Department of English is awarded SSHRC SRGs

Three Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Standard Research Grants (SRG)awarded to the English Department

Dr. Monica Flegel's project:

"Strange Domesticities: Animal-Human Relations in Nineteenth-Century Literature":

This project seeks to analyze and explain narratives of human-animal companionship that both police and explode boundaries of species, love, gender, sexuality, and relating. Relying on Donna Haraway's examinations of companion species relationship and on more recent work which "queers" animal studies, this project asks: what might we learn about animals, childhood and domestic relations if we refuse the anxiety, embarrassment, and discomfort which comes with acknowledging how closely these categories have been and are linked.

Dr.'s Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth's project:

"Regulating Fan/tasies: Fandom, Fan Fiction, and Internet Policing".

The project is co-investigated by Dr. Jenny Roth (Women's Studies, English Adjunct) and Dr. Monica Flegel (English). Drs. Roth and Flegal will examine fan-writing and Internet policing to argue that assumptions about the beneficiaries of copyright must be challenged to take on the often gendered and corporate-based structure of modern publishing.

Dr. Daniel Hannah's project:

Transatlantic Erotics, 1783-1916: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Anglo-American Exchange

Reading texts of transatlantic travel, displacement or alterity from the long nineteenth century, this project will probe aesthetic manoeuvre that demarcate and disrupt dominant gendered framings of an emergent Anglo-American public sphere. The project attends, especially, to narratives that rhetorically graft both anxious acts of shoring up conventional understandings of gender and desire and subversive querying of dominant forms onto scenes of transatlantic exchange, whether that involves physical travel, juxtapositions of European and American settings, or figurative comparisons. Through comparative readings of British and American editions, print media and reviews, the project will also examine how the cross-cultural production and circulation of texts and genres in a transatlantic marketplace during this period produced moments of translation, transmission and resistance that reveal much about the sexual politics structuring the literary and economic scene.