prize: I. S. Bashirah, Honourable mention: Nadia Khan Andrew James Dugan Prize in Literature: Andie Kaiser Andrew James Dugan Prize in Rhetoric and Professional Writing: Jillian Franz Award in American Literature and Culture: Jared Cubilla Canadian Literature Prize: Hanna Freitas Co-op Reflective Report Award: Vyshnavi Rajeevan Diaspora and Transnational Studies Prize: Naomi Francis Donald R. and Mary E. Snider Literary Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Writing: Anna-Maria Brokalakis Emerging Scholar Award: Alicia Sheppard English Society Creative Writing Award for Poetry: Kassandra Lynne Attwood English Society Creative Writing Award for Prose: Sara Funduk Janice Del Matto Memorial Award in Creative Writing: Sebrina Bank Joergensen Olive Carrick Scholarship in English: Nadia Khan Rhetoric and Digital Design Award: Aidan de Villa-Choi, Yingying Huang, Vade Lail, Emma van Weesenbeek Rhetoric and Professional Writing Award: Amaya Kodituwakku The G.R. Hibbard Shakespeare Prize: Patricia Fagan Walter R. Martin English 251 Award: Chloe Shantz
Graduate
Beltz Essay Prize, MA: Varsha Thulasi Pillai Beltz Essay Prize, PhD: Sarah Casey David Nimmo English Graduate Scholarship: Shannon Lodoen, Anna McWebb English Rhetoric Essay Award, MA: Sophie Morgan, Chinye Obiago English Rhetoric Essay Award, PhD: Carolyn Eckert, Honourable mentions: Sarah Casey, Omnia Elsakran Gladys Srivastava Graduate Scholarship: Kasturi Ghosh, Melissa N.P. Johnson, Alexi Orchard, Christopher Rogers Graduate Co-op Work Report Award: Ariel Fullerton Graduate Creative Writing Award: Maab Al-Rashdan Graduate Professional Communication Award: Alyssa Clarkson Independent Graduate Instructor Award for Excellence in Teaching: Chris Martin Jack Gray Graduate Fellowship: Fatima Zohra Lea Vogel-Nimmo English Graduate Professionalization Award: Kellie Chouinard, Kasturi Ghosh, Rency Luan, Humaira Shoaib, Fatima Zohra TA Award for Excellence in Teaching: Damilola Adebajo W. K. Thomas Graduate Scholarship: Jin Sol Kim, Dakota Pinheiro, Sabrina Sgandurra, Humaira Shoaib, Valerie Uher
Regular readers of the Globe and Mail may have noticed UWaterloo English’s Dr. Forrester’s recent contribution, “Patwa, Jamaica’s mother tongue, deserves to be an official language.” As Dr. Forrester writes:
In Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood, the melodic sounds of Patwa – Jamaica’s homegrown language that blends standard English with other European and West African languages’ words and grammar – are frequently heard. In a Jamaican restaurant, you might hear someone say, “Sell mi a spicy beef patty and coco bread, with a peanut punch please.” You might hear a song from popular Jamaican artist Koffee, who sings, “Koffee come in like a rapture, and everybody get capture.” In some Toronto neighbourhoods, Patwa is spoken not just amongst Caribbean immigrants, but by their descendants and community members who live alongside them.
So it might come as a surprise that Patwa, which has taken root in Toronto, London, New York and many other cities around the world, still struggles to get official recognition in its homeland of Jamaica.
Congratulations to UWaterloo English’s newest PhD, Hannah Watts, who successfully defended her dissertation, Cognitive Constellations: Neurodivergent Aesthetics in 20th Century Experimental Poetries. Dr. Jay Dolmage supervised, with committee members Dr. Kevin McGuirk and Dr. Aimée Morrison. The external examiner was Dr. Michael Davidson, Professor Emeritus of American Literature, Distinguished Professor, University of California San Diego; Dr. Michael Boehringer served as the internal-external. A summary follows.
