Alessandra Capperdoni | alessandra_capperdoni@sfu.ca

I was born in Italy, where I studied Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (English, German, French, and Italian Studies). My stream focused on the methodologies of history, philology, and continental philosophy within the study of literature. My specialty was modernist and avant-garde studies, but I felt that the European focus of my department was too limiting and so in 1999 I came to SFU with a Government of Canada Award for Foreign Nationals to work on a one-year research project on North American “open poetics.” My PhD in English focused on experimental writing in Canada in the long poem genre and the politics of form in relation to space, nation, and global capital.

I have taught a wide range of courses in the departments of English and Women’s Studies at SFU, where I was Ruth Wynn Woodward Lecturer in 2009-2010, before joining the Department of Humanities. My research focuses on modern and contemporary studies in literature and culture, theory, and psychoanalysis, as well as translation in poetics and practice. I am particularly interested in examining how literary and cultural texts register, problematize, and critique social and economic determinants; how they orientate us toward our world; how they address embodiment and materiality; and how they contribute to the production of social links with human and non-human worlds.  

I am currently working on a manuscript on post-1960s Canadian poetics in the context of the social imaginaries that emerged at the intersection of nationalism and globalization and a second manuscript on women’s avant-garde writing and feminist phenomenology in Canada. A third project on culture and violence is at the early stages, fostered by the research cluster on Memory and Trauma with Eirini Kotsovili and James Horncastle.

Niall Mackenzie | niall_mackenzie@sfu.ca

Niall MacKenzie holds an undergraduate degree in History from Washington and Lee University and a doctorate in English from the University of Cambridge, where he was among the last research students to be supervised by the late Howard Erskine-Hill.  Before coming to SFU, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UBC. Niall’s publications on literary-historical matters have appeared in a number of journals and edited collections, including Scottish Gaelic Studies, Éigse, Studia Neophilologica, The Review of English Studies, and The Age of Johnson.  He is a grandson of Kate MacKenzie (Caitrìona Uilleim Iain mhic Artair, 1876-1979), a noted Cape Breton Island tradition bearer.

Antone Lanatà Minard | antone_minard@sfu.ca

Antone's background is in the field of traditional narrative and its intersection with ancient, medieval, and oral literatures. His specialty is Celtic-language literature, particularly Welsh, though he has also published on Old Irish and Breton. His current research involves the supernatural in Welsh culture, and through that he is involved with the Mari Lwyd revival at the Vancouver Welsh Society, where he also teaches the Welsh language.