People

Faculty
Administrative Faculty

Alice Te Punga Somerville

Alice Te Punga Somerville

she/her/ia

Department Head and Professor

location_onBuTo 397
Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) joined the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures in 2022. She holds a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She has previously taught in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i. Pro...Read more

Glenn Deer

Glenn Deer

Associate Professor | Associate Head (Curriculum & Planning)

phone604 822 4469
location_onBuTo 509
My areas of teaching and research include Canadian and Asian North American literature, multi-ethnic and mixed race studies, and the intersections of writing, photography, and film. My first book explores the politics of interpretation and ideologies of postmodernism: Postmodern Canadian Fiction and...Read more

Miguel Mota

Miguel Mota

he/him/his

Associate Head (Undergraduate) and Associate Professor

phone604 822 4393
location_onBuTo 404
Miguel Mota (MA, PhD, Queen’s University) writes and teaches in the following areas: post-1945 British literature, with emphasis on the Thatcher years; the relationship between print and film cultures, and image and text more generally, with focus on the status and function of screenplays as print...Read more

Sandra Tomc

Sandra Tomc

she/her/hers

Professor and Associate Head, Graduate

phone604 822 4097
location_onBuTo 517
Sandra Tomc is a filmmaker and scholar of nineteenth-century US literature and print culture. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century book and magazine history, romantic authorship, the gothic, especially Edgar Allan Poe, transatlantic fashion, and visual culture. Her most recent book, Fashion Na...Read more

Suzanne James

Suzanne James

she/her/hers

Lecturer and First-Year English Coordinator

phone604 822 5651
location_onBuTo 309

Thematic Research Area

Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies
Current Faculty

Adam J. Frank

Adam J. Frank

Professor | Associate Dean, Policy pro tem

phone604 822 4087
Adam Frank's research and teaching areas include affect theory and poetics in US literature and culture. His essays have appeared in ELH, Criticism, Critical Inquiry, Science in Context, and elsewhere. He is the author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015),...Read more

Alexa Manuel

iskʷist capqʷícyaʔ, kn‿Syilx uɬ St'at'imc. My name is Alexa capqʷícyaʔ Manuel, I am from the Syilx and St’at’imc nations. I completed my doctoral studies in March 2024. My dissertation, titled “Stories of Lands, Bodies and Dreams: A tmixwcentric Literary Theory”, proposes a li...Read more

Alexander Dick

Alexander Dick

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4225
location_onBuTo 424
I work and teach in the fields of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literatures, Scottish Literature, and Environmental humanities. I am the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Palgrave 2013) and I have also published coll...Read more

Alice Te Punga Somerville

Alice Te Punga Somerville

she/her/ia

Department Head and Professor

location_onBuTo 397
Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) joined the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures in 2022. She holds a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She has previously taught in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i. Pro...Read more

Aren Roukema

Aren Roukema

Sessional Lecturer

Aren Roukema is a sessional lecturer and postdoctoral researcher, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He brings together methods and perspectives from literary criticism, cultural studies, history, and religious studies to analyze relationships between narrative ...Read more
ON LEAVE
January 1, 2025 - June 30, 2025

Barbara Dancygier

Barbara Dancygier

ON LEAVE
January 1, 2025 - June 30, 2025

Professor | FRSC | Distinguished University Scholar

phone604 822 5738
I am 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. Much of my work is focused on cognitive poetics, especially fictional narratives and drama. I ...Read more

Bo Earle

Bo Earle

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 3076

Brendan McCormack

Brendan McCormack

he/him/his

Sessional Lecturer

I study and teach Canadian and Indigenous literatures, often thinking through the historical entanglements and disentanglements of these fields of study. My research specializes in literary nationalisms, the politics of multiculturalism, and the relationship between public policy and literary arts i...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures

Christine Kim

Christine Kim

she/her/hers

Associate Professor | Editor, Canadian Literature

phone604 822 1575
location_onBuTo 405
Christine Kim is Associate Professor and editor of the journal Canadian Literature. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, Canadian literature, diaspora studies, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illi...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures

Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4068
location_onBuTo 421
Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM). He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (2012), which received the literary criticism book award from the Association f...Read more

Dallas Hunt

Dallas Hunt

Assistant Professor

location_onBuTo 505
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. He has had creative and critical work published in the Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His first children...Read more

Daniel Justice,
O.C., F.R.S.C.

