NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of February 2, 2026
Translating the Middle Ages
Term 1
MON, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
“‘I have been a stranger in a strange land,’ but the land of my sojourning cannot bear me…Nu?” So we took off by ourselves and stayed together two whole years. Me, I was ready to stay with him for the rest of my life, but better you should ask for the moon from heaven.
Al-Ḥārith, fictional admirer of the brilliant con artist Abū Zayd and the speaker above, appears in al-Ḥarīrī of Basra’s maqāmāt, written in Arabic around 1100. Yet in the passage above, one of fifty award-winning experimental mini-translations of al-Ḥarīrī by Michael Cooperson, he speaks a New York English inflected with Yiddish, an exaggerated twentieth-century Jewish-American vernacular. How did this come to be and what does it tell us about medieval histories of Jewish and Islamic literary intimacy? For that matter, why are there so many recent, experimental English-language translations of medieval Arabic literature and of other medieval literature? How did we get a queer, postcolonial version of the Old English Seafarer, and a fascist, modernist one? How long has this wave of literary translations been going on? What are its ethics? What does translation theory help us understand about medieval literature and all literature, about diaspora and multilingualism, and about the role of poetics in civic life in the present moment?
In this graduate seminar, students will learn to write a conference paper and present at a conference. They will also have the opportunity and be encouraged to use languages other than English. Primary texts will likely include translations by Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Zadie Smith, Alasdair Gray, Meagan Purvis, Yasmine Seale, Ezra Pound, Juan Gelman, Denis Ferhatovič and others. Secondary readings will likely include medieval translation theory and modern selections by Jhumpa Lahiri, Stuart Hall, Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Venuti, Isabel C. Gómez, David Gramling, and many others. Readings may also be shaped by student interest and linguistic background.
Term 2
MON, 12:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Shakespeare, Race, and Feeling
This seminar will examine the intersection of race and feeling in works by William Shakespeare. We will consider how Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poetry produce feelings about non-white people, and how such feelings participate in the production of racial difference, especially whiteness. We will investigate the work Shakespeare’s plays and poetry did within what scholars of emotion call “emotional communities”—composed of people who are moved by similar interests and values—to both produce and destabilize race as a concept. Our Shakespearean works will be Titus Andronicus, The Rape of Lucrece, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.
Term 1
THU, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Bodies: Person, Flesh, Thing
The basic premise of the course is that bodies are natural and social, biological and cultural. We have our bodies and we are our bodies. Bodies are both voluntary and involuntary. Our current understanding that the boundaries of one’s self are coextensive with the boundaries of one’s body had its origins in the eighteenth century. Using a broadly historical approach, we will begin with Richardson’s epistolary narrative Pamela (1740) and John Cleland’s 1747 pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to consider bodily privacy and its invasions. From there, we will move on to slavery, judicial torture, and incarceration as systems that reduce persons to things and flesh. Readings: Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Jean Amery’s memoir At the Mind’s Limits; James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. Finally, to develop the idea that bodies are subject not only to intentional harm, but also to involuntary forces such as sickness or impairment, the class will end with two texts on illness. Critical and theoretical excerpts will be drawn from the work of Hortense Spillers, Didier Fassin, and Jay Bernstein. Requirements: regular attendance and participation; Canvas posts; one 5-page book review; and a final essay.
Term 1
MON, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Vancouver's Coasts
Greater Vancouver is located at the estuarial meeting point of one of North America’s largest and most complex riverine watersheds, an oceanic basin (a sea, a straight, an inlet), a mountain range, and an archipelago. The complexities of this coastal ecology continually dog, confront, and challenge its image as Canada’s transcendental, gleaming, futuristic city of glass. Vancouver was also built on the unceded territory of three coastal nations and it shares a history of migrations and dispossessions with several continents to which it is still connected by ties of commerce, culture, and conflict. What does it mean to live, work, play, and thrive in such a place? This course will offer an interdisciplinary, multi-generic, and multi-media survey of writing from and about Vancouver’s coasts, their ecologies, and their colonialisms. The literary component of the course will feature poetry and stories by E. Pauline Johnson, Daphne Marlatt, Phinder Dulai, Rita Wong, Wayde Compton, and Lee Maracle, accompanied by selected readings from the field of coastal studies including the many philosophical, historical, aesthetic, and environmental approaches scholars bring to it. For some of our class meetings—and time permitting—the class will visit coastal sites described and discussed in our readings, such as Wreck Beach, Vancouver Harbour, Stanley Park, Kits Point (Senakw), and Steveston. Assignments will combine creative and critical skills and will include both a field report on a coastal Vancouver site and a final conference-length paper.
