Graduate Course Offerings

Winter 2026-2027 Graduate Courses

Dr. Danine Farquharson, ENGL 7302: Literature and the Environment

Tuesdays 1000-1300

 An image showing HMS Erebus passing through a chain of icebergs.

Image: Richard Brydges Beechey (presumed artist), “HMS ‘Erebus’ Passing Through the Chain of Bergs, 1842” (1860), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London

                            

Transcendence is essentially a hierarchical control freak relation to the world. It holds that some humans are better than other humans and that all humans are superior to the nonhuman. Maybe the worst thing transcendence does is to try to corset the total excessive marvelous abundance of nonhuman lifedeath into one six letter word: nature. (Boyer, No More Fossils, 73, emphasis mine)

 

Using Boyer’s 2024 text No More Fossils as one focal point, this graduate seminar will follow how various literary and philosophical moments/movements approach questions of the human relationship to the non-human/more-than-human world(s). We will focus on changing ideas of “nature.”

 

 

Dr. Aaron Tucker, ENGL 7225: The Secret Lives of Objects: Writing, Items, Archives

Thursdays 1300-1600

 

 A black-and-white photograph of the paper mill company town Ocean Falls, BC, in 1928

Image: “5th Street Ocean Falls” (1928), from The British Columbia Archives

                            

 This course takes a multi-genre creative writing approach to objects, localities, histories, futurities, and archives by incorporating research creation methods into poems and prose. Students in this class will consider what an object is, what an archive is, and how poetry and prose can reveal, narrate, and reconsider localities and narratives.

 

 

Dr. Joel Deshaye, ENGL 7552: Sequels in Canadian Poetry

Fridays 1000-13000

 An image depicting the title of the course, with text changing the title: sequels, sea quells, see squalls.

Image credit: Joel Deshaye

 

This course re-examines the traditions of the long poem or the serial poem in Canadian literature, focusing (for a manageable scope) on the sequel or the follow-up. In the background of the course are historically significant examples such as bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Books 1 & 2 (1972, plus four more and some posthumous additions); Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (1989); Lisa Robertson’s XEclogue (1993.1999) and XEclogue II-V (1993); Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy (1984) and Book of Longing (2006); George Elliott Clarke’s Blue (2001), Black (2006), Red (2011), Gold (2016), and Portia White (2019); Marvin Francis’s City Treaty (2002) and Bush Camp (2008); Stephen Collis’s Anarchive (2005), The Commons (2008), and To the Barricades (2013); Sue Goyette’s Outskirts (2011) and Ocean (2013); and Shannon Maguire’s fur(l) parachute (2013) and Myrmurs (2015). 

 

In this course, we will (probably) focus on recent examples, such as (again, probably) Rita Wong’s forage (2007) and undercurrent (2015), Christian Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1 (2015) and Book 2 (2025), and Oana Avasilichioaei’s Eight Track (2019) and Chambersonic (2024). Part of the course will be devoted to reading book reviews of these texts so that we gain a better sense of the genre of the review while attending to the ways in which poets respond to the reception of their work and link sequential volumes. Practically, this work may also furnish us with ideas for designing our own future writing projects in reaction to those we have already completed.

 

 

Dr. Sarah Thorne, HUMN 6015: Political Games and Game Politics

Friday 1100-1400

 

 A 2D depiction of a video game controller with neon lines, and the title of the course in neon writing.

HUMN 6015 examines the rise of far-right extremism in North America and its ties with video games and internet culture. Since the “Gamergate” cultural war and harassment campaign against women in 2014, the proliferation of far-right extremism and conspiracy theories has intensified political division. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network has found that, “[w]hether you measure it by number of supporters, fundraising ability, or by the size of its militant groups,” these organizations have “never been larger or more of a threat.” Critically, recruitment efforts are happening in spaces where children are playing games. While far-right gamers have complained that games have become political (as though art wasn’t always already political), this course critiques the ways that mainstream games have upheld conservative ideologies related to borders, immigration, and gender roles.