Cognitive Constellations: Neurodivergent Aesthetics in 20th Century Experimental Poetries
“Inaccessible” is a term shared by both Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and literary criticism, although this term means different things to each discipline. For CDS, an inaccessible space is one that prevents physically or cognitively disabled people from fully participating as valued members of society. For literary scholars, “inaccessible” refers to strategies used by authors to estrange readers. Inaccessible techniques necessitate strenuous close reading, and may either increase or decrease the absorption and investment a reader experiences. Inaccessible strategies are often present in texts labelled “experimental” or “conceptual.” However, some of the techniques modern and post-modern authors use in order to estrange readers mimic or perform disabled patterns, practices, and aesthetics. Ironically, the cultural value assigned to famous inaccessible texts often separates poetic techniques from disabled people’s embodied experiences; scholars may praise representations or metaphors of disability while rejecting disabled perspectives as valuable critical lenses for reading literature. In this way, inaccessible texts may also become inaccessible literary spaces that perpetuate ableist academic systems. For example, even if a literary scholar identifies as neurodivergent (a person with a cognitive disability) they are still expected to write in neurotypical forms, and interpret literature using neurotypical methodologies: they still must “access” ability to be academically successful. This project joins interdisciplinary scholarship that refuses to categorize CDS and English Literature as discrete areas of study, but suggests that physically and cognitively disabled aesthetics illustrate important reading values. This is especially true for scholarship that already acknowledges the presence of disability in inaccessible poetic texts without naming or engaging with disabled perspectives. This dissertation tracks some of the ways that readers have reacted to disability aesthetics in experimental texts like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems. It traces how ableism, specifically ideas associated with the pseudoscience of eugenics, is connected to “inaccessible” labels bestowed on these texts. This project then offers readers creative interpretive modes that will help them engage with and explore disabled aesthetics in the text instead of dismissing such poems as too difficult, or diagnosing them as symptomatic of a disabled writer and therefore not worth reading. This dissertation is also written using the form of my own neurodivergent expressive practice, ADHD, as one example of how literary scholarship might encourage scholars to celebrate their neurotype instead of leaving it behind in favour of the exceptional level of ability expected in academic spaces.
UWaterloo English PhD candidate Jonathan Baltrusaitis is the subject of a recent Waterloo Record article, for his work studying digital ways to remember wartime sacrifices. As the headline reads “Waterloo filmmaker hopes to bring silent cenotaph to life with stories of service, sacrifice.” For more, see the Record.
We’re thrilled to welcome our newest member of the UWaterloo English department, Dr. Aparajita Bhandari. And she was kind enough to do an interview with our department blog. Read on to find out more about Dr. Bhandari’s research, future projects, and favourite book for the spooky season.
JLH: Welcome to UWaterloo! Can you tell us what makes UWaterloo a good fit for you and your work?
AB: My work examines how the proliferation of digital technologies across all spheres of society exacerbates social inequities and structures of power and influences cultural practices and patterns of labor, creativity, and consumption. I approach this question from a wide range of methods and disciplinary angles, and at UWaterloo there is an emphasis on doing truly interdisciplinary research. There are so many people within the English department collaborating with scholars in the physical sciences, engineering, and computer science in critical research and I’m grateful to be able to leverage these connections and expertise in my own research program. The university’s strong connections with the local tech industry offer me an incredible opportunity to engage in meaningful public-focused work and allow me the ability to translate my research on technology into real-world impact.
JLH: Could you tell us a bit about your current research project, and where you are hoping it will go?
AB: Right now I’m really excited about continuing my research that examines the role of algorithms and datafication on self-expression and identity formation online. I am working on a monograph with co-author Sara Bimo extending our conception of the “algorithmized self” across social media platforms. A growing focus in my research program is critically examining the impact of data collection and algorithmic decision-making beyond the Global North, particularly in South Asian contexts. Ultimately the goal is to partner with organizations and community groups based in South Asia and support their “on-the-ground” work so to speak.
I am also working on a series of workshops and papers with collaborators at York University on feminist digital methods including a project examining the potential of Twine as a collaborative feminist pedagogical space and a series of location-based Augmented Reality activations around safety and embodiment online. We presented a series of workshops on these topics over the summer and now in the fall, we are excited to incorporate some community voices into the next phase of this research.
JLH: What are you most excited about moving forward?
AB: I’m very excited to do more community-engaged work that is based in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and the GTA. It is very important to me that my work within the academy engaged with the communities around me and so I’m looking forward to connecting with groups in this region who have already been engaging in work around digital rights and inequality. I’m also looking forward to getting to know and working with more students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Collaborating with students is one of my favourite aspects of academia!
JLH: We always close interviews asking for book recommendations. Can you share what you’ve been reading for fun in the past year?
AB: I’m always partial to a good short story collection. This past year I’ve come across some particularly great ones including Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry, Vampires in the Lemon Groveby Karen Russell, and Tilled Earth by Manjushree Thapa.
Now that it’s getting a bit colder, I’m also looking forward to fully embracing the spooky season with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, one of my favourite fall re-reads!
UWaterloo English’s Dr. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher, Canada Research Chair in Science, Health and Technology Communication, has partnered with Dr. Donna Strickland, recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, to establish the Trust in Science and Technology Research Network at UWaterloo. It is “the first multidisciplinary research network of its kind in Canada to tackle this important issue.” According to Waterloo News, “The Trust in Science and Technology Research Network plans to begin engagement with the public through an expert speaker series and a Citizen Science Project where Waterloo region community members can offer input and actively participate in the scientific research communication process.” You can read more about it here.
UWaterloo English’s Dr. Marcel O’Gorman is a University of Waterloo Research Chair and founder of the Critical Media Lab—and the perfect person to address the question “how we should lead technological transformation to ensure a safe and human-centred digital future?” Recently, he was asked this question by Waterloo News. You can read his full response here.
Members of the department of English at UWaterloo were saddened to hear of the passing of alumna Dr. Y-Dang Troeung in late November. She was a valued student during her time here, and continued to maintain strong ties with various members of our department. Collectively, we’d like to extend our condolences to Y-Dang’s partner, child, and family.
Here, some of those who knew her share treasured memories.
Dr. Veronica Austen Y-Dang was a calm yet bright light during our grad school days. My Ph.D. and her M.A. just barely overlapped, but I got to audit a course that she was in, and her potential for great scholarly work was clear. She too stood out for her kindness and genuine interest in the ideas of others. As we had the opportunity to catch up at various conferences throughout the years, that curiosity remained a constant. She’d ask such great questions about what I was up to and the like. I’m thankful for having had the opportunity to know her, regretful that I hadn’t been in touch since before the pandemic, and in awe of the amazing work that she was able to accomplish in such a short time.
Dr. Fraser Easton I first met Y-Dang in when she was a second-year undergraduate student in a practical criticism course I was teaching, and later on she took a course in eighteenth-century fiction with me. She was a bright, successful student whose interests at that time were in the areas of rhetoric and professional writing. I did not really get to know Y-Dang as a scholar, thinker, and communicator, however, until she started work for me as a research assistant during, and then immediately after she completed, her MA in English at UW.
Y-Dang started her research with me by reading whole years of the Times of London on microfilm from the late eighteenth century, searching for reports of cross-dressing. In the course of this tedious work, Y-Dang discovered that the Times had just been digitized. In response, she worked with me to develop a recursive methodology for creating a search set that would find these records. We drew keywords from known records, tested them, noted which records were successfully captured, tried new terms for the ones which were not found, and sought to control for false hits. After numerous passes and the addition of wildcards, we landed on a search set comprised of a total of 24 search phrases. Y-Dang herself used the search set to locate cross-dressing records in Times Digital Archive for the years from 1785 to 1832. The work Y-Dang did on this project, now known as the Waterloo Cross-Dressing Archive, was outstanding, and it forms a part of the open access database currently under development. It was never any surprise to me that she would thrive in an academic career, but it delighted me to watch her do so. I am deeply saddened to learn how tragically short her work and life were cut, and my heart goes out to her partner and young child.
Dr. Randy Harris I remember Y-Dang with great fondness. She was a brilliant young woman when I knew her best and it is tragic she was taken away from the world and her family with so much more she would have added to both.
I had her in one undergraduate class, and also briefly as a colleague, when I hired her to work on the production of my Rhetoric and Incommensurability. She was a highly diligent fact checker and indexer, and just charming to work with.
But my strongest memories are from the class, in which she was a vibrant presence, making a huge impression on all of us. She was active in every discussion, probing the central issues without ever dominating. I still remember her complex, but succinct and sharply angled, essay on Descartes and Nietzsche and their divergent philosophies of language and rhetoric (Nietzsche wins!); she blew away the final exam.
