McGill.CA / Department of English / People

Retired Faculty

Dorothy Bray

Position: Associate Professor (Retired)

Stream: Literature

Degree(s): 

B.A. (McGill);
Ph.D., Celtic Studies (Edinburgh)

Previously Taught: McMaster University, University of Durham

Area(s): Medieval studies, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon; early Irish hagiography; heroic tradition; Celtic folklore and mythology; women saints and women’s spirituality

Selected Publications: 

Books

  • A List of Motifs in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints (Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1993)

Articles and Chapters

  • ‘The Vita Prima of St. Brigit: A Preliminary Analysis of Its Composition.’ Narrative in Celtic Tradition: Essays in Honour of Edgar M. Slotkin. Ed. Joseph F. Nagy. CSANA Yearbook 8-9 (Colgate University Press), 1-15.
  • ‘Ireland’s Other Apostle: Cogitosus’ Saint Brigit.’ Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 59 (Summer 2010): 55-70.
  • ‘Further on White Red-Eared Cows in Fact and Fiction.’ Peritia 19 (2005): 239-255.
  • ‘Miracles and Wonders in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints’ in Celtic Hagiography and Saints’ Cults, ed. Jane Cartwright (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002): 136-147.
  • ‘Malediction and Benediction in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints.’ Studia Celtica 36 (2002): 47-58. [published March 2003]
  • ‘The Study of Folk-Motifs in Early Irish Hagiography: Problems of Approach, and Rewards at Hand.’ In Studies in Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars, ed. John Carey, Máire Herbert, Pádraig Ó Riain (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001): 268-277.
  • "Suckling at the Breast of Christ: a spiritual lesson in an Irish hagiographical motif." Peritia 14 (2000): 282-296.
  • "The Manly Spirit of St. Monenna," in Celtic Connections, Vol. 1, ed. R. Black et al. (East Linton, 1999): 171-181.
  • "Secunda Brigida: Saint Ita of Killeedy and Brigidine Tradition", in Celtic Languages and Celtic People (1992): 27-38.
  • "Heroic Tradition in the Lives of the Early Irish Saints," in Proceedings of the First North American Congress of Celtic Studies (1988): 261-71.
  • "The Image of St. Brigit in the Early Irish Church," Études Celtiques 24 (1987): 209-215.
  • "Allegory in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani," Viator 26 (1995): 1-10.

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships:  

  • FCAC Bourse de recherche, British Council Personal Grant

Michael Bristol

Position: Professor (Retired)

Stream: Literature

Degree(s): 

B.A. (Yale)
Ph.D. (Princeton)

Area(s): Renaissance literature; Shakespeare; Shakespeare and contemporary popular culture; questions of moral agency in Renaissance drama; sociology of literature

Selected Publications: 

Books

  • Big Time Shakespeare (1996)
  • Shakespeare's America / America's Shakespeare (1990)
  • Carnival and Theatre: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (1985)

Articles and Chapters

  • "Funeral Baked Meats: Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet," in William Shakespeare: Hamlet Case Studies (1994): 348-368.
  • "Where Does Ideology Hang Out?" in Shakespeare Right and Left (1991): 31-43.
  • "Chivarari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello," in True Rites and Maimed Rites (1992): 75-98.
  • "In Search of the Bear: Spatio-Temporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (Summer 1991): 145-68.
  • "Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (1987).

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships: 

  • David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision

Max Dorsinville

Position: Professor (Retired)

Degree(s):

  • B.A., M.A. (Sherbrooke)
  • Ph.D. (C.U.N.Y.)

