Paul Crowe
Department Chair; Associate Professor
BA, MA (Calgary), MA, PhD (UBC)
Homepage
AQ 5113
778-782-3406
pcrowe@sfu.ca

Paul Crowe’s research is divided between classical textual work, principally in the Ming dynasty (1398-1644) Daoist Canon, and studies of modern sprit-writing (Cant. fugei) altars in Hong Kong and Canada, and Chinese Buddhist organizations in British Columbia. The former work examines Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1279-1368) dynasty Golden Elixir alchemy traditions of the Jiangnan region of China in which Literati (Ru) and Buddhist ideas are blended. The latter area concerns altars dedicated to communication with Lü Dongbin, one of the famous “eight transcendents” widely revered in Hong Kong and south China. Crowe has a keen interest in cross-cultural dialogue between Chinese and European domains of thought.

Crowe served as director of the SFU David Lam Centre for International Communication for seven years and is editor of the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies and associated CJBS News Blog.

Areas of teaching: Daoist history; contemporary Buddhist ethics; Confucian ideals in the context of modern Asia as they relate to education, feminism, property rights, constitutional democracy, justice; multiculturalism policy in Canada. Courses frequently include a comparative element based on reference to and discussion of European and North American philosophical traditions. Students are encouraged to write comparative papers drawing on the diverse fields of exploration constituting their undergraduate education.

Publication information is available through the “Homepage” link above.

Alessandra Capperdoni
Limited-Term Instructor, January 2017 to December 2018
BA, MA, Foreign Languages and Literatures (Bologna)
PhD, English,(SFU)

Alessandra teaches courses on modern and contemporary literature, literary and critical theory (semiotics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and Feminism), ancient Greek epic and theatre, and Italian Renaissance poetry and art.

She is currently working on a book manuscript, Shifting Geographies: Poetics of Citizenship in the Age of Global Modernity. A second project examines the role of literature and culture in relation to war and violence. Articles have appeared in Translation Effects: The Making of Modern Canadian Culture; Tracing the Line: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki; Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard; Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada; Translating from the Margins/ Traduire des marges; Convergence and Divergence in North America: Canada and the United States; and the journals Canadian Literature Journal, Open Letter, TTR: Traduction, traductologie, redaction, and West Coast Line.

Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon
Professor
PhD (University of California, San Diego). Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees (University of Paris)
AQ 5111
778-782-3763
afeenber@sfu.ca

My main scholarly interests in the field of comparative literature has been the theory of the novel. Over the years, I have given presentations on my research at numerous academic conferences, several of which were  published as articles. My main theoretical interest lies in understanding the relation between the novel and society generally. However, this involves understanding the relation between form and value in the novel, which I believe is essential to ground the interpretation of fiction. I rely on the work done in critical theory, among others, by Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Bakhtin and Todorov, who bring to bear formal approaches to further their understanding of the mediations between the novel and the wider historical context. I give a yearly paper on this research, the latest two entitled, “Adorno and Kafka” (2014) and  “Walter Benjamin on Goethe’s ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften.’ (2015)  This article is under review for publication. I plan to give a talk on Walter Benjamin and Proust in May 2016 at the Rome Critical Theory Conference.

Areas of Teaching: the Enlightenment, 19th & 20th c. European fiction, history

Publications: translation of book by Marcel Hénaff, The City in the Making (La cité à venire), October 2015, Rowman and Littlefield, London, New-York.

Translation of book by Michel Serres, Eyes, (Yeux), October 2015, Bloomsbury
Translation of book by Augustin Berque, Poétique de la Terre, 2014 Belin, Paris

Paul Edward Dutton, FRSC, FMAA
Graduate Chair; Professor
Fellow, Royal Society of Canada; Fellow, Medieval Academy of America; Jack and Nancy Farley University Professor in History (2005-2015)
B.A. (Hons.) UWO, MA PhD Toronto, MSL MSD Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
AQ5125
dutton@sfu.ca

In 1974 as a green and faltering undergraduate at the University of Western Ontario, I first became smitten by the early Middle Ages. That summer I had chanced upon a small, but exquisite exhibition of early medieval ivory carvings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in quite another London. One can still remember, as though it were yesterday, the darkened room, the pale white light cast, seemingly by the ivories themselves, and the sinuous figures impressed with symbols that stepped forth from the bones. What struck me then and fascinates me still was the crystallization of image and idea in wordless objects suggesting other worlds of ideas, people, and materialities that belonged to some misty long ago far removed from the modern world of barking klaxons and impatient taxi cabs rushing along Cromwell Road outside. My chief guide into this early medieval world was the towering Irish thinker, Eriugena, who was little known at the time. Decades later, I still cleave to the same insistent drum and remain haunted by many of the same questions, for the study of the deep, wide, and often surprising Middle Ages can be intoxicating. One just never knows what new thing, what new understanding, what new insight will slowly or suddenly force itself upon the mind of the alert observer. Together with my students, both undergraduate and graduate, I like to seize upon some unusual or remarkable thing (a puzzling phrase or fact, a curious image, a telling incident) and to employ it as a key to open up a document and so the world from which it came. Behind such strange things swirl constellations of people and events worth knowing for what they tell us about their world, and ours. My publications, I trust, tell the same story. My most recent article, “The Desert War of a Carolingian Monk” manifests the method and will, I hope, one day appear  in a collection of such studies tentatively called Minima Mediaevalia: The Least Little Medieval Things.

Areas of Teaching: Western Civilization, History of the Book, Medieval Studies, Carolingian Civilization, the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Microhistory and Micro-Medieval Studies, the Strange and Wonderful World of Pieter Bruegel 

Publications: The Glosae super Platonem of Bernard of Chartres (1991); The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (1994); The Autograph of Eriugena (1996) with Edouard Jeauneau; The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (1997) with Herbert L. Kessler; Charlemagne’s Courtier: The Complete Einhard (1998); Charlemagne’s Mustache (2004); and Many Europes: Choice and Chance in Western Civilization (2013) with Suzanne Marchand. 

