Faculty Profiles

An indication of all English department faculty research interests can be found on the main department page.

Read about our award-winning faculty in recent news.


Graduate Faculty Profiles

Pat Byrne, BA (Iona College), MA, PhD (Memorial). Email: pbyrne@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Utopian literature, short fiction, Newfoundland literature and folklore, Shakespeare, and modern American and Canadian fiction

Publications: on interrelationships between folklore and literature, on the influence of the McNulty family on Newfoundland music, on manifestations of the tall tale in Newfoundland literature, on invented traditions in Newfoundland popular culture, and on the influence of folklore and literature on the image of Newfoundland within the Canadian context. He co-edited Land, Sea and Time, a three-volume anthology of Newfoundland and Labrador texts published by Breakwater Books, which is currently in use in the province's high schools.

A published poet and songwriter, he has performed at numerous folk festivals, as well as on radio and television. He has also been active in amateur theatre. He can also be heard on the CD Towards the Sunset, a collection of original Newfoundland songs, on which he is joined by Joe Byrne and Baxter Wareham.

Dr. Brad Clissold -- film, popular culture, modernism, postcards

Danine Farquharson, BA (Alberta), MA, PhD (Memorial). Email: daninef@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Irish literature and critical theory

Current research project: Violence and Narrative in Novels of the Easter Rising

Recent and Forthcoming Publications: Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland; The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies: Special Issue on the Irish in Newfoundland as guest editor; “Violence and Ontological Doubt in ‘The Stoat.’” ; “Pity vs. Fear: Performing Violence in Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Contemporary Irish Drama”; “Sexing the Rising: Men, Sex, Violence and Easter 1916” in Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland and “The Language of Violence in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street”.

Dr. Farquharson is Past President of Canadian Association for Irish Studies and Literature Editor of Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

Noreen Golfman, BA Hons. (Alberta), MA, PhD (Western Ontario).
Dean of Graduate Studies. Email: ngolfman@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Canadian literature, film studies, women's literature, critical theory.

Current Projects: Link to www.mun.ca/cinema

Selected publications: "An Outsider's Eye," in Literary Review of Canada; "(Canada) George Jonas vs (Hollywood) Stephen Spielberg: Conflict, Resolution, and Munich," in Coping With Crisis (Magnes Press);"Documenting the Sealing Fishery," in Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Essays on Film and Television in Atlantic Canada (Uni of Calgary Press) ; "Imagining Region: A Survey of Newfoundland Film," in North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980 (Uni of Alberta Press); "Letters in Canada/Fiction," University of Toronto Quarterly.

Gordon Jones, BA (Leeds), MA (McMasert), PhD (London). Email: gjones@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching and research: Shakespeare and 
theatre.

Publications: on Shakespeare, John Payne Collier, Frederick Rolfe (Baron
 Corvo), Malcolm Lowry. Freelance theatre reviewer for The Telegram (St. John's).
 Director of Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night, Love's Labour's 
Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Two 
Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Romeo
 and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors (twice), and The Taming of the
 Shrew (twice).
 Author and director of The Irish Caruso, a one-man play with music
on the life and times of John McCormack.


Dr. Jones is a board member of the National Theatre School of Canada and Canadian Theatre Critics Association.

Valerie Legge, BA, BEd, MA, PhD (Memorial). Email: valerie@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Canadian Exploration Literature; North American Aboriginal Literature; Canadian Women Writers.

Current research projects: ‘Only a Roughneck Woman’: The Life and Times of Agnes C. Laut (a literary biography); Wandering Woman: Agnes C. Laut’s Selected Correspondence, 1898-1936

Selected publications: “Elizabeth Bishop in Newfoundland: ‘Sad and Still and Foreign’”; Agnes C. Laut. Lords of the North. [1900] Ed. and Introduction by Valerie Legge.; "Heralds of Empire: Liminal Heroes and Visionary Fugitives"; “‘Why Go Abroad?’ Agnes Laut in Wonderland”; “Worldly Women and the Land of Frost and Fire”; “Journey-Women in the Ark of the Wilderness"; "Agnes C. Laut: What the New Nation to the North Thinks of the United States"; "Agnes C. Laut's Freebooters of the Wilderness: Borderlands and Visionary Fugitives”; "Lily Dougall's The Madonna of a Day (1895): Spiritual Fortress Inviolate; or, Falling into [W]holiness”; "The Guerrillero": Albalucía Angel and the Politics of Terror." ; "Sheila Watson's Antigone: Anguished Rituals and Acts of Public Disturbance."; "Kristjana Gunnars' Zero Hour: 'When Mourning Becomes Language'".