Daniel Justice,
O.C., F.R.S.C.

he/him/his

Professor, English and Critical Indigenous Studies | Distinguished University Scholar

phone604 827 5176
location_onBuch E258
‘siyo ginali. I’m an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, born and raised in Colorado. (See Statement of Indigenous Citizenship and Affiliation below.) Professionally, I work on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory as Full Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Institute for ...Read more

Danielle Wong

Danielle Wong

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 5749
location_onBuTo 501
Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining UBC’s Department of English Language and Literatures, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell Universit...Read more

David Gaertner

David Gaertner

Assistant Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies | Associate Member of English Language and Literatures

David Gaertner is an assistant professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the co-Director of the CEDaR space: a community-centered new media and immersive storytelling lab. He writes, researches, and teaches new media, critical Indigenous studies; Indigenous literatures; contemp...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures | Contemporary Literatures

Deena Dinat

Deena Dinat

Assistant Professor without Review

Dennis Britton

Dennis Britton

he/him/his

Associate Professor

location_onBUTO 526
Dr. Britton researches and teaches early modern English literature, with a focus on the history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, and the history of emotion. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and has recently co-e...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Dina Al-Kassim

Dina Al-Kassim

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5743
location_onBuTo 508
Dr. Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist, who works on political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in transnational modernist and contemporary postcolonial cultures, including the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the Fir...Read more

Elise Stickles

Elise Stickles

she/her/hers

Assistant Professor

location_onBuTo 414
  Elise Stickles studies spoken and signed language from the perspective of cognitive semantics. Her research lies at the intersection of conceptual metaphor theory and embodied construction grammar approaches to syntax and lexical semantics. She focuses particularly on multimodal metapho...Read more

Elizabeth Hodgson

Elizabeth Hodgson

she/her/hers

Professor

phone604 822 5101
location_onBuTo 504
I earned my BA (English Honours) at UBC (1985), my MA at University of Toronto (1987), and my PhD at Brandeis University in Boston (1992).  I returned to UBC in 1995 as a faculty member. The English Renaissance is my scholarly neighbourhood, and I’m particularly interested in historicism, femi...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Gisèle Baxter

Gisèle Baxter

she/her/hers

Sessional Lecturer

location_onBuTo 306

Thematic Research Area

Rhetoric
I moved from Nova Scotia to Vancouver in 1997 to teach at UBC. My teaching and research interests include 19th-21st century literary and cultural studies; Gothic studies; Victorian literature and 19th-century studies; science/speculative fiction and fantasy; dystopian/post-apocalyptic narratives; ch...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Rhetoric

Glenn Deer

Glenn Deer

Associate Professor | Associate Head (Curriculum & Planning)

phone604 822 4469
location_onBuTo 509
My areas of teaching and research include Canadian and Asian North American literature, multi-ethnic and mixed race studies, and the intersections of writing, photography, and film. My first book explores the politics of interpretation and ideologies of postmodernism: Postmodern Canadian Fiction and...Read more

Gregory Mackie

Gregory Mackie

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5506
location_onBuTo 403
Dr. Mackie specializes in Victorian and Modernist literature, drama, and book history. His monograph Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife (2019) examines a lost archive of Wilde forgeries that flooded the rare book market in the 1920s. He has been the recipient of...Read more

Ian Hill

Ian Hill

he/him/his

Associate Professor | TA Coordinator

phone604 822 4091
I am an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, and I am also affiliated with UBC’s Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies. My research focuses on rhetoric and technology – the ways people advocate, resist, design, and otherwise argue and debate machines and system...Read more

Ina Biermann

Ina Biermann

Sessional Lecturer

Thematic Research Area

Contemporary Linguistics
My research and teaching interests are in stylistics, phonology, grammar and theory of literature. I’ve taught and published in both English and Afrikaans. Before teaching at UBC, I taught for several years at the University of South Africa working with students from various language backgrounds

Thematic Research Area

Contemporary Linguistics

J. Logan Smilges

J. Logan Smilges

Assistant Professor

location_onBuTo 527
Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, J. Logan Smilges writes and teaches at the nexus of queer/trans disability studies, the history of medicine, and rhetorical studies. Their first book, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (University of Minnesota Press, 2022...Read more

Jae Sharpe

Jae Sharpe

Sessional Lecturer

I study United States literature after World War II, with a specific interest in postmodern and maximalist texts and the digital humanities after the Cold War. I have written about David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Matthew McIntosh, paying specific attention to how these authors...Read more

Janice Ho

Janice Ho

Associate Professor

Thematic Research Area

Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies
Janice Ho grew up in Malaysia and Australia, received her BA (First Class Honours) from the University of Queensland, and her MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. She has research and teaching interests in twentieth- and twenty-first century British literature and culture; British and transna...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies

Jeffrey Severs

Jeffrey Severs

Associate Professor

location_onBuTo 519

Thematic Research Area

War And Conflict Studies
I study postmodern and contemporary U.S. literature and culture, and I have published criticism on David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, John Edgar Wideman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others. I co-edited (with Christopher Leise) Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University...Read more

Thematic Research Area

War And Conflict Studies

Jessica de Villiers

Jessica de Villiers

Associate Professor and Language Coordinator

phone604 822 4081
location_onBuTo 409

Thematic Research Area

Contemporary Linguistics
My research focuses on communication in autism spectrum disorder and the relationship of language development to neurocognition. Major threads in my work include studying neurocognitive factors that drive conversation skills, developing methods for clinical discourse analysis, and analyzing pragmati...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Contemporary Linguistics