Term 1
WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
[specific title forthcoming]
While rhetorical studies has long engaged disability on issues of access and accessibility, scholars such as Tara Wood, Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2014) have urged the field to “move beyond mere lists and individual accommodations.” This honors seminar sets out to explore that “beyond,” teasing out the conflicts and potentials embedded at the intersection of disability, rhetoric, and activism. Over the course of the semester, we will ask two, interanimating questions: in what ways can we write about and theorize disability rhetorically? And in what ways might experiences of disability “crip” our understanding of rhetoric and rhetorical theory?
Importantly, disability is an embodied experience (rather than a purely theoretical exercise), which means our readings will include a combination of genres, such as memoir, fiction, theory, and graphic literature, that speak to disability’s materiality. The course assignments, too, will demand a kind of engagement with the world of disability that exceeds traditional library research and a final paper. These assignments ask you to take up Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s call to “start noticing” disability in your lives outside of school. Noticing disability is a rhetorical task because it involves rescripting the discourses that we use to name and address bodymind difference. Indeed, this course sits delicately on the border of theory and praxis, urging us to take up scholar-activism by reimagining disability and rhetoric in all aspects of our lives. As this seminar will make clear, studying crip rhetorics requires a commitment to disability liberation.
Term 1
TUE, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Modernism and the Mass Body
This seminar course in modernist literature and social theory explores fictional, empirical, and theoretical variations on the historical and narrated worlds of the collectivity, its marginalized and its revolutionists. We will examine theories and case studies of crowds, paradigmatic figures in modern and contemporary fiction, and collective forms of identity, those through which the “core of the self” extends outward, acquiring new repertoires of experience. We will explore theories of agency and layered sovereignties, and phenomena such as group aggression and utopianism, the sophisticated judgments of crowds, populisms and authoritarianisms, bare life and biopolitics. Readings include Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Eliot, Barnes, Le Bon, Moscovici, Laclau, Ranciere, Hardt and Negri, Raymond Williams, Freud, Bion, Rose, Lacan.
Term 2
TUE, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Fictions of London
“Neither of us is English, we’re Londoners you see”
--Sammy, in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
This course will attempt to chart the urban and fictional landscape of the former imperial metropolis and conceptualize a London uneasily situated at the intersection of the material and the imaginary. We will read, watch, and listen to a selection of novels, poetry, films, photographs and recordings from the mid-1950s to the present, and attempt to address such issues as the representation of space in former imperial, now global, centers, and the processes of change (cultural, social, political, aesthetic) that such representations both respond to and produce. We will debate the extent to which these fictions of London are intimately bound up not only with migrant and diasporic, colonial and postcolonial identities, but also with increasing, and in some instances highly troubled, political and cultural ties to Europe and America. Our aim will be to consider London as a complex and conflicted space of intercultural exchange where social and material inequalities are constantly challenged and resisted in imaginative representations within both literary and popular cultural forms.
Tentative list of primary texts: works by Sam Selvon, Colin MacInnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Laura Oldfield Ford, Raymond Ontrobus, Derek Jarman, Mike Leigh, Hanif Kureishi, Patrick Keiller, Gilbert & George, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith. Tentative list of secondary readings: writings by Iain Sinclair, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, John McLeod, Edward Soja, and others.
Term 2
TUE, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Contemporary U.S. Novel: DeLillo, Morrison, Lee
This seminar will examine in depth works from the 1970s to the 2010s by three of the great U.S. novelists: Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: DeLillo’s The Names (1982), Libra (1988), and Mao II; Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1993), and Paradise (1997); and Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), and On Such a Full Sea (2014).
Our goal will in part be to understand 40 to 50 years of literary and cultural history through figures who, in their monumental power and reach, tend to embody certain periodizing and otherwise explanatory categories but also trouble their boundaries and distinctions, whether those categories be (to name only a few) modernism, postmodernism, paranoia, twentieth-century African American novels, contemporary U.S. literature, historical fiction, transnational U.S. fiction, or immigrant writing. We will also be on the lookout for hidden symmetries and unexpected lines of influence among these writers.
The focus will be on close examination of the novels and on two major writing assignments by each student: a seminar paper of about five pages that will form the basis of discussion in most weeks; and a final research paper at the end of term. Students will also lead discussion in selected weeks and write discussion posts. Essays from each novelist will be part of our reading, and criticism on the syllabus, invoking a wide range of theoretical paradigms, will come from Colleen Lye, Jodi Kim, David Cowart, John McClure, Chris Lee, Lavinia Delois Jennings, Jean Wyatt, John K. Young, Amy Hungerford, and others.
Term 2
WED, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Language standards and inclusivity: theory & practice
This seminar probes theories of linguistic standardization with the express goal of putting them into practice, while using this practice to further inform theory. The corresponding fields of comparative standardology and linguistic standardization are relatively young in their own rights as academic subjects. Their aim to dehegemonize and decolonize contemporary standard varieties, which has become a goal often talked about but rarely put into practice.