Area(s): Caribbean, Postcolonial and Modernist literature; Modernism; fiction; Derek Walcott's poetry; Memorial Postcolonial Writing

Selected Publications:

  • (Ed.) 1946: Le Journal de Robert Brémont (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2008) (forthcoming)
  • (Ed.) Le Monde de Robert Brémont (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2007)
  • (Trans.) A Brief History of the Black Communities in Canada (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2007)
  • (Ed.) L’Ombre de Duvalier (Montreal: CIDIHCA, 2007)
  • (Ed.) Mémoires de la décolonisation (Montréal: Editions Mémoire d'Encrier, 2006)
  • (Author) A Haitian's Coming of Age in 1959. (2005)
  • (author) “Roger Dorsinville en trois temps” in M-A Sourieau and K. Balutansky, eds. Écrire en pays assiégé/ Haïti / Writing Under Siege (New York, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004)
  • (Author) Understanding Contemporary Cuba in Visual and Verbal Forms (2004).
  • (Ed.) Pour célébrer la terre suivi de Poétique de l'exil (2004).
  • (Ed.) The Collected Edition of Roger Dorsinville's Postcolonial Literary Criticism in Africa, 2 vol. (2003).
  • (Ed. and trans.) A Critical Edition of Haitian Writer Roger Dorsinville's Memoirs of Haiti (2002).
  • (Ed. and trans.) A Critical Edition of Roger Dorsinville's Memoirs of Africa (2002).
  • (Ed. and trans.) Postcolonial Stories...: In the Shadow of Conrad's Marlow (2001).
  • (Ed. and trans.) The Rule of Francois ("Papa Doc") Duvalier...: Realism and Magic Realism in Haiti (2000).
  • (author) "The Heat of Home: Metaphors of Incorporation in Derek Walcott's Poetry," Anglistica 3:1 (1999), 33-58.
  • Erzulie Loves Shango (Novel) (1998).
  • "Ronald Sutherland," in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. (2nd ed. 1997): 103-104.
  • James Wait (Novel) (1995).
  • (editor) Rites de passage 10 vols (Port-au-Prince: Deschamps, 1990)
  • Solidarités: Tiers-Monde et littérature comparée (1988).
  • Le Pays natal: Essais sur les littératures du Tiers-Monde et du Québec (1983).
  • Caliban without Prospero: Essay on Quebec and Black Literature (1974).

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships:

  • Canada Council Leave Fellowship
  • Humanities Research Council and Multiculturalism Directorate Publication Grants
  • McGill Graduate Faculty International Travel and Research Grants

Berkeley Kaite

Position: Associate Professor (Retired)

Stream: Cultural Studies

Degree(s): 

B.A. (Concordia)
M.A. (McMaster)
Ph.D. (Carleton)

Previously Taught: Carleton University, Simone de Beauvoir Institute - Concordia University

Area(s): feminist cultural studies; cultural memory and popular media; the body

Selected Publications: 

Books

  • Editor, Menstruation Now: What Does Blood Perform? (Demeter, 2019)
  • Pornography and Difference (1995)

Articles and Chapters

  • “Bloody Jackie: how menstrual blood speaks for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s silence” in Menstruation Now: What Does Blood Perform? (2019)
  • “Camelot: the violence and the ecstasy,” Teorija in Praksa. 5-6, Sept-Dec (2013)
  • “Fetish Operations in the Photographs of Sally Mann,” Mothering and Psychoanalysis, ed., Petra Bueskens. Toronto: Demeter Press (2014)
  • Reviews of Canadian Cultural Poesis; Caught: Montréal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-194;, and, Types of Canadian Women in Canadian Literature
  • “The Pink Suit: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Celebrity Defilement,” Celebrity Studies.

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships:

  • SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship

Leanore Lieblein

Position: Professor (Retired)

Stream: Literature

Degree(s): 

B.A. (City College of New York)
M.A., Ph.D. (Rochester)

Previously Taught: City College of New York, University of Rochester

Area(s): drama and dramatic theory, Renaissance literature; Shakespeare in France and French Canada; the Shakespearean body; the concept of character

Selected Publications: 

Books

  • A Certain William: Adapting Shakespeare in Francophone Canada (2009)

