Networks & Projects

Members of the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures work on collaborative research within UBC, throughout Canada and across the globe.

They teach, publish, organize workshops and conferences on a wide range of topics such as ecology, cognition, linguistics, poetics, rhetoric and science, new and digital media, and migration narratives.

Below is a small segment of the collaborative research projects and networks to which our faculty belong.

Autism in Context: Theory and Experience (ACTE) started in 2015 at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Our main objective is to understand better the nature and origins of communication difficulties and language delays in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

We bring together investigation techniques from cognitive psychology and linguistics within an ecological research program whose experimental dimension is geared towards specific sensibilities of children and adults with autism.

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced “quirk”) / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC) is an online infrastructure for literary research in and about Canada designed to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities of the digital turn. Enabling unprecedented avenues for studying the words that most move people in and about Canada, CWRC involves more than one hundred scholars to engage the Canadian writing research community at large and researchers worldwide as both contributors and users.

The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America to 1992 is collecting a bibliography and textbase intended to help scholars, teachers, students, and Indigenous community members to find published works of literature, history, ethnography, autobiography and the like by Indigenous authors. Our goal is to decolonize university curricula in Canada that continue to feature the British canon.

When such distribution is legal and in keeping with Indigenous ethics and protocols, it will make the original literary works openly accessible. Deanna Reder (First Nations Studies, SFU) is the Principal Investigator for this SSHRC-funded project.

The Research Cluster on Cognition and Poetics at Osnabrück University brings together scholars from various disciplines in humanities, the fine arts and the cognitive sciences to create a unique, innovative and interdisciplinary research and training program Cognition and Poetics.

Members of the cluster, along with international visiting professors, regularly offer graduate courses on various aspects of cognition and poetics.

Critical Studies in Improvisation is an open-access, peer-reviewed, electronic, academic journal on improvisation, community, and social practise housed at the University of Guelph.

The editorial and advisory boards are made up of leading international scholars spanning diverse disciplines.

The Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network is an exciting new initiative in the study of environmental issues.

The network presents researchers within the humanities with a forum to engage with each other’s work, share insights, and develop collaborative partnerships.

We believe the humanities are uniquely positioned to complement responses to environmental issues in the hard sciences by addressing the values which underpin environmental decision-making, and therefore to evaluate the consequences of what are essentially problems of human interaction (with both the human and the non-human worlds).

The Editing Modernism in Canada Project (EMiC) facilitates collaboration among researchers and institutions from regions across Canada and the UK, France, Belgium, and the United States.

The project’s mandate is primarily directed toward producing critically edited texts by modernist Canadian authors. Still, it does not exclude figures from the international field who have demonstrable relationships to Canadian literature and its modernist literary cultures.

Edited texts include poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, correspondence, and non-fictional prose from the early to mid-twentieth century.

The Gertrude Stein Society was formed in May of 2010 at the 21st convention of the American Literature Association (ALA). In establishing Stein within the ranks of major American authors represented at the ALA, the Gertrude Stein Society recognizes and advocates for Stein’s ongoing importance to modern literature, modernist aesthetics, philosophies of language, and experimental poetics of the 20th and 21st centuries.

With the primary goal of furthering scholarly inquiry into Stein’s works, the society seeks to form a community of people across the disciplines who share an interest in Stein as an artist, a public intellectual, and a complex subject uniquely situated in modern history.

The society encourages the broadest possible diversity of views and range of approaches to Stein’s work. It encourages those interested in furthering discussion and debate to attend our annual meeting at the American Literature Association.

The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI) is a partnered research institute building from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) project, “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” (ICASP).

The institute’s research team comprises 58 scholars from 20 different institutions. Its mandate is to create positive social change through the confluence of improvisational arts, innovative scholarship, and collaborative action.

Our team engages, connects, and mobilizes scholars, students, creative practitioners, and community partners to create a vibrant intellectual hub and a focal point for leading-edge research and critical inquiry in the field of improvisation studies.

Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds is a research cluster that gathers scholars from the humanities living and working along the North American Pacific coast to investigate the idea of “oecology,” an older spelling of the modern concept “ecology.”

The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC provides funding opportunities and an intellectual environment where scholars are free to pursue the collaborative exchange of ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries.

The institute’s mission is to create collaborative, interdisciplinary, basic research programs for scholars at all career stages. The research supported makes essential advances in knowledge that are shared through ongoing community engagement programs.

UBC offers coursework leading to either an MA in science and technology studies (STS), or an MA or PhD with an STS research specialization in English, History, and Philosophy.

The graduate program in science and technology studies is designed to give students opportunities to understand the roles of science and technology in the contemporary world.

Graduates of the program work in science and technology policy, science journalism and communication, or curatorial positions in science and technology museums.

The Affect Project: Memory, Aesthetics, and Ethics is envisioned as a multidisciplinary, critical, and timely response to the ubiquity of the affective in contemporary life and culture, as well as the “affective turn” taken by a range of scholarly disciplines.

The project seeks to develop connections among those working in different scholarly fields and those working in the community who share an interest in affect and wish to explore the role and power of emotional expression in private and public life.

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