John Culbert

John Culbert

Sessional Lecturer

Period/Nation Research Area

Contemporary Literatures

Judith Paltin

Judith Paltin

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4080
location_onBuTo 502
I am an associate professor in Modernist studies. My current research focuses on the politics of British and Irish modernism and on modern and contemporary theories of collective identification and action. I also hold more general interests in critical and cultural theory, critical studies in gender...Read more

Kathryn Grafton

Kathryn Grafton

Associate Professor of Teaching

I am a Senior Instructor, a tenured faculty member who specializes in Educational Leadership. I work in both English and the Coordinated Arts Program (CAP). My areas of specialization include Canadian literature, media, genre and reception studies, as well as academic writing and research in and acr...Read more

Katja Thieme

Katja Thieme

she/her/hers

Associate Professor of Teaching

phone604 822 4738
location_onBuTo 217
I have an M.A. in art history from Universität Leipzig, Germany, an M.A. in English from UBC, and a Ph.D. in English language studies from UBC. I have also studied at Carleton University in Ottawa. My research interests include genre theory, forms of public address in social and political moveme...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures

Kevin McNeilly

Kevin McNeilly

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4466
My critical practice emerged from the study of late modernism and critical theory: my own doctoral dissertation repurposed the thinking of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas to engage with the poetry and theatre of W. B. Yeats. I maintain a keen interest in contemporary North American poetics, part...Read more

Kimberly Bain

Dr. Bain's most pressing and urgent scholarly and critical-creative pursuits have consolidated around the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora, race, gender, environmental and medical racism, the Anthropocene, and Black arts and letters. She is currently working on two scholarl...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

United States Literatures

Laura Moss

Laura Moss (BA, U of Toronto; MA U of Guelph, PhD Queen’s U) (pronouns she/ her/ hers) is Professor of English at UBC where she teaches Canadian and African literatures. She is currently the Associate Dean, Students, in the Faculty of Arts. Trained as a postcolonial theorist and a specialist...Read more

Laurie McNeill

Laurie McNeill

she/her/hers

Associate Dean, Students and Professor of Teaching

phone604 827 5179
I earned my PhD from the Department of English at UBC, and joined the faculty in 2012. My research has focused on contemporary instances of “folk genres” of autobiography, such as the diary and the obituary. Rhetorical genre theories have helped me frame questions about access and agency in self...Read more

Mark Vessey

Mark Vessey

he/him/his

Professor

phone604 822 8670
Mark Vessey studied English at Cambridge (BA 1980) and later Latin literature, Roman history and Latin patristics at the Université de Paris-IV (Sorbonne) and Oxford (DPhil 1988), before joining the Department of English at UBC as an I.W. Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 1989. He was appointe...Read more

Marlene Briggs

Marlene Briggs

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 4088
location_onBuTo 422
I completed my PhD in English Literature at the University of Ottawa and I held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University before I joined the department of English at the University of British Columbia. I focus on war and conflict in my interdisciplinary...Read more
ON LEAVE
January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024

Mary Chapman

phone604 822 5120
location_onBuTo 509
Mary Chapman (B.A. Queen’s, M.A. Queen’s, Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in American literature and transnational American Studies; suffrage literature and activism; women’s poetry; periodicals; digital human...Read more
ON LEAVE
September 1, 2024 - August 31, 2025

Michael Zeitlin

Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1988. "Faulkner and Ulysses: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry." Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Virginia, 1989-90. My main research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, with a...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

United States Literatures

Miguel Mota

Miguel Mota

he/him/his

Associate Head (Undergraduate) and Associate Professor

phone604 822 4393
location_onBuTo 404
Miguel Mota (MA, PhD, Queen’s University) writes and teaches in the following areas: post-1945 British literature, with emphasis on the Thatcher years; the relationship between print and film cultures, and image and text more generally, with focus on the status and function of screenplays as print...Read more

Miranda Burgess

Miranda Burgess

she/they

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5549
I received my Ph.D. from Boston University. I specialize in British and Irish Romantic poetry and prose (i.e. writing from the period 1780-1830) and in the history and theory of feeling, mobility, media/ mediation, and literary form. My first book, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order...Read more

Mo Pareles

Mo Pareles

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4253
location_onBuTo 411
Dr. Pareles (they+) is a medievalist whose interests include Old and Middle English literature, translation, temporalities, critical animal studies, and Jewish-Christian relations. Their first book, Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English (University o...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Moberley Luger

Moberley Luger

she/her/hers

Associate Professor of Teaching and Chair of the Coordinated Arts Program

phone604 822 9558
location_onIBLC 357
I am an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures and Chair of the Co-ordinated Arts Program. My research has generally focused on contemporary American poetry and its relation to crisis and memory; more recently, my scholarship has turned toward pedagogy...Read more

