Scholarly Lectures / Conférences
Friday, November 5, 2021
2021 CLC Scholarly Lecture with Jody Mason
The “Creative Crusade”: Settler Colonial Antinomies and Books for Development in the Age of Three Worlds
Click HERE to watch the lecture on YouTube!
Building on the work of scholars such as Frederick Cooper, who emphasizes the imperial genealogies of postwar development, this paper analyzes the book donation schemes created by Canada’s first NGO, the Overseas Book Centre / Centre du livre pour outre-mer (OBC / CLO), founded in Toronto in 1959 and still in existence today as the Canadian Organization for Development Through Education (CODE). I argue that the work of the OBC / CLO during the 1960s and 70s relied on a series of contradictions: while insisting on the unique ability of Canadian NGOs to act as “trusted brokers” in international development because of the nation’s own colonial lineage and while finding common cause at UNESCO with the decolonizing nations that were in this period pushing for transformations in the international communications order, OBC / CLO representatives were at the same time disavowing the racially differentiated status of Commonwealth members, as well as Canada’s ongoing colonization of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, despite the attention in English Canadian and Quebecois nationalist circles by the late 1960s to the “colonized” status of the nation’s book cultures, OBC / CLO programs perpetuated neocolonial economic systems that failed to nourish local production capacities, shipping hundreds of tons of books annually to nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.
Jody Mason is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University (cross-appointed with the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies). She is the author of two books, Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures (U of Toronto P, 2013) and Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). Recipient of the 2019 Gabrielle Roy Prize, Mason is currently undertaking SSHRC-funded research for a third book project that examines Canadian practices of book diplomacy and uses of books as foreign aid in the last half of the twentieth century.
Friday, October 27, 2017
2017 CLC Scholarly Lecture with Erin Wunker
Time: 4:00 PM
Place: Student Lounge, Old Arts Building
“Against Despair: Feminist Friendship as Praxis"
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
CLC Scholarly Lecture by Dr. Evelyne Gagnon
Time: 4:00 PM
Place: Salter Reading Room, HC 3-95
Please join us for our 2016 CLC Scholarly Lecture. 2014-16 CLC Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Evelyne Gagnon will be delivering her lecture titled “Melancholia in Canadian and Québécois Literatures, or How to Survive Our Tumultuous Times.” All are welcome!
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
CLC Scholarly Lecture Series with Kit Dobson from Mount Royal University
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Humanities Building L3, University of Alberta
“Mall Culture Superstars! Literary Culture at the Wal-mart in Whitehorse”
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
CLC Scholarly Lecture Series with Libe Garcia-Zarranz
Time: 12 noon
Place: L3 Humanities Centre
"LOVE AIN'T ENOUGH": TransCanLit's Affective Transpositions
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
A Lecture by Dr. Danielle Schaub
Time: 10:00 AM
Place: Senate Chamber, Arts Building (U of A)
“Disarticulated. Dismembered. Destroyed” :
Abuse and Schizophrenia in Nancy Huston’s The Story of Omaya
The lecture will be delivered in English. This is a free event, and all are welcome to attend, with a discussion following the lecture.
About the lecturer: Danielle Schaub was born in Kuala Belait, in the Sultanate of Brunei and was raised all over the world, becoming proficient in several languages, including English, French, Dutch, Hebrew and German. She studied at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium and at the University of Cambridge in England, and went on to earn an MA in English and Dutch philology and literature, an MA in Spanish, and a PhD in Canadian literature. Danielle has always been fascinated by the interaction between text and image. While on research trips in Canada, she’s taken photographs of numerous writers at writers’ festivals, which has led to various exhibitions of her work around the world. A writer of short fiction and poetry, Danielle currently teaches at Oranim Academic College near Haifa, Israel in the areas of British and Canadian literature, trauma in literature, stylistics and poetics, the Canadian novel, women’s short fiction, and the oral tradition, among others. Her research interests include bibliotherapy, literary representations of trauma, autobiographical writing, interaction between text and image, multiculturalism/transnationalism, and spatial representation of female subjectivities.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Fall 2011 CLC Scholarly Lecture: Mary di Michele
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Student Lounge, Arts Building (U of A)
Please join us for the Fall 2011 CLC Scholarly Lecture with Mary di Michele. This is a free event, and all are welcome to attend.
Lecture Title: “The Flower and the Book, My Pier Paolo Pasolini”
The talk will describe the research and writing of The Flower of Youth, di Michele’s new book about the coming of age as an artist of the great writer and film-director Pier Paolo Pasolini during the Second World War.
About Mary di Michele: Poet, novelist, and member of the collaborative writing group, Yoko’s Dogs, Mary di Michele is the author of ten books, including a selected poems, Stranger in You (Oxford University Press, 1995), and the novel, Tenor of Love (Viking Canada, Simon & Schuster USA, 2005). She lives in Montreal where she teaches at Concordia University in the creative writing program. A new book of poetry, The Flower of Youth, Pier Paolo Pasolini Poems (ECW Press), will be published in September 2011.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Fall 2010 CLC Scholarly Lecture presented by Toni Holland
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Senate Chamber, Arts & Convocation Hall, University of Alberta
Please join us as Toni Holland presents the Fall 2010 CLC scholarly lecture. All are welcome, entrance is free and refreshments will be provided.
