Graduate Students
Aon Ul Abideen
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: I work at the intersection of South Asian post colonial studies, trans studies, and queer theory.
Thesis title/topic: In my thesis, I trace the legal and literary representation of trans Pakistanis and interrogate how laws and literature imagine trans citizenship.
Adhora Ahmed
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Postcolonial Literatures, South Asian Studies, Trauma and Memory Studies, Nationalisms and Imperialism, Religion, Gender Studies
Nitasha Baig
MA Course Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Postcolonial Studies, Orientalism, and Muslim Women in Western Literature
Russell Betker
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Differences or crossover in technological and ecological posthumanism | Victorian literature | Proper names and objecthood | Urban/rural/colonial/travel narratives | Identity and/within the former contexts and narratives.
Thesis title/topic: My proposed thesis comparatively analyses Thomas Hardy’s novels of “character and environment” to other urban and colonial Victorian narratives. I pay close attention to how the “human” as a subject is treated in relation to in-between narratives where ecological beings interrupt or undermine human dramatic narratives.
Tilda Bron
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Literatures in Canada; literary geographies; poetry and ecopoetics; ecocriticism; environmental history
Rachel Burlock
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: My research interests include prairie literature, book history, geocriticism and habitat studies.
Thesis title/topic: My thesis is a geocritical analysis of the Manitoba Interlake region. My research draws on canonical prairie texts, archival documents and local history books from (and about) the Manitoba Interlake region to explore how Interlake "placeness" has been constructed and represented by Interlake inhabitants and visitors through time, with a focus on human relationships to the land and non-human communities.
Tess Casher
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: As a person with a stutter, I consider the creative-critical circulation between two questions: “how can dysfluency shift how we think about language/creative arts?” and “how can language/creative arts shift how we think about dysfluency?”; Dysfluency studies, Critical Disability Studies, Creative Criticism
Thesis title/topic: Dysfluent Dissents: Re-Thinking Fluent NormsMy thesis explores how autobiographical and autofictional representations of stuttering destabilize and endorse speech fluency as an ableist norm, questioning if literary representations of stuttering constitute an act of power and if it is an ableist version of power. This investigation seeks to elucidate a peripheral-centre writing approach that could unsettle assumptions about the inherent fluency of narrative.
Alp Cevirme
MA Course Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Theories of everyday life, Michel Serres, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, World Literature, Urban humanities, Geocriticism
Richard Costa
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism, Habitat Studies
Thesis title/topic: Magpie Habitat Studies and the Bioregional Imagination
Francina Cousins
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Caribbean Women's Poetry/Writing, Caribbean Popular Culture, Sexualities, Post-Colonial, African Diaspora and Women's Studies
Max Dickeson
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Game studies -- analog games, tabletop roleplaying games; narrative -- interactive storytelling, narratology; science fiction and fantasy -- history of, sociopolitical work of
Thesis title/topic: Social Rolls: The Interdependence of Narrative Play and Social Interaction in Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Chelsea Dingman
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Research Creation; Contemporary Poetics; Creative Writing
Thesis title/topic: If, Beyond: Poems and Prose
E'lyna Do
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Gothic Literature, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Thesis topic/title: My thesis frames the cultural context of vampires through a Foucauldian lens of power – how and why Western society seeks to use the vampire as an outlet for the particular fears or desires of certain time periods. I examine vampires as a reflection of the Other as those who must consistently monitor themselves to align with the cultural norms of Western society. Notably, I look at vampires in relation to gender and sexuality, and how vampires either reinforce cultural norms, such as passive female roles, or become the source of escapism to subvert gender norms and free sexual desires.
Keighlagh Barwick
PhD Program
Website: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1374-6972
Research areas and/or fields of study: In my research, I trace the conceptualization of “ally” and consider what it means to be here in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta) and Treaty 6 territory in responsible relationship. Reading, writing alongside, and responding to calls to action from Indigenous literatures, students in my courses and I practice anticolonial imagination work.