Nancy Frelick

Nancy Frelick is associate professor of French Renaissance Literature and English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia where she has been teaching since 1990.  She is the author of the book Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève’s Délie (French Forum, 19...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Pamela Dalziel

Pamela Dalziel

she/her/hers

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5408
My research specialization is Victorian literature and culture. I am particularly interested in illustration and visual culture, religion, gender, textual criticism (scholarly editing), and the production of culture-texts (texts, such as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Carroll’s Alice’s Advent...Read more
ON LEAVE
July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025

Patricia Badir

Patricia Badir

ON LEAVE
July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025

she/her/hers

Professor

phone822 5603
location_onBuTo 513
I am a specialist in Renaissance drama and poetry with a particular interest in religious writing. I have a secondary interest in early twentieth-century Canadian theatre. My book, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700, was published by the University of Notre...Read more

Phanuel Antwi

Phanuel Antwi

Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies and Associate Professor

Phanuel Antwi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. In 2022 he was named Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadi...Read more

Ramesh Mallipeddi

Ramesh Mallipeddi

Associate Professor | Editor, Eighteenth-Century Studies

location_onBUTO 423
I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. My research on sentimentalism, transatlantic slavery, and the British empire has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and ELH. My monograph, Spectacular Suffe...Read more

Richard Cavell

Richard Cavell

Professor

phone604 822 2147
location_onBuTo 506
My teaching, research and supervisions are in media theory. Working broadly in the wake of my University of Toronto mentor, Marshall McLuhan, I have published three books on McLuhan and maintain the website spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca. Experimenting with critical performativity, I have published Marinetti Dines with the High Command (2014) and SpeechSong: The Gould / Schoenberg Dialogues (2020). In 2023, SpeechSong was presented as a video installation at the West Den Hague Cultural Centre in The Netherlands, part of their exhibition devoted to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach. Forthcoming books include Mediatic Shakespeare (UTP 2025) and The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down (MQUP 2024). In 2026, the Communication University of China Press (Beijing) will publish in translation my first book, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (UTP 2002). Co-founder of UBC’s Bachelor of Media Studies program, I teach courses in media theory. My most recent doctoral supervision was a dissertation on lyric poetry after Web 2.0....Read more

Rick Gooding

Rick Gooding

he/him/his

Associate Professor of Teaching and Chair, Masters in Children's Literature Program

phone604 827 5834
location_onBuTo 426

Thematic Research Area

Children’s Literature
Like most academics in UBC’s educational leadership stream, my working life is divided between teaching, research, educational leadership, and service. I did my graduate work on the eighteenth-century novel and later researched literary representations of disease in the eighteenth century before t...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Children’s Literature

Robert Rouse

Robert Rouse

Associate Professor

I have taught in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia since 2005, after studying and teaching in the United Kingdom. My own research has been primarily concerned with medieval romance (both Arthurian and non-Arthurian), writing on issues of histori...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Sandra Tomc

Sandra Tomc

she/her/hers

Professor and Associate Head, Graduate

phone604 822 4097
location_onBuTo 517
Sandra Tomc is a filmmaker and scholar of nineteenth-century US literature and print culture. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century book and magazine history, romantic authorship, the gothic, especially Edgar Allan Poe, transatlantic fashion, and visual culture. Her most recent book, Fashion Na...Read more

Sarika Bose

Sarika Bose

she/her/hers

Lecturer

phone604 822 2344
location_onBuTo 427

Siân Echard

Siân Echard

she/her/hers

Professor | English Honours Coordinator

I completed my graduate work at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1990, and have been at UBC since then. I am a medievalist and a book historian. My interests include twelfth-century Anglo-Latin literature, particular Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie; A...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures
ON LEAVE
September 1, 2024 - August 31, 2025

Stefan Dollinger

Stefan is interested in the connection of language and identity, broadly construed, which he most often explores from the vantage points of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology and lexicography. He has published monographs on Canadian English, Austrian German and other non-dominant...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures

Stephen Guy-Bray, F.R.S.C.

