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 research fellowships from the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA and the Bibliographical Society of America. He received a UBC Faculty of Arts Research Award in 2015 and a Killam Teaching Prize in 2020. Dr. Mackie also serves as Norman Colbeck Curator at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections division, where he advises on acquisitions and special projects. He has also curated exhibitions for the Rare Books divisions of both UBC campuses.

Recent Publications

“Des Grieux and the Origins of Teleny.” Victorian Literature and Culture 49: 3 (Fall 2021).

“Aubrey Beardsley, H. S. Nichols, and the Decadent Archive.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 3: 1 (Summer 2020).

“Cocktails with Noël Coward.” Derek Gladwin, ed. Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019.

Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019.

“Textual Dissidence: The Occasions of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism.’” Mémoires du Livre / Studies in Book Culture 4: 2 (Spring 2013).

“‘The Modern Idea under an Antique Form’: Aestheticism and Theatrical Archaeology in Oscar Wilde’s Duchess of Padua.” Theatre Survey 53: 2 (September 2012).

“Forging Oscar Wilde: Mrs. Chan-Toon and For Love of the King.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 54: 3 (2011).

“The Function of Decorum at the Present Time: Manners, Moral Language, and Modernity in ‘an Oscar Wilde Play.’” Modern Drama 52: 2 (Summer 2009).

At UBC, Dr. Mackie has taught undergraduate courses on Modern drama, Decadence, Oscar Wilde, and detective fiction, and graduate seminars and graduate seminars on Camp and Queer Theory and (in conjunction with UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections), literary forgeries and mystifications.Dr. Mackie has curated several exhibitions for UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. “‘That mighty love which maddens one to crime’: Teleny, Oscar Wilde, and Decadent Publishing in the 1890s” (2015) marked UBC Library’s acquisition of the first editions of two rare Victorian erotic texts associated with Oscar Wilde, Teleny and Des Grieux.

“‘An Unmatched Devotion’: A 50^th Anniversary Celebration of the Colbeck Collection at UBC Library” (2017-18) recognized the 1967 arrival to UBC of the 13,000-volume Colbeck Collection, which is one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of English literature from the period 1850-1920. “’An Unmatched Devotion’” was largest-ever rare books display mounted at UBC.

“A Queer Century, 1869-1969,” June 2019, marks several major anniversaries: 150 years since the emergence of homosexuality as a named concept, and fifty years since the Stonewall riots and the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada. The exhibition brings together rare books, art, manuscripts and ephemera from UBC’s collections to tell the story of this pivotal century in queer cultural history.