Christopher Lockett, BA (York), MA (Toronto), PhD (Western). Email: clockett@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: 20th-century American Literature, Postmodernism, Film and Popular Culture

Current research projects: "Spectral Fathers: The Cold War and Postmodern Memory"; "HBO's America: Reimagining Television and Mass Culture"

Selected publications: "Mapping the Conspiratorial Imagination in The Crying of Lot 49" (forthcoming); "Accidental History: Mass Culture and HBO's Rome" (forthcoming); "Don DeLillo's Better Angels: Geography as Teleology in Underworld" (forthcoming); "Domesticity as Redemption: Robert A. Heinlein's Model for Consensus in The Puppet Masters" (SF Studies); "Terror and Rebirth: Cathleen ni Houlihan, from Yeats to the Crying Game" (Literature Film Quarterly); "Extending our Bodies Inward: McLuhan, Neuromancer, and the Copernican Reversal" (Perspectives on the Canadian Fantastic).

Andrew Loman, BA (Victoria), MA (Queen’s), PhD (Queen’s). Email: aloman@mun.ca

Main Areas of Teaching and Research: Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Graphic Narrative

Current Research Projects: Fourierism in Mary Gove Nichols’s Mary Lyndon; hermeneutics in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home; Eugene O’Neill and nineteenth-century America

Recent and Forthcoming Publications: “‘More Than a Parchment Three-Pence’: Crises of Value in Hawthorne’s ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’” (forthcoming in PMLA, 2011), “‘That Mouse’s Shadow’: The Canonization of Spiegelman’s Maus” in The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts (forthcoming from U of Mississippi P, Winter 2010), “The Sea Cook’s Wife: Evocations of Slavery in Treasure Island” (Children’s Literature, 2010), “Cosmopolitan Detachment in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Prophetic Pictures’” (ESQ, 2007), “‘Well Intended Liberal Slop’: Allegories of Race in Art Spiegelman’s Maus” (Journal of American Studies, 2006), “Somewhat on the Community-System”: Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Routledge, 2005).

Larry Mathews, BA Hons, MA (Carleton), PhD (British Columbia). Email: lmathews@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Newfoundland and Canadian literature; creative writing. Courses taught at graduate level include contemporary Canadian fiction and contemporary Newfoundland fiction. Graduate supervisions have included MA theses in creative writing as well as on more conventional academic topics at both MA and PhD levels.

Current research project: writing a novel

Selected publications: an as yet untitled novel to be published by Breakwater Books (forthcoming in Spring 2010), The Sandblasting Hall of Fame (short fiction), guest-editor of a special Newfoundland issue of the journal Essays on Canadian Writing, short monographs on Norman Levine and David Adams Richards for the series Canadian Writers and Their Works (ECW Press).

Selected Articles: "'Some Wonderful Linguistic Game above Believing': Meaningfulness in Two Stories by Douglas Glover,"; "Life on the Brink of Eternity: The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne,"; "Subversive in the Emerald City: Notes on the Fiction of Keath Fraser,";"Calgary, Canonization and Class: Deciphering List B,"; "Ghosts and Saints: Notes on Mavis Gallant's From the Fifteenth Distract"; over 50 review articles and reviews, in such venues as The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Literary Review of Canada, Books in Canada, and Canadian Literature; about 30 stories in various journals and anthologies.

Don Nichol, BA, MA (Carleton), PhD (Edinburgh). Email: dnichol@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: 18th-century satire, Scottish literature, bibliography

Dr. Nichol is currently the departmental Graduate Co-ordinator. He recently organized the 36th conference of Canadian Society for 18th-Century Studies (14-16 October 2010) and will be editing the proceedings, Lumen, vol. XXXI, scheduled for 2011-12.

Robert Ormsby, BA (Toronto), MA (Birmingham), PhD (Toronto). Email: rormsby@mun.ca

Main areas of research: Shakespeare, Shakespeare in performance, theatre history

Current Research: A stage history of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus for Manchester University Press’ Shakespeare in Performance Series; the performance of Shakespeare in Canada.

Selected Publications: Julius Caesar (editor for Sourcebooks); “Coriolanus, Antitheatricalism and Audience Response”; “richardthesecond: Adapting Shakespeare to the Local in a Culture of Global Celebrity”; “Québécois Shakespeare Goes Global: Robert Lepage’s Coriolan” (forthcoming); “Performing Shakespeare on The Internet” (forthcoming); “‘Bold, but Seemingly Marketable’: The 2007 Stratford Ontario Merchant of Venice” (forthcoming); “This Famous Duke of Milan of Whom So Often I have Heard Renown: William Hutt at Stratford and New Burbage” (forthcoming).

