A glance at the list of the faculty’s areas of interests and publications (in the Who We Are section on the left-hand menu) reveals a wealth of diverse interests and approaches. Research in the Department includes such topics as the relationship between the Latin poet Ovid and the medieval poet Chaucer, the formation of gender and sexuality in the Renaissance, and “the sound of Shakespeare” in his own time and on the radio in modern times. We look at topics such as the eighteenth-century novel in the literary marketplace, the culture of celebrity in the Romantic period, contemporary aesthetics in relation to the plays of Bertolt Brecht, the modern American city in modern fiction, and Canadian, American, and British modernisms. Faculty members work on issues like the culture of cooking and the place of women in modern Canada, the role of the novel in post-Apartheid South Africa, the culture of the image with respect to a modern icon such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and the importance of class relations in modern American film.

In addition to these and many other areas of study, specialists in Drama and Theatre mount productions of classical and modern plays such as, most recently, Orra by Joanna Baillie, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Playhouse Creatures by April De Angelis. These productions are forums for research in themselves and they provide situational learning of the most exciting kind for the students who perform in them and who help to produce them. Finally, members of the Department cross over from writing within the academy to writing for—and speaking to—more heterogeneous audiences. Department members publish articles and reviews in literary and popular magazines, and they present their work to groups in Montreal and elsewhere. One recent book-length publication was a provocative account of how the publishing business helped to form Canadian literature; another was an award-winning book of poetry, Horror Vacui.

The Department is home to—or is a principal participant in—a number of major, collaborative research projects and research groups. For an overview, see our listing of Research projects in the left-hand menu. In addition to their leadership in interdisciplinary undertakings, members of the Department share three principles that guide their work and their interactions with students and fellow researchers.

(1) Research and teaching are inseparable. The coupling of research and teaching means that undergraduate and graduate students are important participants in the development of new ways of understanding art and culture, and that knowledge is something produced actively and by means of exchanges that take place in the classroom. Of course, the degree to which faculty bring their research questions into the classroom will vary depending on the level of the course, but in all cases faculty members share at least some of their research interests with their students, profit from the students’ perspectives and ideas, and help to cultivate the students’ own abilities as researchers. The Department aspires to promote in students a desire to find out for themselves about the meanings, formal features, and social dimensions of literature, theatre, film, and cultural imagery.

(2) The best forms of knowledge are critical and self-reflexive. The cultivation of students’ research skills and independence of thought through teaching and research is grounded in the development of critical thinking, which is necessarily self-reflexive. For one thing, that means that members of the Department think about their interpretive work, no matter what the object of interpretation, as a process of reading—a critical and receptive form of attention paid to a text, whether it is a poem, novel, play, film, emblem, or advertisement. That reading is also self-reflexive means that Department members are alert to the social and political dimensions of interpretive practices, both in the modern university and in the many historically situated contexts for literature, theatre, film and images.

(3) Tradition is a living thing. A sense of tradition makes it possible to understand literature, theatre, film, and images more fully by understanding these forms historically. Artists are embedded within tradition, and they engage with tradition in order to represent the world we live in and to imagine new worlds and new ways of living. And, of course, by working within traditional forms and genres, artists also challenge and change tradition, renew it, and keep it alive.

It is important, finally, that the works studied in the Department of English not only stimulate the mind, they also arouse powerful and pleasurable emotional responses. This capacity of the works of literary, theatrical, and visual culture to engage people emotionally as well as intellectually finds its most noticeable form in theatrical performance, which depends on the actor’s ability to express feelings and ideas not separately but as a complex unity. The intellectual and emotional wholeness of the works that we study and the methods by which we study and teach them is of a piece with the capacity of literature, theatre, and the works of visual culture to delight while enlightening and to enlighten by arousing delight. Study in the fields encompassed in the Department of English requires students and faculty to work at the top of their abilities and also offers them both the opportunity to develop greater interpretive and expressive resources and the means to cultivate an enriched intellectual and emotional life.