Stephen Guy-Bray, F.R.S.C.

he/him/his

Professor

location_onBuTo 515
I specialize in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and poetics. My most recent monograph is Shakespeare and Queer Representation (2020). I am now finishing a monograph on line endings in Renaissance poetry. I have articles and book chapters forthcoming on Katherine Philips, on Edmund Spenser and Rola...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Stephen Partridge

Stephen Partridge

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 4094
location_onBuTo 410
My main areas of interest are Middle English manuscripts, authorship, and Chaucer. In several publications I have contributed to the ongoing, collaborative (though only sometimes formally so) effort to describe more accurately and to contextualize Middle English manuscripts. I have a particular inte...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Suzanne James

Suzanne James

she/her/hers

Lecturer and First-Year English Coordinator

phone604 822 5651
location_onBuTo 309

Thematic Research Area

Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies

Suzy Anger

Suzy Anger

she/her/hers

Associate Professor and MA Advisor

phone604 822 4539
location_onBuTo 417

Thematic Research Area

Science And Technology Studies
My writing and teaching focus on Victorian literature in relation to nineteenth-century science, psychology, and philosophy. I am currently working on a project that investigates Victorian fiction and nineteenth-century theories of consciousness. It considers the novels of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dick...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Science And Technology Studies

Tara Lee

Tara Lee completed a PhD (Simon Fraser University) in Asian Canadian literature, with field specialties in Canadian Literature and eighteenth-century British Literature. Her teaching and research interests include critical race studies, techno/new media studies, Canadian literature, dystopian liter...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures | Contemporary Literatures

Tiffany Potter

Tiffany Potter

she/her/hers

Professor of Teaching

phone604 822 4026
location_onBuTo 523
Tiffany Potter works in 18th-century studies. Her arc has included federally-funded research projects on libertinism and gender in fiction and theatre; colonialist representations of indigenous women in 17th- and 18th-century North American contact and captivity narratives; and women writers in 18th...Read more

Tolulope Akinwole

Dr. Akinwole’s teaching and research coalesce around African literatures, African screen media, cultural and critical theory, global Black literatures, urban studies, infrastructure studies, and Black geographies. He is associate editor at Africanwriter.com, an online magazine of contemporary Afri...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Global Literatures
ON LEAVE
July 1, 2024 - December 1, 2024

Vin Nardizzi

I specialize in English Renaissance literature and Shakespeare. I also have research interests in ecotheory, plant studies, queer studies, and disability studies. My first book, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto Press, 2013; reprint 2017), brings ...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures
Graduate Faculty

Adam J. Frank

Adam J. Frank

Professor | Associate Dean, Policy pro tem

phone604 822 4087
Adam Frank's research and teaching areas include affect theory and poetics in US literature and culture. His essays have appeared in ELH, Criticism, Critical Inquiry, Science in Context, and elsewhere. He is the author of Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015),...Read more

Alexander Dick

Alexander Dick

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4225
location_onBuTo 424
I work and teach in the fields of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literatures, Scottish Literature, and Environmental humanities. I am the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Palgrave 2013) and I have also published coll...Read more

Alice Te Punga Somerville

Alice Te Punga Somerville

she/her/ia

Department Head and Professor

location_onBuTo 397
Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) joined the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures in 2022. She holds a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She has previously taught in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai’i. Pro...Read more
ON LEAVE
January 1, 2025 - June 30, 2025

Barbara Dancygier

Barbara Dancygier

ON LEAVE
January 1, 2025 - June 30, 2025

Professor | FRSC | Distinguished University Scholar

phone604 822 5738
I am 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. Much of my work is focused on cognitive poetics, especially fictional narratives and drama. I ...Read more

Bo Earle

Bo Earle

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 3076

Christine Kim

Christine Kim

she/her/hers

Associate Professor | Editor, Canadian Literature

phone604 822 1575
location_onBuTo 405
Christine Kim is Associate Professor and editor of the journal Canadian Literature. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, Canadian literature, diaspora studies, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illi...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures

Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4068
location_onBuTo 421
Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program (ACAM). He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (2012), which received the literary criticism book award from the Association f...Read more

Dallas Hunt

Dallas Hunt

Assistant Professor

location_onBuTo 505
Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. He has had creative and critical work published in the Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His first children...Read more

Daniel Justice,
O.C., F.R.S.C.

Daniel Justice,
O.C., F.R.S.C.

he/him/his

Professor, English and Critical Indigenous Studies | Distinguished University Scholar

phone604 827 5176
location_onBuch E258
‘siyo ginali. I’m an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, born and raised in Colorado. (See Statement of Indigenous Citizenship and Affiliation below.) Professionally, I work on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory as Full Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Institute for ...Read more

Danielle Wong

Danielle Wong

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 5749
location_onBuTo 501
Danielle Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining UBC’s Department of English Language and Literatures, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Asian American Studies Program at Cornell Universit...Read more

David Gaertner

David Gaertner

Assistant Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies | Associate Member of English Language and Literatures

David Gaertner is an assistant professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the co-Director of the CEDaR space: a community-centered new media and immersive storytelling lab. He writes, researches, and teaches new media, critical Indigenous studies; Indigenous literatures; contemp...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures | Contemporary Literatures

Dennis Britton

Dennis Britton

he/him/his

Associate Professor

location_onBUTO 526
Dr. Britton researches and teaches early modern English literature, with a focus on the history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, and the history of emotion. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and has recently co-e...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Dina Al-Kassim