Lecture Title, “American and Canadian Poets Laureate: A Literary and Cultural History”
Toni Holland received her BA from the University of Texas; she is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Texas at Arlington. Part of her doctoral work was completed at the University of Leicester, England. Her dissertation is a literary history of US Poets Laureate; she has been awarded a Fulbright to extend this research at the University of Alberta to include Canadian Parliamentary Poets Laureate. Her awards include Academy of American Poets University Poetry Award, first-runner up, University Scholar, Graduate Teaching Assistance Excellence Award, and numerous scholarships and grants. She has also held poet residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Shakespeare and Company in Paris, France. She is also an Honorary CLC Postdoctoral Fellow, and greatly looks forward to being engaged with the poetry community in Edmonton, Alberta.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Fall 2009 CLC Scholarly Lecture presented by Dr. Keavy Martin
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Students Lounge, Old Arts Building, University of Alberta
Please join us for the inaugural CLC Scholarly Lecture presented by Dr. Keavy Martin. All are welcome, entrance is free and refreshments will be provided.
Lecture Title: “Just a Story? Monkey Beach and the Politics of Aboriginal Literatures”
This discussion of Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach will explore the real-life influences — and consequences — of Aboriginal literatures in Canada. The CLC is proud to announce that Eden Robinson will be presenting the 2010 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture in March 2010.
Dr. Martin teaches Aboriginal literatures in the Department of English and Film Studies at the U of A.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Lecture by Dr. Danielle Schaub, University of Haifa
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Room 2-09 Rutherford South, University of Alberta
Title: “Reading and the Mind-Psyche Interplay: The Principles and Uses of Bibliotherapy”
Admission is free and everyone is welcome. Discussion to follow the lecture. Chaired by Dr. Paul Dubé
Description: Readers often turn to books in search of escape, solace or company. Reader-response theory has thrown light on readers’ dynamic interaction with texts and its transformative impact (Iser 1989). Readers indeed transform the signals and information transmitted by texts as they attribute meaning to them largely in relation to their own emotional and cultural baggage (Iser 1989). By engaging with a text, readers participate in its fictional reality, comparing it to their own, looking for an echo, a difference or an enlargement of theirs. As such, texts may open up perspectives challenging readers’ perception of reality. Those in touch with their emotional needs may negotiate texts in bibliotherapeutic fashion “to sort out [their] own problems, uncover knots, face repressed thoughts, emotions and blockages that prevent . . . feelings of fulfilment” (Schaub 2006). As they witness other lives, they identify with one or another character faced with life experiences resembling theirs or calling theirs to mind. The interaction generates a confrontation with the unconscious on account of situations or images powerful enough to bring repressed feelings and thoughts to the surface as may also happen when viewing emotionally laden films. However such engagement lacks the sounding board that bibliotherapy proper offers. In this respect, a bibliotherapy session allows more interaction than a psychotherapy or psychoanalysis session, for a “third voice” (Zoran 2000) comes into play owing to the presence of a text in the room. Thanks to carefully targeted texts, bibliotherapy allows patients to discuss their problems at a remove; by focusing on fictional situations touching upon their experiential knowledge or on characters with whom they identify because their approach to life compares to their own or because they grapple with predicaments akin to theirs, they come to express inner thoughts that might have taken longer to emerge without the textual encounter. Allowing to face and tackle emotional and social issues indirectly, bibliotherapeutic practice may be used fruitfully in class provided the teacher/lecturer chooses texts meaningful enough for pupils/students to enter into a dialogue with them and release emotional pressures. The lecture will engage participants in hands-on activity to let them experience the value of a bibliotherapeutic approach in the context of a group.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Visiting Lecturers: Dany Laferrière or, Conquering America through Text and Film
Time: 4:00 PM
Place: Humanities Centre, L-4 (main floor), University of Alberta
Dr. Ursula Moser, University of Innsbruck, author of Visiting Lecturers: Dany Laferrière: La derive américaine, will lead a discussion on Comment conquérir l’Amérique en une nuit, a film written and directed by Dany Laferrière.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Visiting Lecturers: Canadian Literature in China
Time: 3:00 PM
Place: Senate Chamber, Arts Building (Old Arts), University of Alberta
Translating Canada: Studies of Canadian Literature in China (Dr. He Ning, Nanjing University)
Identity and the Third Space in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, In the Skin of the Lion, and The English Patient (Dr. Yao Yuan, Nanjing University).
Monday, September 29, 2008
Danielle Schaub
Time: 11:00 AM
Place: Arts Building Senate Chamber, University of Alberta
You are cordially invited to attend a lecture by Dr. Danielle Schaub, University of Haifa, on the work of Nancy Huston. The lecture will be delivered in French. Discussion in English and French will follow.