Articles and Chapters

  • “Embodied Intersubjectivity and the Creation of Early Modern Character.” In Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons, ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights (2009).
  • “Pourquoi Shakespeare?” in Shakespeare: Made in Canada, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Judith Nasby (2007)
  • “Nuancing Diversity: The Boyokani Company Hamlet.” alt.theatre: Cultural Diversity and the Stage, 4.2-3 (May 2006): 22-24; 31.
  • “Corporeal Ecology and European Otherness on the Shakespearean Stage.” In Shakespeare et l’Europe de la Renaissance, ed. Pierre Kapitanik (2004).
  • “My breasts sear'd": The Self-Starved Female Body and A Woman Killed with Kindness.” (With Christopher Frey.) Early Theatre, 7.1 (2004): 45-66.
  • “Le Re-making of Le Grand Will” In “A World elsewhere?”: Canadian Shakespeare, ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk (2002).
  • “Interrogating the Shakespearean Body,” CTR 111 (Summer 2002): 15-21.
  • “Shakespeare in Francophone Quebec,” Internet Shakespeare Editions.
  • “Alfred Pellan, Twelfth Night, and the Modernist Shakespeare” (with Patrick Neilson), Shakespeare Yearbook 11 (2000): 389-422.
  • Editor, “Traversees de Shakespeare” (Dossier), L'Annuaire Theatral, 24 (automne 1998): 9-138.
  • “Theatre Archives at the Intersection of Production and Reception,” inTextual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence (1996).
  • “`Les Grecs' à la francaise,” TRI 18.2 (1993): 123-37.
  • “East Berlin Theatre Diary,” JDTC 6 (Fall 1991): 106-23.
  • “Translation and Mise-en-Scène,” JDTC 5 (Fall 1990:81-94.
  • “The Politics of Renaissance Culture,” in L'Europe de la Renaissance(1989): 49-64.
  • “Flexible Iconography: The Experience of the Spectator of Medieval Religious Drama,” Le Moyen francais 19 (1988): 135-47.
  • “Jan Kott, Peter Brook, and King Lear,” JDTC 1.2 (1987): 39-49.
  • Co-translator of Les Esbahis (1561).
  • Director of Everyman, Calderon de la Barca's Life Is a Dream, Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale, the Towneley Pharaoh, and Slaying of Abel; co-director of George Peele's Old Wives Tale.

Kerry McSweeney

Position: Molson Professor of English (Retired)

Stream: Literature

Degrees:

B.A., Ph.D. (University of Toronto)

Previously Taught: Queen's University, University of Warwick, University of Victoria

Area(s): 19th- and 20th-century fiction and poetry; aesthetic readings of poems and short stories

Selected Publications:

Books

 

  • The Realist Short Story of the Powerful Glimpse: Chekhov to Carver (2007).
  • What’s the Import? Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice (2007).
  • The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson (1998).
  • Supreme Attachments: Studies in Victorian Love Poetry (1998).
  • George Eliot: A Literary Life (1991; 1996).
  • "Invisible Man": Race and Identity (1988).
  • "Moby-Dick": Ishmael's Mighty Book (1986).
  • "Middlemarch" (1984).
  • Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V.S. Naipaul (1983).
  • Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists (1981).
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Aurora Leigh. Oxford World’s Classics (1993; third printing 1994; reissued 1998).
  • Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus (with Peter Sabor). Oxford World’s Classics (1987; reprinted1991; reissued 1999)
  • Angus Wilson. Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings (1983).

Articles and Chapters

  • "Dream Representations in Wuthering Heights, Crime and Punishment, and War and Peace." Symposium 59 (2005): 163-78.
  • "Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney." Style 33 (1999): 130-43.
  • "David Copperfield and the Music of Memory." Dickens Studies Annual 23 (1994): 93-119.
  • "Intimations of Wordsworth in A. M. Klein's ‘Autobiographical’." Canadian Poetry 35 (1994): 74-9.
  • "The Silver-Grey Discourse of The Music of Time." English Studies in Canada 18 (1992): 43-58.
  • "The Ending of The Mill on the Floss." English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 55-68.
  • "Mordecai Richler." Canadian Writers and their Works, fiction Series vol. 6 (1985).
  • "Salinger Revisited." Critical Quarterly 20 (1978): 61-68

Patrick Neilson

Position: Associate Professor (Retired)

Stream: Drama & Theatre

Degree(s):