We work with current language theory (whether linguistic, rhetorical or otherwise) and sociohistorical approaches to explore concrete, practicable ways to dehegemonize and decolonize western standard (written) varieties in their contexts, starting with Standard Canadian English. Such standard varieties, hailing virtually without exception from imperial-colonial contexts, are all in need of “opening up”, whether via demotization (widening of the standard) or destandardization (replacement of an existing standard) or a combination thereof.
The question of how the dehegemonization is conducted in concrete social contexts is at the vanguard of current work. This seminar is therefore part of the UBC Research Excellence Cluster on Inclusive Standards (see www.canadianwordcentre.ubc.ca for more). A range of additional events (e.g. Research seminar meetings, Open Townhall-Type Faculty Clubs) accompanies this seminar.
Everyone with an interest in standard language and/or inclusion is welcome. No linguistic knowledge is required (but of course most welcome). An openness to view English as reflected in or department’s name (English Language[s] & Literatures), however, is essential.
Participants have the opportunity to do innovative work on an aspect of inclusivity in the context of the Canadian English Dictionary, the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical or, more abstract, theoretical work for the Canadian Word Centre. You may choose to work on another variety of World Englishes (e.g. American English or Jamaican Englishes) or Global Englishes (English as a Lingua Franca), or, if you have a concrete connection, a non-English language.
There is the option to partake with your seminar paper in a thematic collection of papers on Inclusive Linguistic Standard Varieties: Standardization for the 2020s with a major publisher.
The guiding question will be: how can we best distinguish between
- theoretical approaches that are ideal but perhaps unrealistic to be put into practice (lack of user uptake)
and
- best practices for “inclusive standards” that may not be ideal but would bring inclusive standards more into the centre of linguistic debate.
Optional readings and podcasts in preparation for this seminar:
- Chew, John III., 2025. CWOTY – the Canadian Word of the Year, Press Release https://www.canadianenglishdictionary.ca/media/2025-cwoty-release.pdf
- Language Science Institute (UBC). 2024. On data collection and standard languages: a conversation with Stefan Dollinger, https://languagesciences.ubc.ca/news/march-03-2024/data-collection-and-standard-languages-conversation-dr-stefan-dollinger
- Ferrett, Emma. 2025. Interview on Ontario Morning (8 minutes), 31 Dec. 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-112-ontario-morning/clip/16189867-canadas-canuck-word-year (Emma is a PhD candidate at Queen’s U in English; she took this seminar while at UBC)
- Isai, Vjosa. 2025. Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’. New York Times (Online) 16 Dec. 2025, https://www.academia.edu/145696003/
- The Editorial Board. 2025. A defence of Canadian spelling, with vigour. The Globe and Mail, 26 Dec. 2025, https://www.academia.edu/145676458/
Some scholarly sources for illustration:
Ayers-Bennett, Wendy. 2020. From Haugen’s codification to Thomas’s purism: assessing the role of description and prescription, prescriptivism and purism in linguistic standardization. Language Policy 19, 183–213.
Aryes-Bennett, Wendy & John Bellamy (eds.) 2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Costa-Carreras, Joan. 2025. On the Epistemological Status of Comparative Standardology and Standardisation. Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia 78: 249–270.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties. London: Routledge.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2025. Dialectology as “language making”: hegemonic disciplinary discourse and the One Standard German Axiom (OSGA). In (Dia)lects in the 21st Century: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XVII (Mainz, 2022), ed. by Susanne Wagner & Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer, 287–318. Berlin: LangSci Press.
Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conflict and Language Planning: the Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Horner, Kristine & John Bellamy. 2016. Beyond the micro–macro interface in language and identity research. In Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, ed. by Siân Preece. London: Routledge.
Joseph, John E. 2006. Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Joseph, John E., Gijsbert Rutten & Rik Vosters. 2020. Dialect, language & nation: 50 years on. Language Policy 19: 161–182.
Muhr, Rudolf & Juan Thomas (eds.). 2020. Pluricentric Theory beyond Dominance and Non-dominance. Graz: PCL-Press.
Oakes, Leigh & Jane Warren. 2007. Language, Citizenship and Identity in Quebec. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Oakes, Leigh & Yael Peled. 2018. Normative Language Policy: Ethics, Politics, Principles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Term 2
WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Eating the Text: Reading Culture Through Food, Cooking, and Eating
Food, cooking, and eating are biologically necessary and socially powerful:
we produce and cook food to survive, but also to reinforce social bonds, to celebrate tradition, to evoke memories of home, to compete with other cooks, to impress the eater, and even to beguile and seduce.
