Supervision & Research Areas

Research Areas

• auto/biography, life writing, nonfiction, diary, automedia

• literature and culture in Canada (settler and Indigenous)

• book history, especially publishing history

• mountaineering and gender

• popular culture: print, analog and digital

Supervision

I can supervise Ph.D theses in the following areas: autobiography, life writing and memoir studies, biography studies; cultural studies and popular culture; critical theory; feminist theory, English Canadian literature (especially minority writing); mountaineering writing and culture; the Doukhobors, cyberculture and book history. The Ph.D students I have supervised or am currently supervising are working in these areas: Anne Carson, pedagogy and eros, Caribbean life writing,  Indigenous and settler life writing and performance art in Canada, sexual violence and American memoir, trans memoir and performance, digital travel life writing, memoirs by breast cancer survivors,  Asian Canadian SF and YA writing, utopian landscape in feminist Canadian writing, and Canadian women's political memoir. I serve on many Ph.D dissertation committees at the University of Alberta.

I have supervised M.A. theses and have evaluated M.A. projects in the following areas: Japanese manga, anime and social trauma, queer creative nonfiction on the Canadian prairies, Indigenous comics and reconciliation discourse, Patrick Lane's There is a Season, The limits of "Gender Identity Disorder" in light of queer theory, Gertrude Stein and autobiography, blogs as corporate learning tools, mountaineering writing and Gilles Deleuze, Doukhobor youth culture, feminism and Louise Erdrich, mountaineering literature and postcolonial theory, Oprah Winfrey as a public intellectual, Indigenous life writing, blogs and personal identity, Canadian theatre history, blogs and feminist health issues.

I have supervised Honors Tutorials and directed readings on the following topics: memoir and OCD, Metis memoir and gender theory, Jean Baudrillard and social media networks, post-feminism and sex work, fan fiction, queer theory and horror fiction, trauma theory, Jacques Derrida, Alice Munro, Walter Benjamin and the city, mountaineering writing, Canadian women's autobiography, women's autobiography, postcolonial Canadian literature, utopian literature, gender and mainstream radio.