She was very liberal with her compelling personal story in the class, letting us into her family life in ways that made us feel privileged to know her. She was the daughter of “a lucky one,” a survivor of the brutal Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. I was so taken with her engaging and moving accounts, and her talent for storytelling, that I had the opportunity to spark something remarkable. There was a CBC radio programme, Outfront, in those days (the twenty-aughts—just writing out those dates of her, an undergraduate a little better than ten years ago, makes the loss all the more acute). The tagline for the show was “real people telling real stories about real life” and they encouraged “anyone with a story” to pitch them. If they felt something was there, they would match them with a production team. I told Y-Dang about the programme and strongly encouraged her to contact them with a pitch. She did. It became “The Lucky One Returns,” in which she goes back to Cambodia with her mother to examine the personal impact of social trauma. It is a moving account, both intimate and universal. The experience of making the documentary also became, I later discovered, one of the prime motivations of Y-Dang’s dissertation. With the rise of podcasts I have searched without success for a digital version. If anyone reading this knows how to find it, please add a comment.
We fell out of touch because Y-Dang unaccountably left rhetoric behind for the dark side, literary studies, but I cheered on her career from afar and was stricken, as were all who knew her, when I heard of her shocking death. My deep condolences to her family, her colleagues, and all those who knew her.
Dr. Shelley Hulan Y-Dang was a member of a large, tight-knit graduate class I taught on mostly contemporary Canadian literature. Many of the students would hang out together after class and stayed in touch with each other after graduation. That kind of closeness is not as common as we in the academy would like it to be, and it often depends on a few personalities who spark the friendships that then shape students’ scholarly growth. I remember the fun things Y-Dang used to do, like betting with another student about which party food would disappear first at the Christmas party. Note per Y-Dang: sausages in pastry always go first. She brought them, and she won the bet. I also remember her unfailing generosity in seminars and class discussions, where long before it became the done thing, she embedded opportunities for her classmates to take up the strands of her presentation and to weigh in on her arguments. She was always interested, curious, and deeply committed to her research. My heartfelt condolences to her family.
Dr. Victoria Lamont I had the good fortune to teach Y-Dang as an undergraduate student. She was brilliant, generous, and kind. I remember one class she was getting ready to give a presentation and the technology wasn’t cooperating and it was making her nervous. She gave her presentation and it was absolutely astounding. She had no idea how talented she was; she was just a student doing her job. I knew other colleagues who taught her, and we used to compare notes about how gifted she was as a scholar but also how wonderful she was as a person.
Dr. Kate Lawson Y-Dang Troeung was a stellar student whom I was fortunate enough to teach in my graduate seminar on Victorian literature in 2004. She is memorable for the breadth of interests and the breadth of scholarly work that informed her performance in the class. She was a generous participant in class discussion, always working to build productively on the comments and questions of other students. Her final research paper is probably the best I have ever received in a graduate course.
I was then doubly fortunate to be able to hire Y-Dang as a research assistant for a project I was just beginning. She was a true collaborator, suggesting scholarly material which I should consult in order both to contextualise the project and to focus future inquiry.
Her intellectual energy and excitement, her drive to extend her knowledge were indeed inspiring. I followed her later academic career with great interest, and now with a deep sense of loss. She will be missed.
Dr. Heather Smyth My memory of her is that she was in the first graduate course I taught when I joined the department in 2003. I believe she was an MA student then, but her scholarly poise and analytical skills were really exceptional. I often heard about her or saw her work over the years after that as she completed her PhD and took up a position at the City University of Hong Kong. I rarely ran into her, but her name was always circulating: colleagues and friends would speak of her, noting how hard she was working, how high the quality of her work was, how kind and generous she was with her friendships and scholarship, how rich a life she was building with her partner and child. She clearly touched many lives and will leave a huge gap behind.