Nancy Pedri, BA (Windsor), MA, PhD (Toronto). Email: npedri@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: World Literature in English, Critical Theory, Graphic Novel, Writing and Gender, 20th-century Canadian Literature

Current research projects: Photography in Autobiography, Visual Evidence in Fiction, Focalization in Intermedial Texts

Selected publications: Photography in Fiction. Co-editor: Silke Horstkotte. http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org; Travelling Concepts III: Memory, Narrative, Image. Ed. Nancy Pedri.; "Cartographic Explorations of Self in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues."; "Le silence photographique, un geste provocateur.";"Portraiture's Unruly Faces: Beauty in Jo Spence's Putting Myself in the Picture."; "Here's Looking at Me: Exposing Gender in Gender Outlaw and The Last Time I Wore a Dress."; "Critical Encounters with Gender: Photography in Virginia Woolf's Orlando."; "Showing the Places You Tell: Visual Evidence in Travel Writing.";"The Verbal and Visual Mirrors of Postcolonial Identity in Breyten Breytenbach's All One Horse".

Dr. Pedri is the Humanities Review Editor for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies (2007-09).

Fiona Polack, BA, PhD (Tasmania). Email: fpolack@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Post-Colonial Literature, Island Studies

Current research: ‘Shawnadithit, Truganini and Settler Culture Inquietudes’ (SSHRC funded)

Selected publications: ’Taking the Waters: Abjection and Homecoming in The Shipping News and Death of a River Guide.’; ‘Home Births: Women and Regional Space in The Sound of One Hand Clapping and Waiting for Time.’; ‘From Millstone to Touchstone: Thinking About Regional Identity.’; ‘Place and Space: Views from a Tasmanian Mountain.’; ‘Writing and Rewriting the Island: Tasmania, Politics, and Contemporary Australian Fiction.’

Ronald Rompkey, BA, BEd, MA (Memorial), PhD (London). Email: rrompkey@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Eighteenth-century British literature, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Current research project: The French in Newfoundland

Selected publications: Soame Jenyns (Twayne, 1984); Terre-Neuve: Anthologie des Voyageurs Français, 1814-1914 (Université de Rennes, 2004).

William Schipper, MA (Windsor), PhD (Queen's). Email: schipper@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: Old English, Middle English, Chaucer, Arthurian Literature

Current research project: Hrabanus Maurus's De rerum naturis: a critical edition (with a SSHRC Standard Research Grant from 2009 to 2012).

Selected publications:"Hrabanus Maurus and Anglo-Saxon England: In honorem sanctae crucis," in Nicholas Brooks et al., eds, Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald; "Montecassino 132 and the Early Transmission of Hrabanus's De rerum naturis,"; "The Origin of the Trinity Hrabanus,"; "Textual Varieties in Manuscript Margins,"; "Reading the Cross in Anglo-Saxon England,"; "Digitizing (Nearly) Unreadable Fragments of Cyprian's Epistolary,"; "Rabanus Maurus and His Sources,"; "Style and Layout of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts,"; "The Earliest Manuscripts of Rabanus Maurus' De rerum naturis,"; "Annotated English Copies of Rabanus Maurus's De rerum naturis,"; "Drypoint Compilation Notes in the Benedictional of St. Aethelwold".

Dr. Schipper is currently president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists which is meeting in St. John's for its 13th biennial congress from 26-31 July 2009.

Bernice Schrank, BA (CUNY), MA, PhD (Wisconsin). Email: bschrank@mun.ca

Main areas of teaching: 20th-century American literature, Irish literature

Current research projects: Brooklyn as Cultural Topography

Selected publications: “Sean O’Casey and the Dialectics of Violence”; “‘Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Race’: Jewish Stereotypes, Media Images, Cultural Hybridity”; “Creating the Self, Recreating the Nation: The Politics of Irish Literary Autobiography”; “A study of the political implications of the autobiographical work of George Moore, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan”; “Blurring Boundaries, Intersecting Lives: History, Gender and Violence in Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation”; “Erica Jong” and “Hortense Calisher” in Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Writing; “William Z. Foster” with William E. Schrank, Dictionary of Literary Biography; “Reception, Close Reading and Re-Production: The Case of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie”; “World War I in Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme”; “Reading the Rosenbergs After Venona”; “Staging John Bull: British Identity and Irish Drama”; “Performing Political Opposition: Sean O’Casey’s Late Plays and the Demise of Eamon deValera”; “Sean O’Casey’s Time to Go and the Theory of a Just Price”; “Politics, Language, Metatheatre: Friel’s The Freedom of the City and the Formation of an Engaged Audience”; “‘Which Side Are You On?’ Socialist Workers, Fascist Dupes and Labour Fakers in Sean O’Casey’s The Star Turns Red”; “In the Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War: A Previously Unpublished Letter from Sean O’Casey to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade”; and “Fabulous Cocks and Fallible Clerics: Fantasy as Politics in Sean O’Casey’s Cock-a-Doodle Dandy”.