English Faculty
Chair
Jasmine Nicholsfigueiredo | nicholsfigueiredoj@douglascollege.ca |
Faculty
Jason Bourget
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PhD, Queen's University
My research focuses on how political beliefs structure the conceptual preoccupations of science fiction. Having spent the past few years examining the extent to which political philosophies such as liberalism and libertarianism influence the representation of masculinity in 1960s and 1970s American science fiction, I have now shifted my attention to mapping the ideological relationships between the Disney company and science fiction authors such as Philip K. Dick and Cory Doctorow and to exploring how speculation about networking, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence inform understandings of philosophical and political personhood in postcyberpunk space opera.
Besides science fiction, which I routinely teach in all my literature courses, I am also interested in horror, weird fiction, and the history of fandom.
I also regularly take students on field school and, in Summer 2026, plan to teach ENGL 1109 (Reading Fiction, Poetry and Plays) again as part of the Ireland Field School.
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Connor Byrne
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PhD, Dalhousie University
My research interests include modernism, modernist literary theory, urban studies, theories of everyday life, and more recently the music of Joanna Newsom. I've taught widely in both English and Writing Studies departments at a variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions, including UBC, Langara, and The King's University. My courses focus on the city in literature, technology studies, science and speculative fiction, and essay writing fundamentals.
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Ivanna Cikes
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PhD, Brandeis University
For my PhD dissertation, I examined the effect the new visual technology of photography had on American writers of the 19th and early 20th century – both in terms of how they wrote and how they saw themselves as visible public figures. My 1130 course is an outgrowth of this interest in visual culture and self-identity. In other words, the questions I find most fascinating are: how do different forms of representation in popular culture affect how we view ourselves and others? How are these representations framed and narrated? How do these views affect our understanding of the world around us? I also teach classes on Fear in Fiction (what the noir, ‘thriller,’ or suspense genres from various eras tell us about what society fears) and Gender and the Hero (a look at the role of the female hero and how this role exposes gender issues of our time). Currently, I am revising and expanding my dissertation chapters on Frederick Douglass and Henry James for conference presentations and publication.
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Lise Davidson
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PhD, University of California, Berkeley
I am also a poet, and enjoy teaching literature from the perspective of craft and technique, as well as through the lens of social and cultural history. My first collection of poetry appeared with Signature Editions in 2017. More recently, I was awarded the 2021 CBC Poetry prize for my poem “James.”
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Richa Dwor
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PhD, University of Nottingham
Before coming to Douglas College, I completed a PhD in English Literature at the University of Nottingham and I was Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Leicester. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK.
My research addresses how minorities find a literature in a majority culture. In its first phase, I specialized in Anglo-Jewish women’s writing. In my monograph, Jewish Feeling: Difference and Affect in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Women’s Writing (Bloomsbury, 2015; paperback 2017) and several articles on the subject, I brought together religion, gender, and affect studies to recover women’s theological writing in literary texts during the nineteenth century. More recently, I have broadened my scope by editing an anthology on religious feeling in the nineteenth century (Religious Feeling, Routledge 2020). The anthology decenters dominant religious groups by juxtaposing sources from a wide array of established, dissenting, and minority religions and also by prioritizing writing by women and non-white writers from across the English-speaking world. This global outlook carries through into my current project on Jewish travel writing, begun while I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. This project advances the established conversation between diaspora and migration studies and Jewish studies by examining real and fictionalized narratives of cross-cultural journeys.
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Nancy Earle
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PhD, Simon Fraser University My interests are Canadian literature and print culture. My doctoral dissertation examined the history of writers-in-residence in Canada, and I am still fascinated by what these programs can tell us about cultural policy, the relationships between creative writers and postsecondary and other institutions, and the production of Canadian literature. I recently co-edited a book, entitled The Finest Room in the Colony: The Library of John Thomas Mullock (2016), on a 19th-century library in St John’s, and I have guest edited a special issue of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada on “Book Culture in Newfoundland and Labrador” (2010). I teach Fiction and Academic Writing at Douglas College.
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Wilhelm Emilsson
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PhD, University of British Columbia My interests include 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century British and American literature and culture and how they interact with world culture. Realism, aestheticism, decadence, detective fiction, and music are of particular interest to me.
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Dorritta Fong |
MA, Queen's University Teaching Interests: Academic Writing, Fiction, Children's Literature, Postcolonial Literature. Research Interests: Gender, Popular Culture, Race, Politics.
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Kurt Klotz
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PhD, University of Glasgow My interests are in nineteenth-century American literature, as well as First Nations literature. My PhD dissertation was a single-author study on Edgar Allan Poe, with a focus on the way Poe depicts corporeal dismemberment at sites of colonial contact. I am currently working on research projects based on my doctoral thesis. Prior to working at Douglas College, I taught at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and Red Deer Polytechnic.
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Elizabeth McCausland |
PhD, University of California, Irvine Interests: 19th Century, The Novel, Critical Theory.
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Ryan Edward Miller |
PhD, Simon Fraser University My teaching interests include contemporary Canadian and American literatures. I enjoy introducing students to fiction and poetry in the classroom, particularly Canadian texts that allow us to explore relevant, interesting themes via unique lenses of experience. My current research interests involve a renewed examination of Canadian writer Robertson Davies’s religious leanings. I am also interested in peripheral or literary-adjacent figures such as Christian William (Bill) Miller, an American party boy who frequented literary circles in America in the 1940s. As Miller was often photographed, the latter has allowed me to incorporate my love of analog (film) photography.
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Jasmine Nicholsfigueiredo
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PhD, Simon Fraser University I hold a BA and BEd from Simon Fraser University, an MA from Queen's University and a PhD in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from Simon Fraser University. I am an advocate of experiential learning and promoting student engagement in the community. My research interests include Urban Liveability, Medieval and Renaissance Women’s Writing, Shakespeare, Theatre, and African Literature. In addition, I enjoy travelling and to date have incorporated that love into two separate field schools for students – The Maritime Canadian Field School held at the University of Dalhousie and the Wales Field School held at The University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
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Noëlle Phillips
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PhD, University of British Columbia My primary research area is late medieval book culture and Middle English literature, particularly William Langland's poem Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and the fifteenth-century political adaptations of John Lydgate's poetry. However, I am also very interested in "medievalisms" – how later readers, including modern ones, understand, re-imagine, and use the medieval period. In my teaching, I enjoy using our understanding or interpretation of the past to illuminate our experience of the present. This interest in medievalism led me to study the history of beer brewing and the use of medieval images in modern beer marketing. I have now written and co-edited two academic books on craft beer marketing and medieval beer history, and my newest book (for a public audience) is about the history of craft beer in Vancouver. Before coming to Douglas in 2015, I taught various introductory and upper-level courses at SFU and UBC and I completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies. I'm an Honorary Affiliate Instructor at UBC and a regular writer for the BC Ale Trail Blog and The Growler craft beer magazine. I am also a provisional judge under the Beer Judge Certification Program and I've passed the first level of the Cicerone program (it's like a beer sommelier!).
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Konstantinos Pozoukidis
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PhD, University of Maryland, College Park
My work focuses on human and nonhuman survival in the late 18th-century and early 19th-century poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. I am interested in survival as the ineradicable remainder of disaster and its relation to queerness, disability, and Blackness. My writing examines how these socio-historical formations affect narrative and genre, reshape thought, and contribute to new resistance practices in the work of Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Mary Prince.
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Eve Preus
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PhD, University of British Columbia My scholastic degrees revolved around poetry and poetics, Shakespeare, theatrical phenomenology, and rhetoric. My interest in literary imagination emerged from creative proclivities as a child and developed into a larger philosophical fascination with illusion. How does the production of illusion generate a kind of freedom? I imagine my own teaching to be another apprenticeship in this inquiry.
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Leni Robinson |
PhD, University of British Columbia Teaching Interests: Fiction, poetry, literature prior to the eighteenth century, Canadian literature, academic writing. Research Interests: Seventeenth-century literature; natural philosophy; vitalism in both early modern and recent literature; the relationship between Nature, the self and the sense of place in literature; dance history in literature.
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Louise Saldanha
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PhD, University of Calgary Research areas include the following: critical approaches to young people’s texts and cultures, race, pedagogy, space, diaspora, indigeneity, and gender in both Canadian and international contexts. Teaching areas include the following: children’s literature, Canadian literature, Aboriginal literature, critical theory, gender studies, postcolonial literature, popular culture, critical disability, academic writing.
