The UBC English Graduate Student Caucus, with the support of the Department of English Language & Literatures, is pleased to invite you to “Porous Publics” as part of the 2025/2026 Critical Conversations series. On Tuesday, Jan. 27, join us for a critical conversation between Dr. Patricia Badir, Dr. Dennis Britton, and Dr. Barbara Dancygier.
Critical Conversations is a faculty research series organized by both the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures and the UBC English Graduate Student Caucus. The events aim to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across fields and periodization between students, faculty, and the larger university community. These events, which occur a handful of times over the course of the academic year, feature brief talks by speakers on a critical topic informed by their wide-ranging research expertise and interests.
Speakers
Patricia Badir
Dr. Patricia Badir specializes in Renaissance drama and poetry with a particular interest in religious writing, with a secondary interest in early twentieth-century Canadian theatre. Her book, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700, was published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. Dr. Badir has an on-going interest in the literary afterlives of New Testament saints and continues to work on the books of Little Gidding; however, she is currently working on two Canadian projects: the first explores what it means to study the early modern past, specifically Shakespeare, from “here” and the second is a book about theatre director Roy Mitchell and the matter of the theatrical archive.
Barbara Dancygier
Dr. Barbara Dancygier is a cognitive linguist, interested in conceptual viewpoint, conceptual metaphor theory, blending, and construction grammar, as applied to a variety of meaning-related phenomena in grammar and discourse. Dr. Dancygier’s work is focused on cognitive poetics, especially fictional narratives and drama and she also works on the applications of cognitive theories of meaning to various discourse types, including multimodal artifacts in digital and creative contexts. Her forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press is titled Multimodal Discourse: Viewpoint and Figuration across Image and Text.
Dennis Britton
Dr. Dennis Austin Britton is an Associate Professor of English here at UBC. His teaching and research focus on early Modern English literature, Black people’s engagements with Shakespeare, the history of race, the history of feeling, and Protestant theology. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, co-editor with Melissa Walter of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, and co-editor with Kimberly Anne Coles of “Spenser and Race,” a special issue of Spenser Studies. He is currently working on a book entitled Shakespeare and Pity: A Literary History of Race and Feeling and a new edition of Othello for Cambridge University Press.
