Additional teaching interests

Topics

Dante; Medieval romances and courtly poetry (Italian, French, and Germanic); The Italian Renaissance; History of Art from the 1200s to the Modern Age; Classical Mythology (Greek and Latin) and Germanic/Scandinavian Mythology

Affiliations

Research

• Memory and Trauma. Research Cluster of the Department of Humanities and Hellenic Studies Program at Simon Fraser University. Co-organizer with Eirini Kotsovili and James Horncastle.
• Research Project on Translation Studies for the Bibliography of Comparative Studies in Canadian, Quebec and Foreign Literatures in collaboration with the University of Sherbrooke (http://ccl.flsh.usherb.ca). 2002 - 2014. Director: Prof. Kathy Mezei.

Other academic

• Book Review Editor of the journal Postcolonial Text (www.postcolonial.org) since 2010
• Section Editor of the journal Postcolonial Text (www.postcolonial.org) since 2019

Publications

Journal articles

• 2020. “Noli me tangere: The Art of Parasitology in the Time of Coronavirus.” Contours (Spring). Forthcoming.
• 2014. “George Bowering’s Poetry as Cultural Poetics.” TCR: The Capilano Review 3.24 (Fall): 155-160.
• 2011. “Why the Avant Garde? The Function of the Letter in Canadian Avant-Garde Poetics.” Special issue on Contemporary Poetics. Ed. Clint Burnham and Christine Stewart.  Canadian Literature 210/211 (Autumn/Winter): 97-114.
• 2011. “Theorizing the Letter: Steve McCaffery’s Writing as Analytic Discourse.” Special issue ‘Breakthrough Nostalgia: Reading Steve McCaffery Then and Now.’ Ed. Stephen Cain. Open Letter 14.7 (Fall): 72-90.
• 2010. “Feminist Poetics as Avant-Garde Poetics.” Special Issue ‘Kootenay School of Writing.’ Ed. Gregory Betts and Robert Stacey. Open Letter 14.3 (Summer): 33-51.
• 2008. “Feminist Progenies — Unlawful Citizenship: Reproduction, Technology and the Spectres of the Nation in Margaret Atwood and Larissa Lai.” Special Issue on Citizenship and Cultural Belonging in Canadian Literature. Ed. Sophie McCall and David Chariandy. West Coast Line 59 / 42.3 (Fall): 44-60.
• 2008. “Acts of Passage: Women Writing Translation in Canada.” TTR: Traduction, Traductologie, Rédaction XX.1 (Spring). 245-279.

Book chapters

• 2021. “‘Does the Animal Desire?’ Or, Philosophy and the Lacanian Subject.” Lacan and the Environment. Eds. Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury. Palgrave. Forthcoming.
• 2014. “1989: The Heyday of Feminist Translational Poetics in Canada: Tessera’s Spring Issue on La Traduction au féminin comme réécriture.” Translation Effects: The Making of Modern Canadian Culture. Ed. Kathy Mezei, Sherry Simon and Louise Von Flotow. Montreal and Kingston: McGill and Queen’s UP.
• 2013. “Atti di Passaggio: scrittura-traduzione femminile in Canada,” [Acts of Passage: Women’s Translational Writing in Canada], ed. Deborah Saidero. Udine, Italy: Forum. 149-180.
• 2013. “‘This thing called language’: Reading and Writing in the Classroom.” Tracing the Line: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki. Ed. Maia Joseph, Christine Kim, Chris Lee, and Larissa Lai. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks. 172-181.
• 2013. “‘Voyage autour de la traduction’: The Translator as Writer and Theorist.”  Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard. Ed. Ray Ellenwood, Jennifer Henderson, Eva Karpinski, and Ian Sowton. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP.
• 2012. “‘Phoenicia ≠ Lebanon’ : Transsexual Poetics as Poetics of the Body within and across the Nation.” Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity in Canada. Eds. Melina Baum Singer, Christine Kim, and Sophie McCall. TransCanada Series. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP. 207-228.
• 2007. “Wanderings of Language: Intimate Translations in Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers.” Translating from the Margins / Traduire des marges. Ed. Denise Merkle, Jane Koustas, Glen Nichols and Sherry Simon. Quebec: Nota Bene. 291-309.
• 2006. “Im/political Acts: Re-Siting Canadian Writing.” Convergence and Divergence in North America: Canada and the United States, eds. Karl Froschauer and Nadine Fabbi. Publication of Conference Proceedings. Vancouver: Centre for Canadian Studies, Simon Fraser University. 707-714.

Short articles and encyclopedia entries

• 2007. “Carlo Emilio Gadda.” Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael D. Sollers. New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 081-60-62331. 285-287.
• 2007. “Natalia Ginzburg.” Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael D. Sollers. New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 081-60-62331. 304-306.
• 2007. “Leonardo Sciascia.” Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael D. Sollers. New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 081-60-62331. 715-716.
• 2007. “Italo Svevo.” Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael D. Sollers. New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 081-60-62331. 779-781.
• 2007. “Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.” Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael D. Sollers. New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 081-60-62331. 444-446.
• 2007. “The Leopard (Il Gattopardo).” Compendium of Twentieth Century World Novelists and Novels. Ed. Michael D. Sollers. New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 081-60-62331. 455-456.

Book reviews

• 2020. “Long Poems, Serial Poems: On Writing Writing.” Review of Taking Measures: Selected Serial Poems, by George Bowering; Steve Collis, ed. Canadian Literature. Web excerpt. Pending print publication due to Covid-19.
• 2020. “‘The lemon is not a lemon’: Flowing Letters for Our Time.” Review of Flow: Poems Collected and New, by Roy Miki; Michael Barnholden, ed. Canadian Literature (Spring). 17 Jan. 2020. Web excerpt. Pending print publication due to Covid-19.
• 2019. Review of Duets by Ted Byrne (poetry translation). TCR 3.38 (Spring). 105-107.
• 2016. Review of Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom by Allison Pease and Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 88 (Fall 2015/Winter 2016): 39-40.
• 2014. “Avant, Again.” Review of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations by Gregory Betts (Author) and Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde by Peter Quartermain (Author). In “Recursive Time.” Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 222 (Autumn): 125-27.
• 2013. “Critical Dis/Orientations”: Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature, by George Elliott Clarke. Canadian Literature 217 (Summer), Gendering the Archive: 140-42.
• 2013. Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal, and Arun Mukherjee. Chimo 65 (Spring): 7-13.
• 2013. Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation, by Eva C. Karpinski.
  Life Writing 10.2 (Special Issue: Women’s Life Writing and Diaspora): 231-36.
• 2013. “Getting High on Writing”: Horizontal Surfaces and How I Wrote Certain of My Books, by George Bowering. Canadian Literature 216 (Spring): 150-51.
• 2011. “The Trials of Translation: Psychoanalysis and Islam”: Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, by Fethi Benslama. Reviews in Cultural Theory 2.1 (Winter/Spring): 57-62.
• 2008. “Rethinking Difference and the Body of the Nation”: Cannibal Democracy: Race and Representation in the Literature of the Americas, by Zita Nunes. Postcolonial Text 4.4 (Fall): 1-4.

Conference organizer (Simon Fraser University)

• November 29, 2019. Theodor W. Adorno: Fifty Years After His Death. Symposium co-organized with Samir Gandesha. Keynote speaker: Shierry Weber Nicholsen.
• October 19-21, 2018. Antonio Gramsci: A Legacy for the Future? Principal organizer. Steering committee with Ian Angus and Samir Gandesha. Keynote speakers: Giuseppe Vacca (Former President of the Gramsci Institute, Rome), Peter Ives (Winnipeg), and Michael Denning (Yale).
• December 1-2, 2017. Psychoanalysis and Marxism: Conjunctions and Disjunctions. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. Principal organizer. Keynote speakers: Andrew Feenberg, Jerry Zaslove, and Samir Gandesha.
• July 21, 2015. Love and Jouissance: Conversations with Lacan on Feminine Sexuality. Panel of five speakers. Co-organized with Hilda Fernandez and the Lacan Salon Society, Vancouver.
• June 23-26, 2005. TransCanada: Literature, Institutions, Citizenship Interdisciplinary Conference. Co-organizer.
• September 2003. Brave New Wor(l)ds: Re-thinking National Consciousness. Graduate Conference. Co-organizer.

Invited talks

• January 2020. “Re-visitations of Greek Myth: The (O)ther Desires of Antigone and Medea.” Invited talk. Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies Spring 2020 Seminar Series, Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University, January 24.
• February 2018. “Poetic Work as Labour: Value and Aesthetics for a History of the Present.” Invited talk. Brave New Work: Art, Labour and the Future of Work. Symposium organized by the Institute of Humanities, SFU. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, SFU. March 3 and 4.
• February 2016. “What Does the Unconscious Know About Capitalism? : One-Way Feminist Speculations on Affect, Anxiety, and Love in the Age of Neoliberalism.” Invited Talk. Institute of Humanities, Harbour Centre, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C.

Conference presentations

• May 2019. “‘Can the Animal Speak?’ Or, Non-Human Animals between Poverty and the World.” Delivered Paper. CACLALS, Congress CSSH 2019, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
• April 2018. “Does the Animal Desire? Or, The Animal Question and the Lacanian Subject.” Delivered paper. LaConference 2018: Lacan and the Environment. Conference organized by the Lacan Salon Vancouver. Keynote speaker: Todd McGowan. Western Front, Vancouver B.C., April 6 and 7.
• July 2016. “Love, Hate, and Inauthenticity in Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca: Literature as Clinical Practice.” APW 14th Annual Conference ‘On Love,’ in affiliation with the Lacan Salon Vancouver. Woodwards Centre (Goldcorp), Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• July 2015. “Love after Lacan: Women, Loss and Melancholia.” Panel on Love and Jouissance: Conversations with Lacan on Feminine Sexuality. Lacan Salon, Vancouver, in collaboration with the Institute of Humanities, Harbour Centre, Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• January 2015. “Coastal Zones: Canadian Writing and the Eco-Critical Imagination.” Coastal Canada session, organized by Jennifer Blair, MLA Annual Conference, Vancouver, B.C.
• November 2014. “‘But What of the City Itself?’Productive Labour, Anxiety, and Politics of Affect in Canadian Avant-Garde Poetics.” Symposium, Avant Canada: Artists, Prophets, Revolutionaries. Brock University, St. Catharines, ON.
• May 2014. “Unstable Territories: Ecospheres and the Borders of the Nation.” Panel on Contesting Publics with Christine Kim and Sophie McCall.  CALA Annual Conference, CSSH, Brock University, ON.
• June 2013. “‘A Fair Prospect of Doing Well in Canada’:  Virginia Woolf’s Writing as General Economy.” Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader: The 23^rd Annual Virginia Woolf Conference. Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• May 2013. “Feminine Sublime and the Subject of Jouissance in Anne Carson’s Decreation.” Panel on ‘Novelties of the Sublime’ in Contemporary Poetry organized by Malcolm Woodland and Andrew DuBois (U of Toronto). ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, U of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.
• March 2013. “Postcolonial Ecologies and the Novel: Failed States, Ecocide, and Environmental Racism in Nuruddin Farah’s Work.” Literature, Liberation, and the Law: The 39th Annual meeting of the African Literature Association. College of Charleston, Charleston, SC.
• June 2012. “Writing in a Time of War: Virginia Woolf’s War Novels between Anamorphosis and the Void.” Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary Woolf: The 22nd Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK.
• April 2012. “Human Rights or Environmental Justice? Nuruddin Farah’s Postcolonial Ecologies.” Human Rights, Literature, and the Visual Arts in Africa and the Diaspora: The 38th Annual Meeting of the African Literature Association, Dallas, TX.
• May 2011. “Ecologies of Life: Nuruddin Farah’s Somalia and the ‘Failed State’ Economy.” CACLALS Annual Conference, CSSH, Fredericton, N.B.
• May 2011. “Bodies of Desire: Sexology and Queergenders in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.” Panel on Sexology and Literature organized by Terrie Goldie (York U). ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, Fredericton, N.B.
• May 2011. “‘Untied Knot/s’: Memory and Poetic Form in Roy Kiyooka’s Writings.” Panel on Aesthetics, Arts and Poetics in Asian North American Literature, organized by J.Z.M Chen and Wei Li (Inner Mongolia U).  ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, Fredericton, N.B.
• April 2011. “Ecologies of Life: Nuruddin Farah’s Somalia and the ‘Failed State’ Economy.” African Literature, Visual Arts & Film In Local and Transnational Spaces: The 37th Annual African Literature Association Conference, Ohio U, Athens, OH.
• March 2011. “The Immigrant Thing: Arts, the Real, and Diasporic Flows.” LaConference. 1^st Annual conference on Jacques Lacan, organized by the Lacan Salon, Vancouver B.C.
• November 2010. Is there a Future for Women’s Literature in Modernist Studies? Seminar organized by Mark Hussey and Jane Garrity. MSA: Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Modernist Networks, Victoria U, B.C.
• November 2010. “Une lettre d’âmour: Trans-lating Experimentation in Nicole Brossard, Erin Mouré, and Robert Majzels.” Panel on Quebec Literature and Translation, organized by Gillian Lane-Mercier (McGill). ACQS: Biennial Conference of the American Council for Quebec Studies, Burlington, Vermont.
• July 2010. “Cells and Citizens: (Re)production, Subjectivity, and Technoscience in Larissa Lai’s Feminist Writing.” Contemporary Women's Writing: New Texts, Approaches, and Technologies. CWWN: The Third Biennial International Conference of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Network, San Diego University, San Diego CA.
• June 2010. “to yield, to change”: Charles Olson’s Poetics and the Question of the Feminine. Charles Olson Centenary Conference. Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• May 2010. “Culture and the Ecocritical Imagination.” CACLALS Annual Conference, Concordia U, Montreal, QC.
• May 2010. “Theorizing the Letter: Steve McCaffery’s Writing as Analytic Discourse.” Panel on Steve McCaffery’s Poetics, organized by Clint Burnham (SFU). ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, Concordia U, Montreal, QC.
• April 2010. “My Body Knowing”: Witnessing, Truth, and Jouissance in Marie Clement’s Theatre.” Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair Symposium: Unpacking the Indigenous Female Body. Organized by Dana Claxton. Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• April 2010. “Cells and Citizens: Feminist Desires and Bios at the Turn of the Century.” Ruth Wynn Woodward Lecture Series. Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• July 2009. “‘Trans like Whom?’ Trans Poetics as Re-articulatory Poetics.” TransCanada Three: Literature, Institutions, Citizenship, Mount Allison U, Sackville, NB.
• June 2009. “Feminist Geographies in Virginia Woolf’s London Scenes.” Woolf and the City: The19th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference. Fordham U, New York, NY.
• May 2009. “Feminist Poetics as Avant-Garde Poetics.” Panel on KSW Poetics, organized by Clint Burnham (SFU). ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, Carleton U, Ottawa, ON.
• May 2009. “‘Black like Who?’ Questions of Capital in Black Canadian Literature.” Spectres and Speculations: Capital, Nations, Texts, CACLALS Annual Conference, CSSH, Carleton U, Ottawa, ON.
• April 2009. “Fluid Borders—Solid Seas: Representing Africa in Italy.” Africa and Blackness in World Literature and Visual Arts: The 35^th Annual ALA Conference, U of Vermont, Burlington, VT.
• June 2008. “‘A New Space and a New Form’: Virginia Woolf’s Re-Writing of the Maternal.” Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf: The 18th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference, U of Denver, CO.
• May 2008. “‘Hello Citizens, here is your room’: Contemporary Poetics and the Queering of Spatiality.” Panel on Orientations in Canadian Literature, organized by Wendy Pearson (UWO). ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, U of British Columbia, Vancouver B.C.
• May 2008. “Culture, Spatiality and the Nation-State in the 1970s Canadian Long Poem.” Panel on “a gift of poems”: Remembering the 1970s Canadian Long Poem in English, organized by Rob Winger (Carleton). ACCUTE Annual Conference, CSSH, U of British Columbia, Vancouver B.C.
• May 2008. “‘This thing called language’: Reading and Writing in the Classroom.” Tracing the Lines, a Symposium on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki. Vancouver, B.C.
• April 2008. “Lost Geographies, Embodied Practices: The National within the Global and New Cultural Spatialities.” Arrivals and Departures: ACLA 2008 Annual Conference, Long Beach, CA.
• April 2008. “Modernity in the Feminine: African Women Writers and the Cultural.” African and African Diaspora Women Writers, Global Challenges and Cultural Identity: The 34th Annual ALA Conference, Western Illinois U, Macomb, IL.
• November 2007. “Writing as Civic Space: Erín Moure’s Citizenship Acts.” 19^th ACSUS Biennial Conference, Toronto, ON.
• October 2007. “Cultural Poetics as Global Poetics.” TransCanada Two: Literature, Institutions, Citizenship, U of Guelph, Guelph, ON.
• August 2007. “‘It Was Better To Hold Memory In Your Hand’: Cultural Memory and New Topographies of Struggle in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning and Jeanette Armstrong’s Whispering in the Shadows.” Literature for Our Times: ACLALS 14th Triennial Conference, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
• June 2007. “Citizenship Ethics in Between the Acts: Writing Affect in the Age of Terror.” Virginia Woolf: Art, Education, Internationalism: The 17^th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH.
• October 2006. “Love the Alien: Un-regulated Zones and Asian Canadian Writing.” Canadian Studies Student Forum in affiliation with the Diasporas and Discovery Annual ACS Conference, Vancouver B.C.
• June 2006. “Female Flâneurie: Feminist Spectatorship and the De-Regulation of Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and The Pargiters/The Years.” Woolfian Boundaries: The 16th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, in affiliation with the International Virginia Woolf Society and the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, U of Birmingham, U.K.
• March 2006. “Feminist Progenies – Unlawful Citizenship: Reproduction, Technology and the Spectres of the Nation in Margaret Atwood and Larissa Lai.” Gender and Citizenship: Third Annual New Scholarship in Citizenship Studies, Wayne State University, Detroit.
• November 2005. “Acts of Passage: Women Writing Translation in Canada.” 18^th ACSUS Biennial Conference, St. Louis, Missouri.
• October 2005. “Le Citoyen à venir : The Futurity of Foreignness and Derrida’s Cosmopolitanism.” Colloquium Derrida and His Legacy, Imagining Citizenship Project, Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• June 2005. “Alter/Nations – Long(ing)Poems: Desire and the Reconfiguration of the Discourse of the Nation in Experimental Canadian Poetry from 1960s to 1980s.” Research Cell Session on Citizenship and/in Literature in Global Times. TransCanada: Literature, Institutions, Citizenship Interdisciplinary Conference, Simon Fraser University, B.C. and University of Guelph, ON, The Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, Vancouver, BC.
• June 2005. “The Gender of Citizenship – The Sex of Space: Virginia Woolf’s The Years and the Politics of the Everyday.” The Art of Exploration: The 15^th Annual Conference on Virgina Woolf, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR.
• April 2005. “Alien-Nation: Cleft Tongue and the Spectre of Race.” Beyond Autoethnography: Writing Race and Ethnicity in Canada, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON.
• March 2005. “Contact Zones – Ghost Works: Diaspora and Desire in Daphne Marlatt’s (G)host Writings.” Peripheral Visions: Graduate conference, University of Sherbrooke, QC.
• March 2005. “On Swells and Surges: Pleasure-Holes and Dangerous Zones in Daphne Marlatt’s Migratory Poetic.” Colloquium Citizen: Imagination and Agency, Writer-in-Residence Program, English Department, Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• March 2005. “Wanderings of Language: Intimate Trans-lations in Edeet Ravel’s Ten Thousand Lovers.” Translating Canada/En Traduction: The Margins Talk Back/Les Marges Répondent, University of Moncton, N.B.
• October 2004. “Im/political Acts: Re/Siting Canadian Writing.” Convergence and Divergence in North America: Canada and the United States, CNS-ACSUS Conference, Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• September 2003. “Writing Citizenship in the Feminine: Performative Acts in Erin Mouré’s O Cidadàn.” Brave New Wor(l)ds: Re-thinking National Consciousness, Graduate Conference, Simon Fraser University, B.C.
• February 2003. “De-facements: Rethinking Political Identities and National Culturalism through Roy Kiyooka’s October’s Piebald Skies & Other Lacunae.” The Academy and Maps of Knowledge: An Interdisciplinary Conference, Graduate Conference, UViC, BC.
• November 2002. "Framing Roy Kiyooka: Texts, Contexts, Critical Practices". Hybridity, the Global Imaginary and Roy Kiyooka: Roundtable Discussion, Graduate Conference, UViC, B.C.
• September 2002. “The Politics of Monstrosity as a Translational Practice: Siting Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.” Intersections II: Avenues of Literary Context, Graduate Conference, Simon Fraser University, B.C.

Community outreach

• Organizer of poetry readings Third Friday Series at the People’s Co-Op Bookstore, Vancouver, in collaboration with Rolf Maurer, editor of NEW STAR BOOKS, 2017-2018.
• Member of the Lacan Salon Society (Vancouver, B.C.), http://www.lacansalon.com. Psychoanalytic study group open to the public and the academic community. Participant and part of the Board of Directors.
• Meschonnic Poetics Study Group (Vancouver, B.C.). Group open to the community for the study and discussion of poetics, literary and critical theory, and their social applications. Meets regularly every second week.

Languages

• English
• French
• German
• Italian (mother tongue)
• Spanish (reading knowledge only)