This course will explore food in literature, particularly life narratives, cookbook selections, and films across different cultures and borders, from the transnational to local Vancouver contexts. The production of food is essentially linked to histories of empire, colonial power, capital, racialized and gendered labour, and ecological change. Our discussions will explore these intersections.
Readings will include selections from Gitanjali Shahani (Food and Literature), Sandra Gilbert (The Culinary Imagination), Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire), Sidney Mintz (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History), Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd with Alexia Moyer(Canadian Literary Fare), Monique Truong (The Book of Salt), MFK Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf), Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?), Fred Wah (Diamond Grill), and Austin Clarke (Pigtails ‘n’ Breadfruit). Films will include Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Juzo Itami's Japanese "noodle western" Tampopo, Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, and the restaurant documentaries of Cheuk Kwan.
Term 1
FRI, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Cold War Legacies in Asia and the Asian Americas
The period post-WWII until the 1980s is conventionally understood in the West as the Cold War. Marked by events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, these years are remembered as a tense time when it seemed that the conflict between communist and capitalist democratic ideologies might result in the outbreak of nuclear war. At the same time, it is important to remember that these same tensions played out very differently in Asia and took the form of multiple bloody and violent wars. This course will return to this historical period in order to rethink what is conventionally remembered in the West as a conflict between the US and the USSR as a struggle that also involved—and, indeed, was staged in—Asia.
We will consider the legacies of these hot wars in Asia as they have been experienced in Asian North America and critiqued by diasporic and transpacific scholars, writers, and filmmakers. Our readings will be drawn from various fields that include Asian diaspora studies, critical refugee studies, inter-Asian cultural studies, Indigenous studies, Asian Canadian and Asian American studies, and transpacific critique. We will ask how, what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War, continues to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, human rights, race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and imperialism.
Term 2
THU, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
The Postcolonial Incredible
The African cultural theorist Tejumola Olaniyan describes the disenchantment of the postcolonial subject after colonialism as “the postcolonial incredible.” He characterizes this situation as marked by “an outlandish infraction of ‘normality’ and its limits.” This course sits with that characterization of the postcolonial. We will proceed with two aims in mind. The first is to consider the term “postcolonial.” We will discuss the postcolonial condition through the works of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Achille Mbembe. As we sit with these thinkers, we will ask the following questions of the postcolonial: What is the post in postcolonial? Who inhabits the postcolonial? How is the postcolonial inhabited? Having sorted through all this, we will turn to the second aim of this course: exploring the specific condition of the postcolonial which has been termed “the postcolonial incredible”—political situations in which the postcolonial state is characterized by unbelievable events. Under the rubric of the postcolonial incredible, we will study postcolonial texts such as Femi Osofisan’s Kolera Kolej, Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks, Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, and S. Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half.
Term 2
MON, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Writing the American Self in the Long 19th Century
This seminar is organized around the theme of the self–self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-deception, self-representation-–in US literature from the long nineteenth century. We will begin with a hip hop opera based on the biography of the US’s first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of the first self-made men in America. We will then read nonfiction about self-reliance by an early environmentalist (Thoreau) and a philosopher (Emerson); fiction about self-deceptive (Melville); lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; life-writing by a formerly enslaved person (Jacobs) and the first Asian North American author (Sui Sin Far); followed by a novel written not by an individual but by a collective of authors. The last few weeks of the course will focus on two contemporary works of multi-generational life-writing (Chin and Graver).
PRIMARY TEXTS WILL INCLUDE:
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “American Scholar”
Selections from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself
Selections from Emily Dickinson’s poetry
Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854)
Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1852)
Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Selections from Sui Sin Far’s works
Elizabeth Jordan, editor, The Sturdy Oak
Ava Chin, Mott Street: The Story of Belonging: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming
Elizabeth Graver, Kantika
Term 2
MON, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Technology
Technologies emerged in the nineteenth century that transformed conceptions of time, space, and the self, and influenced the form and content of literary texts. Trains, and later automobiles, allowed for rapid travel; electricity illuminated cities, altering perceptions of the relations between night and day; the telegraph enabled instantaneous, seemingly incorporeal, communication across distances; sound recording and wireless delivered disembodied voices. Environmental movements grew up in response to industrial technologies. New technologies were also crucial tools of imperialism and globalization, and of resistance to them.
In this seminar, we will consider the ways in which emerging technologies of communication, recording, perception, transportation, industry, medicine, and war altered nineteenth-century literature and culture. Topics discussed will include technology and consciousness, technology and perception, globalization and imperialism, technology and race, industrialism and the environment, the emerging genre of science fiction, automata, technology and the supernatural (spiritual telegraphy, ghost photography), and technologies and disability.
Authors and texts will include Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, Flora Anna Steel, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and H. G. Wells, along with critical readings from Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility; Long T. Bui, Model Machines; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics; and Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media; and M. Norton Wise, “The Gender of Automata in Victorian England.”