B.A. (Bishop's)
M.F.A. (Calgary)

Area(s): theatre design, theatre history; design for Shakespeare, Canadian designers and stage design; theatrical iconography; theatrical use of non-theatre spaces

Selected Designs: 

  • The Duchess of Malfi by Webster (1994).
  • King John by Shakespeare (1994).
  • Ten Lost Years by G. Luscombe (1994).
  • Rubber Dolly by D. Hannah (1990).
  • Twelfth Night by Shakespeare (1991).
  • Bonjour, là, Bonjour by M. Tremblay (1991).
  • Directed The Rivals (1990).
  • Set and costume design for The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1989).

Peter Ohlin

Position: Professor (Retired)

Area(s): Swedish cinema (in particular the works of Ingmar Bergman); and American Literature (especially the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Agee)

Selected Publications:

  • "The Holocaust in Ingmar Bergman's Persona: The Instability of Imagery." Scandinavian Studies 77.2 (Summer 2005): 241-274.
  • "Bergman's Nazi Past." Scandinavian Studies 
  • Wordless Secrets: Ingmar Bergman's Persona and the Modernist Project. Forthcoming in Studies in Nordic Cinema and Literature.

Peter Sabor

Position: Distinguished James McGill Professor Emeritus

Stream: Literature

Degree(s):

Ph.D. (London)
M.A. (Queen’s)
M.A. (Cambridge)
B.A. (Cambridge)

Previously Taught: Laval University, Queen’s University, University of Calgary

Area(s): fiction; archives and bibliography; restoration and eighteenth-century literature; book history; history & theory of the novel; textual editing

Selected Publications:

Books and Edited Volumes

Awards, honours, and fellowships:

  • Royal Society of Canada, Fellow since 2008
  • Visiting Fellow Commoner, Trinity College, Cambridge, January-March 2024
  • Visiting Fellow, Jesus College, Oxford, January-March 2022
  • Visiting Fellow, St Edmund Hall, Oxford, January-March 2020
  • Visiting Fellow Commoner, Trinity College, Cambridge, January-March 2019
  • Visiting Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford, January-March 2016
  • Traveling Lecturer, Jane Austen Society of North America, 2016-2018
  • Donald and Mary Hyde Fellow, Houghton Library, Harvard University, October 2015
  • Visiting Fellow, Chawton House Library, August 2015
  • SSHRC Insight Grant, 2020-2026; 2012-2017
  • Canada Research Chair, 2017-2024, 2010-2017, 2003-2010
  • SSHRC Standard Research Grants, 2009-2012, 2006-2009, 2002-2005, 1999-2002, 1996-1999
  • Marjorie Wynne Fellow, Beinecke Library, Yale University, May 2008

Denis Salter

Position: Associate Professor (Retired)

Stream: Drama & Theatre

Degree(s):

B. A. (UBC)
M.A. (University of Toronto)
Ph.D. (University of Toronto)

Previously Taught: University of Calgary, University of Leeds (Visiting Professorship), Dalhousie University

Area(s): history of Shakespeare in performance; Canadian drama and theatre; twentieth and twenty-first century drama; Victorian and Edwardian stage history; dramaturgy, theory, and criticism; dvidence-based theatre historiographies; issues in cultural pluralism, social activism, politics, and the stage; problematic keywords in (Canadian) theatre historiography

Selected Publications: 

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Teaching, Performing and Responding to Shakespeare in Multicultural (Postcolonial) Canada and Quebec.” Revised essay printed in Canadian Shakespeare, ed. Susan Knutson. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2010. [42]-53.
  • “On Native Ground: Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Postmodernism/Post-colonialism Axis.” Reprinted in Theatre Histories, ed. Alan Filewod. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. 115-123.
  • “A Woman of Many Parts,” published in the Souvenir Program for the Shaw Festival’s 2009 production of Michel Tremblay’s Albertine In Five Times, translated by Linda Gaboriau and directed by Micheline Chevrier.
  • “(Im)possible Worlds: The Plays of Sharon Pollock.” Reprinted in Sharon Pollock, ed. Sherrill Grace and Michelle La Flamme. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2008. 13-32.
  • “Change the World, One Play at a Time: Teesri Duniya Theatre and the Aesthetics of Social Action: Denis Salter talks with Rahul Varma, Ted Little and Jazwant Guzder.” Canadian Theatre Review No. 125 (Winter 2006): [69]-74.
  • “Exile, Return and the New South Africa: An Interview with Anthony Akerman.” South African Theatre Journal 18 (2004): [255]--276.
  • “The Performance of Their Lives: Laurence Irving, Mabel Hackney, and the Empress of Ireland.” First Knight: The Journal of the Irving Society 7.1 (June 2003): 13-51.

