Get to Know the English Department Contract Faculty!
Fri. Sep. 1, 2017
The English Department is pleased to profile a number of the contract faculty who are teaching courses in the Fall/Winter 2017-18 academic year. We asked each instructor to answer the following questions:What background do you bring to your teaching?
How would you describe your classroom?
What is the best thing you read or watched this summer?
JONATHAN BALL
(FW) ENGL-1001.6-050 English 1
(F) ENGL-2102.3-050 Intro Creative Writing
I hold a PhD from the University of Calgary with specializations in Creative Writing, Canadian Literature, and Literary Theory. I am the author of three books of experimental prose-poetry, co-editor of a poetry anthology, author of an academic monograph on John Paizs’s experimental film Crime Wave, and writer of thousands of other works, from true crime television scripts to silly haiku horoscopes.
I emphasize a practical, methodical, analytical approach to writing and study. A student evaluation once said my hair was always on fleek; that is my promise to you.
My daughter Jessie wrote a beautiful poem called “Mother Moonlight." She has much more talent than I ever did.
SARAH BEZAN
(F) ENGL-1000.3-005 English 1A
I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, where my love of animals led me to explore a wide range of environmental texts. My most recent work on Darwin, which was enriched by a three-month research trip at Cambridge University, has also enabled me to present students with a unique approach to interpreting the value of Darwin's ideas in the present era, which are uniquely shaped by the urgent crisis of global climate change.
My classroom is open, inclusive, and welcoming to a wide range of perspectives from students. While the learning outcomes remain consistent throughout the course, each class presents students with exciting challenges to delve deeply into textual analysis.
This summer, I read Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer -- a book that the late Kurt Cobain declared was his favourite novel. The protagonist (who is endowed with an exceptional sense of smell), reminded me of Cobain himself, whose creative talent often made him feel like a misfit. A fascinating read!
ALYSON BRICKEY
(FW) ENGL-1001.6-004 English 1
(FW) ENGL-1001.6-006 English 1
I'm a specialist in late 19th and early 20th-century American literature and critical theory, and I just moved from Toronto after completing my PhD. My teaching experience ranges from a first year writing course to a fourth-year seminar called "Excess and American Literature," which was based on my doctoral research.
In the classroom I place an emphasis on collaboration and intellectual generosity. I want students to know they're free to take risks and experiment with their responses to texts.
I just finished watching The Handmaid's Tale and thought it was brilliant. It's so rare that a film or TV show lives up to the original text!
RYAN CLEMENT
(FW) ENGL-2113.6-001 Picture Books for Children
(F) RHET-1105.3-050 Academic Writing: Multidisciplinary
(F) RHET-1105.3-051 Academic Wrting: Multidisciplinary
Introduction to Canadian Literature (Brandon University)
My educational background is in English language and literature, and communications and culture, though most of my research has been focused on the emergence of narrative from game studies and the globalization of comics and manga. While originally from Brandon, I have lived on four different continents and travelled to over sixty countries, so I like to merge local perspectives with international ones. In addition to my academic work, I write/design tabletop games, perform improv, and write creatively for publication—most recently through the Toronto Comics Anthology.
I am a firm believer in the interactive classroom, and always try to mix up my lectures with hands-on exercises, field trips, games, creative projects, and similar activities. When I do use a traditional lecture, I strive to make my delivery as engaging and effective as possible through a conversation that encourages and relies on class participation.
For summer reading, I recommend Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga (science fiction) and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn (fantasy). This past summer I had the opportunity to work with the International Space University’s Summer Studies Program at the Cork Institute of Technology in Ireland, where I was a staff editor for an international collaborative handbook on starting a space business.
SCOTT CROMPTON
(FW) ENGL-2180.6-001 Popular Literature & Film
I teach Film Studies and English and am joining The University of Winnipeg for the 2017-18 school year to teach Popular Literature and Film (ENGL-2180) with a focus on Weird Fiction. The course builds on my interests in genre fiction and film, especially horror and sci-fi, as well the impact of multimedia and technology in our experience of the world (and the Weird).
I would call my classroom a bridge between popular response and academic inquiry (fandom is the beginning of scholarship). My lectures blend history and analysis with humour, and I always hope for students who are keen on class discussions.
The best thing I watched this summer was Twin Peaks: The Return. Hellooooooo!
AUDREY BARKMAN HILL
(F) ENGL-1000.3-003 English 1A
(F) ENGL-1003.3-002 Intro: Topics in Literature
(F) ENGL-1005.3-002 Intro Read to Write
I bring a PhD that focuses on the teaching of literature, a thirty year career in education, and a love of reading and writing to my role as an instructor at the University of Winnipeg. My professional interest is in the impact of literature on identity construction and on the norms and values by which we construct societies. Artistically, my interest in literature is the aesthetics, or the reflection of art, culture and nature, by which writers create a version of themselves and their worlds.