Dr. Linda Warley A specific memory that stands out to me is when Y-Dang was a student in my Canadian Life Writing graduate course. As an exercise in getting students to think about how life writers make specific choices when telling their personal stories I asked them to write the first page of their own autobiographies. Y-Dang began with her name. She explained that she was born in a refugee camp and that her parents had named her after the camp. I don’t think I knew that she was originally from Cambodia. I certainly didn’t know that her life had begun in Khao I-Dang. Her family had survived bombings, the overthrow of the Khymer Rouge regime and the genocide that followed. I later learned that the Catholic Church that sponsored the family’s immigration to Canada changed her name to Sarah, a Christian name. Y-Dang refused to be called Sarah.
It almost sounds like the opening of a joke, doesn’t it? But in fact, these are just some of the things our UWaterloo English people have been talking about in the news.
Recent PhD alumnus Dr. Tommy Mayberry appears in The Bookseller, as his collection RuPedagogies of Realness: Essays on Teaching and Learning with RuPaul’s Drag Race won the 2022 Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The article is a masterclass in humour. Congratulations!
Dr, Marcel O’Gorman‘s piece on recent critiques of the colonial history of engineering’s “iron ring” ceremony appeared in The Conversation.
Department of English Language and Literature: Assistant Professor in Critical Digital Studies
The Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo invites applications for a probationary position in Critical Digital Studies at the rank of Assistant Professor, with a preferred start date of July 1, 2023. We are looking for a colleague with expertise in critical approaches to digital media who will contribute to our research and teaching in this area, as well as to the Department more broadly. Potential areas of expertise might include, in no particular order of preference, critical internet studies, critical data studies, responsible innovation, critical design, technopolitics, critical game studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Applicants with other relevant areas of expertise will also be considered. A focus on digital technology and Indigeneity, postcolonialism, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, environment, or any combination of these topics, is especially welcome. Applicants for this position must have a completed PhD in English or a cognate field by time of appointment and provide evidence of research and/or research-creation potential and achievement commensurate with their experience and a strong teaching record in relevant areas.
This position will offer a wide range of teaching opportunities, from first-year writing and communication courses that draw students from both Arts and STEM disciplines, through to undergraduate courses in digital media studies and graduate teaching and supervision of doctoral students in the Department of English. The current teaching load is 2 + 2. The salary range for this position at the rank of Assistant Professor is $90,000 to $120,000. Negotiations beyond this salary range may be considered for exceptionally qualified candidates.
The successful candidate will provide teaching, supervision and mentorship in our unique PhD degree, which integrates literary studies, rhetoric, media theory and design, and writing studies. In addition, the successful candidate will teach courses related to our MA degrees, particularly the MA in Experimental Digital Media (XDM) and the MA in Rhetoric and Communication Design; as well as courses related to our undergraduate degrees, particularly the Honours BA in Rhetoric, Media, and Professional Communication. Since the Department promotes an integrated research culture, secondary expertise in rhetoric, literature, or writing studiesis welcome.
Research opportunities include those available at the Critical Media Lab, where the successful candidate will have access to extensive resources for digital design (http://criticalmedia.uwaterloo.ca) and at the university-wide Games Institute (https://uwaterloo.ca/games-institute/).
Applications are due by November 22, 2022. Please address applications to Professor Jay Dolmage, Chair, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo. Application materials must be submitted online as PDF files through https://ofas.uwaterloo.ca/job-details/46. Please include a letter of application, curriculum vitae, and a teaching dossier and/or link to an e-portfolio. Long-listed candidates will later be asked for three letters of reference to be uploaded.
The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is centralized within our Indigenous Initiatives Office.
The University values the diverse and intersectional identities of its students, faculty, and staff. The University regards equity and diversity as an integral part of academic excellence and is committed to accessibility for all employees. The University of Waterloo seeks applicants who embrace our values of equity, anti-racism and inclusion. As such, we encourage applications from candidates who have been historically disadvantaged and marginalized, including applicants who identify as Indigenous (e.g., First Nations, Métis, Inuit/Inuk), Black, racialized, people with disabilities, women and/or 2SLGBTQ+.
All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, including Indigenous candidates from across Turtle Island. For all other candidates, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.
The University of Waterloo is committed to accessibility for persons with disabilities. If you have any application, interview or workplace accommodation requests, please contact Professor Jay Dolmage at englishchair@uwaterloo.ca.
If you have questions regarding the position, the application process, assessment process, or eligibility, please contact Professor Jay Dolmage, englishchair@uwaterloo.ca.
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