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships:

  • Richard Plant Prize (Best Article in English) of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research (now the Canadian Association for Theatre Research) for “Between Wor(l)ds: Lepage’s Shakespeare Cycle.” In Theater sans frontières: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I. Donohoe, Jr. and Jane M. Koustas. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. 191-204. 2004. 

  • Richard Plant Prize (Best Article in English) of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research (now the Canadian Association for Theatre Research) for “Hector Willoughby Charlesworth and the Nationalization of Cultural Authority, 1890-1945. In Establishing Our Boundaries: English-Canadian Theatre Criticism, ed. Anton Wagner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. [137]-76. 2000.

Brian Trehearne

Position: Professor (Retired)

Stream: Literature

Degrees: 

B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (McGill)

Previously Taught: University of Western Ontario, Queen's University

Area(s): Canadian literature to 1970, chiefly poetry

Selected Publications:

  • Editor, The Complete Poems of A.J.M. Smith (2007). 
  • The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (1999).
  • "Critical Episodes in Montreal Poetry of the 1940s" Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 41 (1997).
  • Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence (1989).
  • Editor of Standish O'Grady, The Emigrant (1989).

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships:

  • SSHRC Standard Research Grants
  • Twice winner of Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching

David Williams

Position: Professor (Retired)

Degree(s):

B.A. (Boston)
M.A., Ph.D. (Toronto)

Previously Taught: Kennedy Smith Professor of Catholic Studies (Professor Emeritus) 

Area(s): Chaucer, the grotesque, Bible, Saints' Lives, mediaeval language theory, Catholic Studies; the interrelation of text, image, and cult in hagiographical narrative; the nature of the ontology of word in biblical and poetic language

Selected Publications:

Books

  • Language Redeemed: Chaucer's Mature Poetry (2007).
  • Chaucer and Language Eds. Robert Myles and David Williams (2001).
  • Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (1996).
  • Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage (1987).
  • Cain and Beowulf: A Study in Secular Allegory (1982).

Articles

  • "'Lo how I vanysshe': The Pardoner's War against Signs." in Chaucer and Language. (2001)
  • "Attentio, Intentio, Distentio: Intentionality and Chaucer's Third Eye," Florelegium 15 (1997).
  • "From Grammar's Pan to Logic's Fire: Intentionality and Chaucer's Friar's Tale," in Literature and Ethics (1988): 77-95.
  • "Wilgeforte--Patron Saint of Monsters--and the Sacred Language of the Grotesque," in Scope of the Fantastic (1985): 171-77.
  • "Radical Therapy in 'The Miller's Tale,'" Chaucer Review 5.3 (1981): 227-35.
  • "Flannery O'Connor and the Via Negativa," Sciences Religieuses 8.3 (1979): 304-12.
  • "Exile as Uncreator," Mosaic 8.3 (1975): 1-14.

Awards, Honours, and Fellowships:

  • Raymond Klibansky Prize for the Most Outstanding Book in the Humanities, for: "Deformed Discourse: the Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature."

Myrna Wyatt Selkirk

Position: Associate Professor (Retired)

Stream: Drama & Theatre

Degree(s):

The Vancouver Playhouse Acting School
M.F.A. (Illinois)
B.A. (Alta)

Area(s): directing and acting for the theatre; creative practice & performance studies, embodied practice & ethnographic approaches; text interpretation through movement; identity & representation; clown and mask; audience/actor relationship.

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