My classrooms are places of interaction where, in addition to listening to short lectures or presentations, students work productively with one another in partnerships, and engage in lively class discussions.
One of the books in my beach bag this summer was Katherena Vermette's novel, The Break.
CHARLIE PETERS
(F) ENGL-2922.3-245/246 Topics in Women Writers
(W) ENGL-3160.3-245/246 Topics in Young People's Texts and Cultures
For me, reading books, and absorbing cultural texts, in general, has been a passion, a refuge, and a really challenging friendship. Now that i’m writing stories myself, i’m finding this friendship even more rewarding. My wish, when i teach, is to share this enthusiasm for the joys and the challenges of scholarly and artistic practice.
Having spent a lot of my life in schools, i would have to say that what keeps me here is the comradery of the curious types who thrive in these institutions. Daily, i’m inspired by conversations that happen in classrooms and hallways and seminars, and it is my hope that the other members of the classes that i teach feel inspired, too.
In preparation for a course i’m teaching this fall, Topics in Women Writers: Short Stories, i read a collection of stories by the nineteenth-century American writer Kate Chopin. Her characters’ witting and unwitting involvement in unjust power dynamics and her commentary on gender, race, class, and other group identifications really blew me away.
CHRISTOPHER PETTY
(W) ENGL-1000.3-006 English 1A
(F) ENGL-1003.3-003 Intro: Topics in Literature
(W) ENGL-3118.3-001 Topics in Fiction for Young People
Two experiences have helped shape my teaching. One is an education that exposed me to a wide range of literary practices from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries and to all genres. The other is my good fortune in being taught by a series of lively and original teachers from high school through graduate school.
Although I use brief lectures to provide background and context, mostly I ask questions in the classroom, some planned, some spontaneous. Not all questions have convincing (or any) answers, but the attempt to provide those answers is what makes thinking and learning happen.
One of my great pleasures this summer was watching Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, a kind of master-class in creating immersive but disinterested narrative. What made it even more interesting was the contrast it provided with the Dunkirk section of Joe Wright’s film, Atonement, faithfully reflecting the novel of the same name, which offered a much less canonical (and, literally, carnivalesque) account of a major historical event.
PATRICIA ROBERTSON
(F) ENGL-1005.3-001 Intro Read to Write
(W) ENGL-2102.3-005 Intro Creative Writing
I bring my passion for words, my skills as a published author and professional editor, and my twenty-five years of teaching experience to the classroom. I love sharing my passion with students by helping them realize that craft can be learned, that imagination is available to everyone, and that the stories we tell ourselves are crucial for revitalizing the world. Everything you can imagine is real. – Pablo Picasso.
At a time of planetary unravelling, I aim to make my classroom a place of energy, engagement, and trust where students feel challenged yet comfortable enough to share their opinions without judgment. That trust—and a willingness to risk—is built on creating relationships with and among my students by recognizing our individual human selves and what we each bring to the process of learning.
The best thing I read this summer was The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, a gripping and utterly convincing portrait set in a near-future dystopic Britain where a group of women establish a place of refuge—and conflict—in a remote farmhouse outside the reach of the “Authority.” Hall’s crisp and evocative writing, and the vividness of her imagination, make this novel a fresh take on dystopia.
JAMES SCOLES
(W) ENGL-1005.3-003 Intro Read to Write
(W) ENGL-2102.3-007 Intro Creative Writing
(FW) ENGL-3716.6-001 Canadian Literature & Culture
I bring to my teaching a multi-disciplinary education, writing, and research background, and nearly twenty years of experience, including five years at UWinnipeg, universities and colleges in the USA, ESL overseas and in Canada (I’ve even taught at a prison in Arizona, with Adrienne Rich). I also bring cultural sensitivity (I’ve lived on and traveled five continents), a life of rigorous artistic work (poetry, stories, novels, creative non-fiction) and academic exploration (my current research focuses on Irish-Canadian migration & literature), and the desire to keep on learning every day (my parents also taught me to carry a smile wherever I go).
My classrooms are lively, interactive, and inclusive. They feature low-to-no technology, with lots of reading, writing, discussion, and real-time learning (you also get to be creative).
The best things I read and watched this summer I had the opportunity to do while in Ireland: read Patrick Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn and see Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Kavanagh is a poet-farmer from the same area of the country as my ancestors, and the novel captures rural Ireland in all its awkward glory, with the right narrative voice, setting, and embattled main character; Beckett’s play I re-read over a week’s worth of visits to Charlie Byrnes Bookstore in Galway, before seeing the play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with an ‘updated’ script, stripped-down staging, and actors who made it simple to figure out who Godot really is (The King of Kensington).