Thesis title/topic: ally, interrupted: a poetics of care traces a personal and academic journey of engaging Indigenous literatures, queer theory, disability studies and more as a means of settler harm reduction and relearning how to be in relationship(s) beyond colonial teachings.
Cass Duxbury
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Queer & feminist philosophy, critical theory, gender theory, lesbian & trans literatures, sexual & gender-based violence, human rights literatures, the (personal) essay
Sosthenes Ekeh
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: My research areas are psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, hermeneutics, existential psychotherapy, and cultural sociology. I am particularly interested in the insights the conversations across these theories bring to understanding of suicide and depression in a postcolonial context.
Thesis title/topic: My thesis topic is 'Cultural destitution and suicidality in the postcolonial Nigerian literary world'. I am exploring the enabling conditions of suicidality in the Nigerian context. My focus is on the intersection of colonialism, the Nigerian Civil War, and leadership failure in Nigeria and how it contributes to the changing structure of thought that facilitates suicidal ideation.
Hope Eze
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: My research interests cut across African literature, decolonial studies, ecocriticism, and food studies.
Thesis title/topic: "The Pineapples Don’t Know There’s a War on”: Agroecological Critiques of Global Development Discourse in Selected Sub-Saharan African Literature. This research is supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC).
Lizette Gerber
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: My current research considers the ways in which Black women's speculative fiction rejects humanist hierarchies and imagines being otherwise. I am particularly interested in Black queer and feminist theories of relationality, temporality, monstrosity, and madness.
Thesis title/topic: Monstrosity, Animality, and Madness: Black Women's Speculations of Otherwise Being
Theo Gray
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Critical Border Studies, Speculative Fiction, Contemporary Literature
Thesis title/topic: Border Speculation: A Critical Approach to Borders in Speculative Fiction
Reece Gritzmacher
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Decoloniality; Settler Colonialism; Empire; Archives; Social Memory; Settler Replacement Narratives & Myth-making; Indigenous Literatures; Cartography; Poetry
Cassidy Hogg
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Indigenous Literatures, Canadian Literature, Poetry, Feminism, Ecofeminism
Alyssa Laboucan
MA Course Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Diversity in Children and Young Adult Literature
Nathan Lamarche
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: My current studies and research interests focus on Indigenous and queer storytelling and the relational impacts of technology on our perceptions of the self and our humanity. I am engaged in the examination of the marginalisation of cultures and perspectives through a lens of objective morality that is created through artificial intelligence, and how these happenings are displayed in science fiction literature and film. Ethics and aesthetics are also core to these interests. I am also studying accessibility through academia and writing centres, and the portrayal of non-settler, non-European cultures in fantasy storytelling.
Thesis title/topic: My thesis examines our anthropomorphisation of artificial intelligence, especially in science fiction media, to investigate the impacts of that anthropomorphisation in our modern interactions with consumer-ready GenAI technologies, such as interactions with simulations of deceased loved ones, romantic and sexual companion apps, and AI-hosted customer service platforms. What does our approach, notably through our perceptions of humanised AI in fiction, say about us?
Hilary Lerner
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: 19th Century American Poetry, Abolition, Suffrage, Poetic Aesthetics
Thesis title/topic: Poetry of Protest: Linguistic Grace in 19th Century American Activist Poetry
Celina Loew
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: My research area examines totalitarian governance and literary censorship, depicting how present-day western governments and societies are reflected in totalitarian fiction.
Thesis title/topic: My thesis examines the censorship of L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time and what can be concluded from these gaps by exploring modern literary censorship.
Michael MacKenzie
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Study of embodiment desire, with focus on corporeality and growth manipulation. Areas include Archive studies, study of body modification and DIY trans*, Body and Trans* Studies, Video Games Studies (focus on avatars), 20th and 21st Century Speculative Literature (including indigenous and afro-futurism), Lacanian psychoanalysis, Affect Theory, anime and manga studies.