“The Desert War of a Carolingian Monk,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.1 (2017) Special Issue: Microhistory and the Historical Imagination: New Frontiers, ed. Thomas Robisheaux and Thomas V. Cohen with István M. Szijártó, pp. 75-120. 

“The Identification of Persons in Frankish Europe,” Early Medieval Europe 26 (2018), forthcoming.

Series Editor: Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures (University of Toronto Press, 1993-), 19 volumes; Companions to Medieval Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2013-), 2 volumes; Rethinking the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2004-), 3 volumes.

Samir Gandesha 
Associate Professor
BA (UBC), MA, PHD (York)
HomePage
AQ 5113
778-782-5855
gandesha@sfu.ca

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique,  Constellations,Logos, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, Radical Philosophy, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012). He is co-editor (with Johan Hartle) of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) also with Johan Hartle. He regularly contributes to openDemocracy,Canadian Dimension, the Vancouver Sunand the Globe and Mail. In the Spring of 2017, he was the Liu Boming Visiting Scholar in Philosophy at the University of Nanjing and Visiting Lecturer at Suzhou University of Science and Technology in China. In February, 2019, he was Visiting Lecturer at Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas - FFLCH-USP(Universidade de São Paulo). He is currently editing a book entitled Spectres of Fascism (Pluto Press) that, in part, stems from an Institute Free School co-organized with Stephen Collis in 2017, co-editing with Peyman Vahabzadeh a Festschrift for Ian Angus and preparing a manuscript on the “Neoliberal Personality.”

Shuyu Kong
Professor
BA and MA, Peking University; Ph.D, University of British Columbia
Publications details at Academia.edu (http://sfu.academia.edu/shuyukong)
AQ 5121
778-782-9219
shuyu_kong@sfu.ca

Shuyu Kong teaches and researches in Chinese literary and cultural studies and Asian Diaspora studies.

Besides numerous articles in referred journals such as Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Asian Cinema, China Journal, and Modern Chinese Literature & Culture, Shuyu is the author of two books: Consuming Literature: Bestsellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2005), and Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2014). She also co-translated one collection of short stories from Chinese Beijing Women: Stories, (MerwinAsia, 2014).

Shuyu Kong is also actively involved in international research exchanges and collaborations. She was a visiting fellow at National Chengchi University (2016), Zhejiang University (2015), Leiden University (2013), Australia National University (2012) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011).

David Mirhady
Undergraduate Chair; Professor 
BA, MA UBC, PhD Rutgers, in Classics
AQ5122
778-782-3906
dmirhady@sfu.ca

My research spans several related fields: Greek rhetoric, law, and the school of Aristotle. It began with a dissertation on the political and legal writings of Aristotle's student Theophrastus. In order to get a background for that I looked at Aristotle's approach to legal argumentation in his Rhetoric, which led to articles on the parallel accounts of argumentation on documentary forms of evidence in the Rhetoric, its contemporary, the Rhetoric to Alexander, and in the Athenian orators, the speeches of one of whom, Isocrates, I translated. I have also continued my interests in the parallels between the Rhetoric and the Rhetoric to Alexander , which led to a Loeb translation of the latter, and in other students of Aristotle, the Peripatetics, including Dicaearchus, Hieronymus, Phaenias, Clearchus, and now Critolaus. HomePage

Areas of teaching: Classical Mythology, Greek tragedy, Greek law, Greek rhetoric

Publications: "Ethos in On the Crown ," in Demosthenes' "On the Crown": Rhetorical Perspectives, ed. by James J. Murphy, 2016, pp. 114-29.

"Urbane Expressions in Aristotle and Anaximenes," Papers on Rhetoric XIII 2016 257-88.

Nomoi, A Bibliographical Web Site on Ancient Greek Law www.sfu.ca/nomoi In collaboration with Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Athens, Greece.

Languages: Ancient Greek, Latin

Emily O'Brien
Associate Professor (joint appointment with History)
BA (UofT), MA, PhD (Brown)
AQ6240
778-782-3150
eobrien@sfu.ca

Renaissance Italy is the focus of Emily’s teaching in the Humanities Department and her central field of research. She teaches both lecture and seminar courses on Italian Renaissance art and literature (HUM 211, 311 and 312-W). Her research centers primarily on fifteenth-century Italian humanism and on the extensive writings of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II, 1458-64). She has published articles on Pius’s literary and historical works and is currently completing her book manuscript on his autobiography and a Latin-English edition of his and other humanists’ novelle. Her new research project focuses on Renaissance Italian historical epics.

Stephen Collis
Professor, English
BA (UVic), PhD (SFU)
AQ 6108
scollis@sfu.ca

Stephen Collis’s many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), DECOMP (with Jordan Scott—Coach House 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talon Books 2016—nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. Almost Islands is a forthcoming memoir, and a long poem, Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written, is in progress. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

Evdoxios Doxiadis
Assistant Professor, History
BA (Tufts), MBA (U of Glasgow), PhD (Berkeley)
AQ 6198
edoxiadi@sfu.ca

Evdoxios Doxiadis is an assistant professor in history at Simon Fraser University. His research is on Greek, Balkan and Mediterranean history with a focus on the 18^th and 19^th centuries and a particular interest in questions of gender, law, state formation, and minorities. He has published two monographs The Shackles of Modernity: Women, Property, and the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Greek State 1750-1850 (2011), and State, Nationalism and the Jewish Communities of Modern Greece (2018), a co-edited volume with Aimee Placas Living under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis (2018).