Celebrating the retirements of our esteemed faculty members!
The Department of English would like to honor our esteemed faculty members who have retired this year: Ken Borris (Literature), Catherine Bradley (Drama and Theatre), Nathalie Cooke (Literature), Marianne Stenbaek (Literature) and Paul Yachnin (Literature, Drama and Theatre). We would like to highlight the invaluable contribution that they have made to the Department over the years and we wish them the best for the chapter ahead.
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Born in Burnaby, British Columbia, Kenneth Borris was raised across the Salish Sea in Victoria near the beckoning shores of Willows Beach and the wild Garry Oak meadows of Uplands Park, flooded in spring with purple camas and violet shooting stars, where he loved to play and walk his intrepid beagle. His parents helped kindle his loves of nature, literature and the other arts, history, and cultural differences. After his BA (Hons) at the University of Victoria, a Commonwealth Fellowship and then another from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada enabled his doctorate in English Renaissance studies at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Alastair Fowler, CBE, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature. A five-year postgraduate Canada Research Fellowship brought him to McGill University, where he met many wonderful students and colleagues, became full Professor in 2003, and obtained 5 major refereed SSHRC research grants as principal investigator. Aside from over 27 essays in scholarly serials and collections so far, and further studies in progress, his currently 8 refereed books include 3 monographs, a textual edition of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, 3 co-edited collections of scholarly essays, and the handbook/sourcebook Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance, addressing diverse writers including Spenser, John Milton, and Sir Philip Sidney, and topics ranging through early modern sexual, cultural, and intellectual history, literary theory and poetics, allegory, and the sublime. His most significant monographs to date are Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press) and Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Oxford University Press). He is a recipient of the Isabel MacCaffrey Award and Fellow of the International Institute of Literature and Arts.
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Catherine Bradley has worked in costumes for her entire post-University life. Catherine’s first experience in theatre was working in the costume department of the Stratford Festival (starting in 1986). She had never considered a career in theatre. One free-lance contract led to another; Stratford was followed by Theatre New Brunswick, followed by Theatre Plus in Toronto. In her first five years working professionally, Catherine made costumes at most of the major Canadian theatres, including the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, National Ballet in Toronto, l’Opéra de Montréal, the Shaw Festival, Banff School of Fine Arts, Theatre Plus, Theatre Nouveau Monde. In Montreal she worked as a milliner for film and television projects, as well as costume houses such as Barbeau, Jobin, LaPlante (BJL) and Espace Costume. Centaur Theatre, the Saydie Bronfman Centre (now Segal Centre) rounded out the roster of free-lance projects that interwove her professional life.
Two years as Wardrobe Assistant at Concordia’s Theatre Department (1986-88) led to a call requesting that Catherine take on the role of Wardrobe Manager at McGill’s Department of English, Drama & Theatre Program. Her time at McGill started in 1988 and lasted until her retirement in 2026. Running the costume shop at McGill, designing costumes for mainstage productions, and teaching Costuming for the Theatre, History of Costume, and Costume Design has been the highlight of Catherine’s career.
Catherine began at McGill by setting up a temporary costume shop in a classroom in the Islamic Studies building. After five years in the temporary facility, Catherine organized a fundraising initiative called Friends of Costume Shop (1993) to raise funds for the future facilities. Catherine designed every inch of the purpose-built costume shop in Arts basement, which opened in 1996.
Catherine has had success in research by applying digital capacities to costume design. She headed SSHRC sponsored research called the Digital Costume Project (debut 2008). This research grant yielded numerous educational videos depicting the creation of an actor’s 2D avatar to aide in envisioning perfectly scaled actor-specific costume renderings before a single stitch was made (2009). Publications on this topic led to the Innovation and Excellence in Technical Writing Award from the United States Institute for Theatre technology (USITT) in 2011, as well as USITT grants for development of the Virtual Textile Project (VTP) 2014-2015. Bradley partnered with American software developer, Dr Kat Lind, to host the VTP on their servers. Bradley and Lind brought their teams together to create digital representations of Victorian era fabric samples archived at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, Mass. These historic textiles were hosted on the VTP site (starting in 2014), along with an open access visual Textile Dictionary (debut 2015), and Weave Guide (2016). The VTP site was hosted on Dragon and Phoenix Software’s VPN from 2014-2019.
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Nathalie Cooke joined McGill’s Department of English in 1991 and became Full Professor in 2009. Her research has ranged from Canadian women’s writing, life writing, and Margaret Atwood to food studies, culinary history, book history, coded communications and material culture. Her six books include Margaret Atwood: A Biography (1998), the award-winning Canadian Literary Fare (2023), and Tastes and Traditions: An Illustrated Journey through Menu History (2025). A pioneering scholar of Canadian literary and social food studies, Cooke played a leading role in establishing and defining the field in Canada and internationally.
Teaching and mentorship have been central to Cooke’s McGill career. Recipient of the Louis Dudek Award and the Carrie Derrick Award for graduate teaching, she supervised eight doctoral dissertations, twenty-six MA projects, forty-five undergraduate honours theses, and four postdoctoral scholars. These relationships often developed into continuing intellectual partnerships, with former students becoming co-authors, grant co-investigators, and collaborators in games and other forms of public scholarship.
Cooke also held significant leadership roles at McGill, serving as Associate Dean of Arts (Research and Graduate Studies), Associate University Provost (Academic Staff and Priority Initiatives), and Associate Dean of McGill Libraries. Throughout these roles she sought to connect scholarship, collections, students, and broader publics. She founded the bilingual open-access journal Cuizine and championed innovative approaches to rare collections through exhibitions, alternate-reality and analogue games, and a pop-up book.
Cooke is a lifetime member of the Culinary Historians of Canada and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2025.
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Marianne Stenbaek was Professor of English at McGill University and holds an Honorary Doctorate in Arctic Culture, Language, and Society from Ilisimatusarfik University in Greenland. She serves as Director of the University of the Arctic’s Thematic Network on Children and Youth in the Arctic — a role that reflects her lifelong commitment to the wellbeing, dignity, and rights of Indigenous children and youth. Marianne is also a member of the Board of Siunissaq, an Greenlandic organization leading community‑based initiatives for youth. Her work spans literature, media, cultural history, and Arctic policy. She has curated exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, led international Arctic research networks, collaborated with Inuit leaders and communities, and published widely on Indigenous culture, communication, and political development. She has received the Greenlandic Medal of Honour, Nersornaat, for her contributions to Greenlandic culture and society.
Marianne’s collaborations are always rooted in respect, listening, and shared creation. She has worked closely with Inuit writers, artists, and people, helping bring forward voices that shape contemporary Arctic identity. Her editorial work on the Voices and Images of Nunavimmiutseries, and her leadership in circumpolar cultural initiatives have made her a central figure in Arctic humanities. In Siunissaq, Marianne contributes deep cultural insight, historical knowledge, and a strong circumpolar perspective. She brings a rare ability to connect community-based learning with global conversations on Indigenous rights, resilience, and cultural continuity. Marianne’s life’s work is guided by a powerful principle: that Indigenous art, knowledge, cultural values, and community strength are essential to the future of the Arctic.
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Paul Yachnin was until his retirement the Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies. He served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2009-2010). From 2005-2010, he directed the Making Publics (MaPs) project. From 2013-2018, he directed the Early Modern Conversions project. Among his publications are the books, Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson), editions of Richard II and The Tempest; and seven edited books, including Making Publics in Early Modern Europe, Forms of Association, and Conversion Machines in Early Modern Europe: Apparatus, Artifice, Body. His ideas and the ideas of his MaPs colleagues about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” He publishes non-academic essays about Shakespeare and modern life, including titles such as “Alzheimer’s Disease: What would Shakespeare Do?” and “Tragedy as a Way of Life.” An area of strong interest is higher education practice and policy, including the TRaCE Transborder Project, involving 12 universities across five continents. He and Laurette Dubé are now leading an international project, “Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking the Modern Self and Modern World Systems.” The project pairs ten of Shakespeare’s plays with ten key modern systems (medicine, healthcare, education, AI/digital technology, etc.), using the plays as interpretive lenses through which the working groups of humanists, artists, scientists, and domain experts—collaborating with AI as a “scene partner” rather than an author—diagnoses the crises in those systems and proposes pathways toward a more humane, convergence-based future.