Thesis title/topic: Examination of contemporary examples of virtual and actual corporeal neoteny, critically (that is, with critical awareness of ideological and power-structure influenced readings of the texts), by making use of speculative, fictional and poetic representation of such virtual and actual corporeal neoteny. I.e., reconsidering the case of Ashley X through Peter Pan.
Karen McFadyen
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Contemporary literature, film, psychoanalysis, Gothic fiction, gender studies
Tanvi Mohile
PhD Prgram
Research areas and/or fields of study: Publishing Studies; Authorship Studies; Fandom and Fanfiction Studies; Book History; Publishing History; Platform Studies
Thesis title/topic: In my research, I study online author-reader communities on Archive of Our Own and Wattpad to examine how authors within the digital publishing environment acquire authority, authenticity and legitimacy. My research focuses on community norms, platform affordances, fandom and writing and publishing practices on the two platforms for this analysis.
Alex Mortensen
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: My future research aims to explore the connection between how literary representations of the environment affect and influence the relationship between humans and the environment. Specifically, how colonial and Eurocentric literary representations of the environment align nature with the feminine, thereby creating and perpetuating a static, asymmetric human-environment relationship. A goal for my future research is to contribute to the advancement of environmental humanities by investigating this connection and finding environmental literary representations that support solutions based on a reciprocal and symbiotic human-environmental relationship. The genres I am interested in working with are Canadian Literature, American Literature, and Indigenous Literature. Using an ecocritical approach will allow my research to critique and interrogate retroactive ways of writing and engaging with the environment. Living through the climate crisis, now more than ever, it is vital to reassess and reframe how humans interact with the environment. My main goal is to produce research that is both accessible and interdisciplinary and can work in tandem with the hard sciences when it comes to fighting climate change and protecting the environment.
Anindita Mukherjee
PhD Program
Website: https://ualberta.academia.edu/AninditaMukherjee
Research areas and/or fields of study: Philosophy of Literature ǀ Critical Theory ǀ Literature of the Catastrophes ǀ Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature ǀ Memory and Affect Studies ǀ Continental Philosophy ǀ Philosophy of Art ǀ Holocaust and Genocide Studies ǀ Philosophical Aesthetics and Totalitarianism| Historiography and Narratology| Poetics
Thesis title/topic: Listening in the Aftermath of Catastrophe
Zahra Nazarieh
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Trauma Studies, Memory studies, Affect theory, Theories of Deleuze and Guattari, intersections of trauma and literature, I am particularly interested in exploring how reading and writing literature can function as an act of survival
Thesis title/topic: I will be exploring expressions of trauma in Ocean Vuong's works. I will be employing principles of affect theory to argue that viewing and writing trauma as affect can open up new potentialities and help us move beyond the Caruthian irrepresentability of trauma.
Chelsea Novak
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Eearly Canadian Literature, Early American Literature, Game Studies
Melanie Oberg
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Melanie Oberg (she/her) is a PhD Student and instructor in the department of English and Film at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on video game design and narrative—particularly, what video games can ‘tell’ the player without the use of language. She received her MA from the University of Victoria with a focus on Let’s Play Videos, fan culture and the spectacle of gameplay. She is a recipient of The Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship and a three-time recipient of the Academic Graduate Excellence Scholarship.
Thesis title/topic: Silent game design: Meaningful Gameplay without Words
Jason Purcell
PhD Program
Website: https://www.jasonpurcell.ca/
Research areas and/or fields of study: I am interested in queer theory, crip and disability studies, affect, and life-writing expressed using research-creation and creative writing methods
Thesis title/topic: Rupture: A History of Bad Queer Feelings in Myself and Others
Amaan Rizvi
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: My research fields include religion, fashion, politics and horror among many other things. I am also interested in the politics of embroidery and its relationship with oral storytelling.
