Executive Board and Staff / Comité directeur et personnel
CLC Executive Committee
Sarah Wylie Krotz (CLC Director) - krotz@ualberta.ca
Marie Carrière (Past Director; on sabbatical) - carriere@ualberta.ca
Jordan Abel (on sabbatical) - jabel@ualberta.ca
Michael A. Bucknor - mbucknor@ualberta.ca
Courtenay Chan - cchan3@ualberta.ca
Conor Kerr - ckerr1@ualberta.ca
Michelle Lobkowicz - mlobkowi@ualberta.ca
Stephanie Oliver (on sabbatical) - ssoliver@ualberta.ca
Jason Purcell - jason@glassbookshop.com
Kristine Smitka - smitka@ualberta.ca
Sarah Wylie Krotz (Director)
Sarah Wylie Krotz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, where she researches the spatial and ecological dimensions of literature. Her book Mapping with Words: Anglo-Canadian Literary Cartographies, 1789-1916 (UTorontoP, 2018) explores the ways that writers negotiated and made sense of the shifting landscapes of early Canada, particularly in relation to Indigenous sovereignties and dispossession and environmental change. She co-edited a book called The Politics of the Canoe (UManitobaP, 2021) with Bruce Erickson (Geography, University of Manitoba), an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the multivalenced political meanings of this significant national icon. Her recent articles, such as “A Natural History of Loss: Reading ‘The Last Bison’ in the Age of Loneliness” (Canadian Poetry, 2019) and “The Affective Geography of Wild Rice: A Literary Study” (SCL/ELC 2017, winner of the Herb Wyile Prize), work to deepen our understanding of Canada’s complex literary ecologies, and the possibilities they open up for rethinking our relationships with the land.
Marie Carrière (Past Director)
Marie Carrière (BA Ottawa, MA Queen’s, PhD Toronto) teaches Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois literatures in the Department of English and Film Studies. She was director of the CLC from 2008 to 2020, and is now Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts. Her 2020 monograph, Metafeminist Practices in Canada, is published with McGill-Queen’s University Press, and her current research explores ecofeminist interventions in sustainability and anthropocene theory. She has published oft-cited articles and books including Médée protéiforme (UOttawaP, 2012) and Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics (UTorontoP, 2002), as well as edited volumes and special journal issues including All the Feels: Affect and Writing in Canada/Tous les sens: Affect et écriture au Canada (with Ursula Mathis-Moser and Kit Dobson, UAlbertaP, 2020) and Regenerations: Canadian Women’s Writing/Régénérations: Écritures de femmes au Canada (with Patricia Demers, UAlbertaP, 2013), among several other volumes. With Curtis Gillespie and Jason Purcell, she curated the award-winning critical anthology Ten Canadian Writers in Context (UAlbertaP, 2016). Her SSHRC-funded research has led to a number of publications in both English and French on migrant literatures in Canada and Québec, contemporary writing by women, the ethics of care, and feminist theory.
Jordan Abel
Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Talonbooks, 2013 ), Un/inhabited (Talonbooks, 2020) and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, Talonbooks, 2016). Abel’s latest project NISHGA (McClelland & Stewart, 2021) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel recently completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing.
Courtenay Chan
Courtenay Chan is a Vancouver-born and raised PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching focuses on critical race and mixed race studies, Asian diaspora studies, and Canadian literatures. Chan’s forthcoming article in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne reads Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (2017) and my yt mama (2020) for how they poetically expose the limits of Canada’s hierarchal racial structure.
Stephanie Oliver
Stephanie Oliver (BA StFX, MA/PhD Western) joined the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose, Alberta (also known as asiniskaw sipisis, or Stoney Creek) in 2017. She is an Associate Professor of English and teaches Canadian, postcolonial, and diasporic literatures in Augustana’s Creativity and Culture program. Her research interests include representations of smell in diasporic women’s writing in Canada, sensory encounters with oil and the Alberta tar sands, the poetics and ethics of breathing in Canada’s settler atmospheres, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her work has been published in Canadian Literature, Transformative Dialogues, and Teaching Innovation Projects. Her recent article “‘Stinking as Thinking’ in Warren Cariou’s “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto”' was published in a special issue of Canadian Literature on “Poetics and Extraction” in 2023, and her chapter “Breathing in the ‘Pulmonary Commons’: Conspiring Against Canada’s ‘Settler Atmospherics’ in Rita Wong’s undercurrent” is forthcoming in Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics and Poetics Today (University of Alberta Press). She is a co-applicant on the SSHRC Insight Development Grant “Literary Biodiversities in Western Canada” and is co-editing a special issue of the journal Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies with Kit Dobson on the topic of affect and environment in literatures of Canada. She is currently working on a manuscript about smell and (un)belonging in recent Canadian literature.
Jason Purcell
Jason Purcell is a writer based in amiskwacîwâskahikan. Their debut collection of poetry, SWOLLENING, was published in 2022 by Arsenal Pulp Press. Alongside Matthew Stepanic, they run Glass Bookshop, an independent bookstore that strives to centre queer and racialized writers, uplift independent publishers, and support local arts communities.
Photo credit: Zachary Ayotte
Kristine Smitka
Kristine Smitka (BA SFU, MA/PhD UofA) is the Associate Director for the CLC and an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where she also coordinates first-year English. Her current research focusses on the discounting of books by large vendors, which threatens to homogenize the Canadian publishing industry, and by extension, the voices that circulate in local communities. Her previous research has focussed on Marshall McLuhan’s academic and artistic networks, culminating in the co-edited collection Counterblasting Canada (UAlberta Press, 2016). She teaches classes on Canadian literatures and book history, both of which draw on her interest in Canadian publishing.
CLC Staff
Nicole Brandsma, Business Manager - cdnlit@ualberta.ca
Nicole Brandsma is a PhD graduate of the Department of English and Film Studies and continues to teach in the department as a contract instructor. Her doctoral work examined the way that settler writers in northwestern British Columbia situate their sense of place on the unceded territories of First Nations, in the Skeena watershed, and in the communities along the Highway of Tears. In particular, her dissertation, "Uprooting and Re-Routing a Settled Sense of Place: Reading Settler Literary Cartographies of Northwestern British Columbia," focuses primarily on the work of writer, poet, and scholar Sarah de Leeuw.
Heléna Plain, Communications & Research Officer - hplain@ualberta.ca
Heléna Plain is the face behind the CLC's 2023/24 promotional posters and social media. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English and History from the University of Alberta. In her spare time, Heléna enjoys torturing her friends with bad puns, climbing rocks, and baking. Outside of her role at the CLC, Heléna works as a web designer.
Karen McFadyen, Research Assistant - kpmcfady@ualberta.ca