My research has been supported over time by ten SSHRC grants. One of these, a SSHRC Connection Grant, supported the conference, “Untold Stories,” staged at UCD in April 2017 and its fruitful extension, the volume On the Other Side(s) of 150 (WLUP 2021), which I co-edited with Dr. Sarah Henzi. This book was awarded the Canadian Studies Network Prize for Best Edited Volume of 2021. The second of these SSHRC grants was an Insight Grant, to support my research for the biography of Jane Rule (to 2022).

I recently published The Routledge Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Literature in Canada (2023), which I wrote during my residence as the Farley Visiting Scholar at SFU (2022). This volume charts the evolution of gender and sexuality, as they have been represented and performed in the literatures of Canada for more than three centuries. This volume introduces readers to how gender and sexuality have been variably conceived in Canada and the work they perform across multiple genres. Calling upon recent currents of gender theory and examining the composition, structure, and history of selected literary texts—that is, the “literary sediments” that have accumulated over centuries—readers of this book explore how those representations shift over time. By examining literature in Canada in relation to crucial cultural, political, and historical contexts, readers will better apprehend why that literature has significantly transformed and broadened to address racialized and fluid identities that continue to challenge and disrupt any stable notion of gendered and sexualized identity today.

I was also a SSHRC co-applicant for the Richler Library Project, headed up by Dr. Jason Camlot (Concordia University), for which Dr. Camlot, Dr. Martha Langford (Concordia University), and I developed the volume, Collection Thinking (Routledge, 2022). Collection Thinking is a volume of essays that thinks across and beyond critical frameworks from library, archival, and museum studies to understand the meaning of “collection” as an entity and as an act. It offers new models for understanding how collections have been imagined and defined, assembled, created, and used as cultural phenomena.

In March 2020, I was appointed the Designated Alternate for a Fulbright Research Chair and, between 2016-2017, awarded the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies in Dublin, Ireland. In January 2016, with the support of a Sproul Fellowship, I was appointed as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where I also began researching about the  early life and writings of Jane Rule.

As I continue to research about the life of Rule, I produced Moving Archives (WLUP 2020), which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English. This collection of essays examines the proliferation of archival deposits their materialization, their preservation, and the research produced about them are moving in a different way: they are involved in emotionally-engaged, emotionally-charged processes, which act equally upon archival subjects and those engaged with them.  Moving Archives grounds itself in the critical trajectory related to what Sara Ahmed calls “affective economies” to offer fresh insights about the process of archiving and approaching literary materials. These economies are not necessarily determined by ethical impulses, although many scholars have called out for such impulses to underwrite current archival practices; rather, they form the crucial affective contexts for the legitimization of archival caches in the present moment and for future use.

From 2005-2009, I was awarded another SSHRC Grant (Standard Research) and from 2009-2013, the FQRSC Établissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs, for Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship (University of Toronto Press 2014), which was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in 2015. Therein, I examine how Canadian women writers approached their own archives for the purposes of locating self-agency. I investigate how they were regulated and contained, and how they existed in or resisted both personal and professional antagonist relationships. These antagonisms generated the very divisions, the conflictual set of relations, by which women then engaged in productive disruptions.

During my research for the monograph, I discovered Jane Rule’s hand-written autobiography, Taking My Life, in the University of British Columbia archives. I subsequently transcribed, edited, annotated, and prepared the autobiography for publication (Talon 2011) and also wrote the afterword. Taking My Life was shortlisted for the LAMBDA Award (2011), received a nomination for the Stonewall Book Award (2011), and garnered many positive reviews. One such review appeared in The Globe and Mail. I am drawing upon this research to write the biography of Jane Rule and to evaluate her interventions in the formation of a west coast queer cultures.

As I worked on her monograph, I collaborated with Dr. Schagerl on editing Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (WLUP 2012), a collection of essays that assesses the negotiations—and sometimes contradictions—involved in responsibly dealing with the tangible records of women’s public and private lives, and the fact that these preserved archival documents were often not seen as part of a systematic nation-building process.

This collaboration was preceded by another with Dr. Deanna Reder. Together, we co-edited the interdisciplinary collection, Troubling Tricksters (WLUP 2010), which was nominated for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English. Troubling Tricksters is a collection of theoretical essays, creative pieces, and critical ruminations that provides a re-visioning of trickster criticism in light of recent backlash against it.

Dr. Reder and I also worked on another collaboration, supported by a SSHRC Connection Grant (January 2014), which drew together Indigenous studies scholars and students from across the country to consider pedagogical approaches to Indigenous literatures. The event took place at the end of February 2014 in Vancouver, at which time Dr. Reder and I workshopped a new anthology, Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures (WLUP 2016).

With Dr. Laura Davis (Red Deer College), I published Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters (University of Alberta Press) in 2018. This book was supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to 2015 and was positively reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere.