Dr. Amy De’Ath has an international reputation as a poet and her doctoral dissertation, Unsociable Poetry: Antagonism and Abstraction in Contemporary Feminized Poetics, provides new insights into the long-standing debate over the relationships between culture and capital in a moment of protracted economic crisis.

Dr. De’Ath came to SFU from the UK, where she worked for a publishing company, after receiving her MA in Publishing at University College London and BA (1st with distinction) in American Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. 

During her doctoral studies, she received a number of internal graduate fellowships totalling $129,310, and completed two research residencies, one at the Banff Centre, as a Fleck Fellow at the Leighton Colony for the Arts, the other at University of Alberta as part of Banff Research on Culture. She also received a prestigious Study Abroad Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (UK). 

Her joint supervisors, Dr. Jeff Derksen and Dr. Stephen Collis, say that Dr. De'Ath's dissertation will "be instrumental in shaping literary studies". Dr. Derksen adds that it “literally opens the way toward a new and necessary critical paradigm for reading poetry in relation to contemporary capitalism."

Dr. De’Ath has also co-edited poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. with Fred Wah, the former Poet Laureate of Canada, published two refereed articles, as well as nine articles and reviews in other venues before completing her groundbreaking dissertation. She has also presented papers in conferences and colloquia across Canada, the United States, and in the UK, and given many public talks and poetry readings.

She says, "I would like to thank my supervisors, Steve Collis and Jeff Derksen, for all their guidance, support, and friendship throughout my time at SFU and in Vancouver. In addition I'd like to thank my committee member, Carolyn Lesjak, for her razor-sharp feedback, and Jaleh Mansoor, for her encouragement. I've been lucky to have a committee who care about the intellectual, material, and political dilemmas facing junior scholars working in the humanities today. I also want to thank my family, especially my parents and Sean O'Brien, for their constant love. And I'd like to acknowledge my position as a settler on the still-occupied and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples."