In my teaching and research, I like to wander among the many forms of creative experimentation from the 1890s to today鈥攊n popular arts as well as in the avant-garde. I am motivated by questions about the nature and consequences of aesthetic power and am drawn to radically alternative visions of the good life and the social forces arrayed against it.
Some facts: I was once an American citizen and studied in the South; returning to Toronto, I never liked winter again. I loved my first job as a professor at Dalhousie, and I鈥檝e been fortunate to teach at Queen鈥檚 since 1995. Some of my favourite authors are the modernists Djuna Barnes and D. H. Lawrence, the pulp fiction writers C. L. Moore and Raymond Chandler. My most recent favourite author is Ayse Papatya Bucak. In comics I am devoted to George Herriman and Lynda Barry, among many others. I also love the Western classics, from Sappho and the Odyssey to Moby Dick and Middlemarch.
Modernist avant-garde literature, arts, and culture; ecocriticism and animal studies; comic strips and graphic novels; science fiction, crime, romance, and other modern pulp genres; Hollywood; new media; reading, empathy, and affect.
I also have some experience with creative methods in research and will consider supervising projects of this kind, within my fields of expertise. If interested, please see my website for my guidelines for creative research.
Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment
In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences, wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected ecological entanglements. Yet this deeply felt experience鈥攁t once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical鈥攈as been dangerously neglected in our cultural education. In order to cultivate the imaginative empathy and caution this feeling evokes, we need to teach ourselves and others to read for wonder. This book begins by unfolding the nature and artifice of wonder as a human capacity and as a fabricated experience. Ranging across poetry, foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes, abstract