Dina Al-Kassim

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5743
location_onBuTo 508
Dr. Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist, who works on political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in transnational modernist and contemporary postcolonial cultures, including the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States. She is the author of On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the Fir...Read more

Elise Stickles

Elise Stickles

she/her/hers

Assistant Professor

location_onBuTo 414
  Elise Stickles studies spoken and signed language from the perspective of cognitive semantics. Her research lies at the intersection of conceptual metaphor theory and embodied construction grammar approaches to syntax and lexical semantics. She focuses particularly on multimodal metapho...Read more

Elizabeth Hodgson

Elizabeth Hodgson

she/her/hers

Professor

phone604 822 5101
location_onBuTo 504
I earned my BA (English Honours) at UBC (1985), my MA at University of Toronto (1987), and my PhD at Brandeis University in Boston (1992).  I returned to UBC in 1995 as a faculty member. The English Renaissance is my scholarly neighbourhood, and I’m particularly interested in historicism, femi...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Glenn Deer

Glenn Deer

Associate Professor | Associate Head (Curriculum & Planning)

phone604 822 4469
location_onBuTo 509
My areas of teaching and research include Canadian and Asian North American literature, multi-ethnic and mixed race studies, and the intersections of writing, photography, and film. My first book explores the politics of interpretation and ideologies of postmodernism: Postmodern Canadian Fiction and...Read more

Gregory Mackie

Gregory Mackie

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5506
location_onBuTo 403
Dr. Mackie specializes in Victorian and Modernist literature, drama, and book history. His monograph Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife (2019) examines a lost archive of Wilde forgeries that flooded the rare book market in the 1920s. He has been the recipient of...Read more

Ian Hill

Ian Hill

he/him/his

Associate Professor | TA Coordinator

phone604 822 4091
I am an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, and I am also affiliated with UBC’s Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies. My research focuses on rhetoric and technology – the ways people advocate, resist, design, and otherwise argue and debate machines and system...Read more

J. Logan Smilges

J. Logan Smilges

Assistant Professor

location_onBuTo 527
Led by commitments to transfeminism and disability justice, J. Logan Smilges writes and teaches at the nexus of queer/trans disability studies, the history of medicine, and rhetorical studies. Their first book, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (University of Minnesota Press, 2022...Read more

Janice Ho

Janice Ho

Associate Professor

Thematic Research Area

Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies
Janice Ho grew up in Malaysia and Australia, received her BA (First Class Honours) from the University of Queensland, and her MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. She has research and teaching interests in twentieth- and twenty-first century British literature and culture; British and transna...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Post/Anti/Decolonial Studies

Jeffrey Severs

Jeffrey Severs

Associate Professor

location_onBuTo 519

Thematic Research Area

War And Conflict Studies
I study postmodern and contemporary U.S. literature and culture, and I have published criticism on David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, John Edgar Wideman, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others. I co-edited (with Christopher Leise) Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University...Read more

Thematic Research Area

War And Conflict Studies

Jessica de Villiers

Jessica de Villiers

Associate Professor and Language Coordinator

phone604 822 4081
location_onBuTo 409

Thematic Research Area

Contemporary Linguistics
My research focuses on communication in autism spectrum disorder and the relationship of language development to neurocognition. Major threads in my work include studying neurocognitive factors that drive conversation skills, developing methods for clinical discourse analysis, and analyzing pragmati...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Contemporary Linguistics

Judith Paltin

Judith Paltin

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4080
location_onBuTo 502
I am an associate professor in Modernist studies. My current research focuses on the politics of British and Irish modernism and on modern and contemporary theories of collective identification and action. I also hold more general interests in critical and cultural theory, critical studies in gender...Read more

Kevin McNeilly

Kevin McNeilly

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4466
My critical practice emerged from the study of late modernism and critical theory: my own doctoral dissertation repurposed the thinking of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas to engage with the poetry and theatre of W. B. Yeats. I maintain a keen interest in contemporary North American poetics, part...Read more

Kimberly Bain

Dr. Bain's most pressing and urgent scholarly and critical-creative pursuits have consolidated around the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora, race, gender, environmental and medical racism, the Anthropocene, and Black arts and letters. She is currently working on two scholarl...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

United States Literatures

Laura Moss

Laura Moss (BA, U of Toronto; MA U of Guelph, PhD Queen’s U) (pronouns she/ her/ hers) is Professor of English at UBC where she teaches Canadian and African literatures. She is currently the Associate Dean, Students, in the Faculty of Arts. Trained as a postcolonial theorist and a specialist...Read more

Mark Vessey

Mark Vessey

he/him/his

Professor

phone604 822 8670
Mark Vessey studied English at Cambridge (BA 1980) and later Latin literature, Roman history and Latin patristics at the Université de Paris-IV (Sorbonne) and Oxford (DPhil 1988), before joining the Department of English at UBC as an I.W. Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 1989. He was appointe...Read more