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Fei Shi (石飛)
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PhD, University of California, Davis
As a writer, scholar, artist, and educator, I grew up in Shanghai China where I completed my B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Fudan University (Shanghai, China). There, as an undergraduate student, I co-created a theatre company that still actively produces plays today. I finished my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis with designated emphases in Women and Gender Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Critical Theory. My teaching and research interests are: history of drama and transnational performances, film studies, contemporary racialized women and queer writers, and Chinese language and culture. I am extremely grateful to live on Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen island) – the land of the traditional unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and to enjoy hectic and beautiful family life while teaching and mentoring a young generation of thoughtful and inspired learners at Douglas College.
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Naava Smolash
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PhD, Simon Fraser University Research areas include contemporary Canadian literature, poetry and poetics, nationalism, race theory, and print news media. My work appears in academic and popular publications including Studies in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, the University of Toronto Quarterly's special issue Discourses of Security, "Peacekeeping" Narratives and the Cultural Imagination in Canada, West Coast Line, LitHub, Room Magazine, and Briarpatch. My essay "The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture" is used in classrooms and counselling centres worldwide. Recent projects include Turn This World Inside Out (AK Press, 2019), papers on representations of land, nation, and borders in Canadian fiction, examining Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House, Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach and Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller, and a speculative fiction novella entitled Cipher.
I teach:
Previously, I taught:
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Mike Stachura
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PhD, Simon Fraser University My interests include Scottish, Arctic, and Frontier Literature. My doctoral dissertation examined the links between modern Scottish Literature and the emerging field of ‘Arctic Discourses’. I love any genre of literature that is dark, growly, and full of grit. I think Cormac McCarthy is wonderful. My teaching interests here at Douglas are Academic Writing, Fiction, and British Literature.
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Ryan Stephenson
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PhD, University of Ottawa I’ve been teaching English courses at Douglas College for over a decade now. My research interests include Victorian popular literacy and representations of reading and writing in fiction, journalism, and educational works. Outside of teaching, I’m a member of the executive for the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada (VSAWC), and I’m on the editorial board at Victorian Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Victorian Studies.
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Diane Stiles
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PhD, University of British Columbia I have taught English at Douglas since 2002. For the past few years I have been teaching the preparatory course (1099) for Academic Writing (1130), and both second year survey courses (2116 and 2117: “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf”). I have also been developing and teaching a first year literature course (1102) that explores social, psychological, existential and scientific/medical constructs of identity.
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Nate Szymanski
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PhD, Simon Fraser University My research analyses ideas of community, rivalry, and fellowship in Renaissance poetry and drama, and my work has appeared in publications such as Spenser Review and English Literary Renaissance. A recent area of scholarly interest is in depictions of sport and competition in literature, a focus that combines my love of books with my past experiences playing hockey. While my research centers on the Renaissance, I enjoy teaching a range of topics, including contemporary Canadian fiction, animal and ecological literature, and the contemporary essay. Prior to teaching at Douglas, I taught English literature and/or writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Simon Fraser University, and Concordia University.
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Kim Trainor
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PhD, McGill University My teaching interests include poetry, poetics, ecopoetics, climate justice, science fiction, and world literature with a particular focus on ecology, the wild, war, and the body. I teach literature from the perspective once voiced by Adrienne Rich: "I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary" (What is Found There). I'm on the DCFA and FPSE’s climate action committees. I've also taught at McGill, Concordia, and UBC (for 12 years).
I'm a poet. My most current book of poetry is A thin fire runs through me, (ice house poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2023). My second book of poetry, Ledi (Book*hug, 2018), was a finalist for the League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award. A blueprint for survival is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in 2024. It documents organisms and human artefacts which offer resilience in the face of climate change. I also make collaborative poetry films with Douglas College faculty member Hazel Fairbairn. I write poetry reviews and essays for ARC Poetry Magazine and Prism Online, and help to run the Poets Corner Reading Series (poetscorner.ca). I’m currently working on a scholarly monograph on ecopoetics.
Please note: I will be on educational leave in the Fall of 2023. Courses I teach:
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Faculty Emeriti
Susan Briggs | MA, University of British Columbia
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Lorna McCallum |
PhD, University of Alberta
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Susan McCaslin |
PhD, University of British Columbia
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Susan Wasserman |
MA, University of British Columbia
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