Layla Rosser
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Manga studies; theories and expressions of individual, collective and cultural trauma; identity and memory; graphic narratives and film adaptations
Thesis title/topic: Japanese post-nuclear anxiety and the shaping of expressions of survivor experience in manga and anime
Fatemeh Salehivaziri
PhD Program
salehiva@ualberta.caResearch areas and/or fields of study: I work at the intersection of South Asian post colonial studies, trans studies, and queer theory.
Thesis title/topic: In my thesis, I trace the legal and literary representation of trans Pakistanis and interrogate how laws and literature imagine trans citizenship.
Bailey Schaan
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Bailey (she/her) is interested in theories of canon and cultural remembrance as well as depictions of writer figures and Canadian feminisms in short fiction from the 1960s onwards.
Thesis title/topic: What is Remembered and Felt: Feminine Artist Figures and the Canadian Short Story Cycle
Thomas Schwarz
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Speculative Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, and Religion and Philosophy in Speculative Fiction
Thesis title/topic: My proposed thesis explores how Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time functions as mythopoeic literature that uses philosophies and religions from around the world to create a postmodern myth that speaks to our increasingly globalized age.
Ellie Simonot
MA Course Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Postmodernism & postmodernity; critical theory; postcolonial contexts; capitalism & the hyperreal; satire; animals; science in literature; race & ethnicity; feminist literature; film & television
Charis St. Pierre
PhD Program
Website: http://www.charisstpierre.com
Research areas and/or fields of study: Children's Literature, Ecocriticism, Picturebooks, Critical Plant Studies
Thesis title/topic: My research considers the environmental implications of plant characters in picturebooks, attending to how plant agency, communication, and temporalities can disrupt anthropocentric views of the world
Astrid Stark
MA Thesis Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: Popular romance genre within transmedia storytelling, adaptation theory, book history, fandom and reader participation studies, and popular culture
Meaghan Sych
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: I am interested in the intersection of feminism, listening, eco-criticism, reading, and creation. My MA thesis, entitled Ecological Colonialism and the Impact of the “Englishman’s Foot”: A Literary Ecology of an Invasive Species, was completed in Spring 2024.
Thesis title/topic: Sound Walker: Finding an Ethics and Poetics of Movement and Listening
Sara Taghvaeishahroodi
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Gender studies, humour studies, reception studies, contemporary literature, media studies
Thesis title/topic: “We Are Bad Feminists”: Women’s Empathic and Transgressive Humor in Contemporary Postfeminist Culture
Brayden Tate
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, the History of Political and Legal Thought, and Classical Reception
Thesis title/topic: Staging the English Republic: Shakespeare and the Conditions of Liberty
Pouria Torkamaneh
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Media Aesthetics, Sound Studies, Radio Studies, 20th-Century Literature, Critical Theory
Thesis title/topic: Sounds of Playable Texts: BBC Radio and Modern Irish Literature
Alex Ventimilla
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Though broadly interested in the environmental humanities, my current research operates at the intersection of critical human-animal studies, posthumanism, extinction studies, and ecological cinema.
Thesis title/topic: My thesis dissects the affective and discursive tropes of environmental documentaries interested in biodiversity loss and conservation
Julianna Wagar
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Romance novels; contemporary readership; women's reading; sexuality; BookTok; reading relationships
Zhishang Wang
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: Queer theory; Life writing; Affect theory
Thesis title/topic: Narrating Experience and Affect in Butch Life Writing
Matthew James Weigel
PhD Program
Website: http://www.matthewjamesweigel.com
Research areas and/or fields of study: Indigenous Literary Ecologies is the study of storytelling at the level of deep interrelationality among the sovereign entities that share the land
Thesis title/topic: Engaging in storytelling as expressed in the materials of the land, teaches us what the cryptic elements of the earth are communicating
Sam Woodard
MA Course Based
Research areas and/or fields of study: My passion lies in exploring what falls outside conventional definitions of the literary, challenging those boundaries and demonstrating the literary value of overlooked texts and forms.
Nagehan Yanar
PhD Program
Research areas and/or fields of study: US Literature and Intellectual History of the 19th- and 20th-Century