Marlene Briggs

Marlene Briggs

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 4088
location_onBuTo 422
I completed my PhD in English Literature at the University of Ottawa and I held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University before I joined the department of English at the University of British Columbia. I focus on war and conflict in my interdisciplinary...Read more
ON LEAVE
January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024

Mary Chapman

phone604 822 5120
location_onBuTo 509
Mary Chapman (B.A. Queen’s, M.A. Queen’s, Ph.D. Cornell) is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in American literature and transnational American Studies; suffrage literature and activism; women’s poetry; periodicals; digital human...Read more
ON LEAVE
September 1, 2024 - August 31, 2025

Michael Zeitlin

Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1988. "Faulkner and Ulysses: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry." Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Virginia, 1989-90. My main research interests lie in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature, with a...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

United States Literatures

Miguel Mota

Miguel Mota

he/him/his

Associate Head (Undergraduate) and Associate Professor

phone604 822 4393
location_onBuTo 404
Miguel Mota (MA, PhD, Queen’s University) writes and teaches in the following areas: post-1945 British literature, with emphasis on the Thatcher years; the relationship between print and film cultures, and image and text more generally, with focus on the status and function of screenplays as print...Read more

Miranda Burgess

Miranda Burgess

she/they

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5549
I received my Ph.D. from Boston University. I specialize in British and Irish Romantic poetry and prose (i.e. writing from the period 1780-1830) and in the history and theory of feeling, mobility, media/ mediation, and literary form. My first book, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order...Read more

Mo Pareles

Mo Pareles

Associate Professor

phone604 822 4253
location_onBuTo 411
Dr. Pareles (they+) is a medievalist whose interests include Old and Middle English literature, translation, temporalities, critical animal studies, and Jewish-Christian relations. Their first book, Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English (University o...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Nancy Frelick

Nancy Frelick is associate professor of French Renaissance Literature and English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia where she has been teaching since 1990.  She is the author of the book Délie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Scève’s Délie (French Forum, 19...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Pamela Dalziel

Pamela Dalziel

she/her/hers

Associate Professor

phone604 822 5408
My research specialization is Victorian literature and culture. I am particularly interested in illustration and visual culture, religion, gender, textual criticism (scholarly editing), and the production of culture-texts (texts, such as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Carroll’s Alice’s Advent...Read more
ON LEAVE
July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025

Patricia Badir

Patricia Badir

ON LEAVE
July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025

she/her/hers

Professor

phone822 5603
location_onBuTo 513
I am a specialist in Renaissance drama and poetry with a particular interest in religious writing. I have a secondary interest in early twentieth-century Canadian theatre. My book, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700, was published by the University of Notre...Read more

Phanuel Antwi

Phanuel Antwi

Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies and Associate Professor

Phanuel Antwi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. In 2022 he was named Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadi...Read more

Ramesh Mallipeddi

Ramesh Mallipeddi

Associate Professor | Editor, Eighteenth-Century Studies

location_onBUTO 423
I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. My research on sentimentalism, transatlantic slavery, and the British empire has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and ELH. My monograph, Spectacular Suffe...Read more

Richard Cavell

Richard Cavell

Professor

phone604 822 2147
location_onBuTo 506
My teaching, research and supervisions are in media theory. Working broadly in the wake of my University of Toronto mentor, Marshall McLuhan, I have published three books on McLuhan and maintain the website spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca. Experimenting with critical performativity, I have published Marinetti Dines with the High Command (2014) and SpeechSong: The Gould / Schoenberg Dialogues (2020). In 2023, SpeechSong was presented as a video installation at the West Den Hague Cultural Centre in The Netherlands, part of their exhibition devoted to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach. Forthcoming books include Mediatic Shakespeare (UTP 2025) and The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down (MQUP 2024). In 2026, the Communication University of China Press (Beijing) will publish in translation my first book, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (UTP 2002). Co-founder of UBC’s Bachelor of Media Studies program, I teach courses in media theory. My most recent doctoral supervision was a dissertation on lyric poetry after Web 2.0....Read more

Robert Rouse

Robert Rouse

Associate Professor

I have taught in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia since 2005, after studying and teaching in the United Kingdom. My own research has been primarily concerned with medieval romance (both Arthurian and non-Arthurian), writing on issues of histori...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Sandra Tomc

Sandra Tomc

she/her/hers

Professor and Associate Head, Graduate

phone604 822 4097
location_onBuTo 517
Sandra Tomc is a filmmaker and scholar of nineteenth-century US literature and print culture. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century book and magazine history, romantic authorship, the gothic, especially Edgar Allan Poe, transatlantic fashion, and visual culture. Her most recent book, Fashion Na...Read more

Siân Echard

Siân Echard

she/her/hers

Professor | English Honours Coordinator

I completed my graduate work at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1990, and have been at UBC since then. I am a medievalist and a book historian. My interests include twelfth-century Anglo-Latin literature, particular Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie; A...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures
ON LEAVE
September 1, 2024 - August 31, 2025

Stefan Dollinger

Stefan is interested in the connection of language and identity, broadly construed, which he most often explores from the vantage points of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology and lexicography. He has published monographs on Canadian English, Austrian German and other non-dominant...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Canadian Literatures

Stephen Guy-Bray, F.R.S.C.

Stephen Guy-Bray, F.R.S.C.

he/him/his

Professor

location_onBuTo 515
I specialize in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and poetics. My most recent monograph is Shakespeare and Queer Representation (2020). I am now finishing a monograph on line endings in Renaissance poetry. I have articles and book chapters forthcoming on Katherine Philips, on Edmund Spenser and Rola...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Stephen Partridge

Stephen Partridge

Assistant Professor

phone604 822 4094
location_onBuTo 410
My main areas of interest are Middle English manuscripts, authorship, and Chaucer. In several publications I have contributed to the ongoing, collaborative (though only sometimes formally so) effort to describe more accurately and to contextualize Middle English manuscripts. I have a particular inte...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures

Suzy Anger

Suzy Anger

she/her/hers

Associate Professor and MA Advisor

phone604 822 4539
location_onBuTo 417

Thematic Research Area

Science And Technology Studies
My writing and teaching focus on Victorian literature in relation to nineteenth-century science, psychology, and philosophy. I am currently working on a project that investigates Victorian fiction and nineteenth-century theories of consciousness. It considers the novels of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dick...Read more

Thematic Research Area

Science And Technology Studies

Tolulope Akinwole

Dr. Akinwole’s teaching and research coalesce around African literatures, African screen media, cultural and critical theory, global Black literatures, urban studies, infrastructure studies, and Black geographies. He is associate editor at Africanwriter.com, an online magazine of contemporary Afri...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Global Literatures
ON LEAVE
July 1, 2024 - December 1, 2024

Vin Nardizzi

I specialize in English Renaissance literature and Shakespeare. I also have research interests in ecotheory, plant studies, queer studies, and disability studies. My first book, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto Press, 2013; reprint 2017), brings ...Read more

Period/Nation Research Area

Medieval And Early Modern Literatures
Visiting Faculty

Alexa Manuel

iskʷist capqʷícyaʔ, kn‿Syilx uɬ St'at'imc. My name is Alexa capqʷícyaʔ Manuel, I am from the Syilx and St’at’imc nations. I completed my doctoral studies in March 2024. My dissertation, titled “Stories of Lands, Bodies and Dreams: A tmixwcentric Literary Theory”, proposes a li...Read more

 

UBC Emeriti Staff

Alldritt, Keith
Professor Emeritus

Arnovick, Leslie
Professor Emerita

Bevis, Richard
Professor Emeritus

Brinton, Laurel
Professor Emerita

Busza, Andrew
Associate Professor Emeritus

Danielson, Dennis
Professor Emeritus

Egan, Susanna
Professor Emerita

Fee, Margery
Professor Emerita

Flick, Jane
Associate Professor Emerita

Foster, John Wilson (FRSC)
Professor Emeritus

Giltrow, Janet
Professor Emerita

Globe, Alexander
Professor Emeritus

Goldberg, Michael
Professor Emeritus

Gooch, Bryan N.S.
Professor Emeritus

Good, Graham
Professor Emeritus

Grace, Sherrill (OC, FRSC)
Professor Emerita
University Killam Professor

Hudson, Nicholas
Professor Emeritus

Hulcoop, J.
Professor Emeritus

Kesler, Linc
Associate Professor Emeritus

Kirkley, Harriet
Assistant Professor Emerita

Kröller, Eva-Marie (CM, FRSC)
Professor Emerita

Levy, Eric
Associate Professor Emeritus

Merivale, Patricia
Professor Emerita

Ira Nadel (FRSC)
Professor Emeritus

New, William H. (OC, FRSC)
Professor Emeritus
University Killam Professor
UBC Honoris Causa, Doctor of Science

Quartermain, Peter
Professor Emeritus

Ricou, Laurie (FRSC)
Professor Emeritus

Rodman, Lilita
Assistant Professor Emerita

Rosengarten, Herbert
Professor Emeritus

Seamon, Roger
Associate Professor Emeritus

Segal, Judy
Professor Emerita

Sirluck, Kate
Emerita Associate Professor of Teaching

Stanwood, Paul G.
Professor Emeritus

Stewart, Jack
Professor Emeritus

Stockholder, Fred E.
Assistant Professor Emeritus

Wasserman, Jerry
Professor Emeritus

Weir, Lorraine
Emeritus Professor

Whitehead, Lee
Associate Professor Emeritus

Whitman, F.
Associate Professor Emeritus

Wieland, Gernot
Professor Emeritus

Wisenthal, Jonathan
Professor Emeritus