News and events

The UVic English Department is delighted to announce that two members of our department have received 2023 REACH Awards!

JCURA Student Award Projects

Department of English has created the position of Student Liaison.

Dr. Alison Chapman (ENSH) has been elected as one of just 101 Fellows across Canada to join the society as part of the class of 2023.

The University of Victoria English department is pleased to announce the following honours that have been bestowed upon our faculty.

Dr. Janelle Jenstad wins the 2021 Outstanding Achievement Award for Computing in the Arts and Humanities for her work on Maps of Early Modern London.

On Wednesday, June 5, at 3:30 PM in CLE A207, Professor Alison Donnell, a renowned scholar of Caribbean literature who is Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, will be visiting UVic to deliver a talk entitled "Imagining Impossible Possibles: Speculative Realism, Ecopoetics and Queer Rights in Thomas Glave’s Submerged Worlds."

The English Department's FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) invites you to the last FYI event of the season! Joseph Grossi presents "Boundaries and Their Fictions: King Edgar's 962 Chelsworth Charter and Thomas King's 'Borders.'" Corinne Bancroft presents “Tracks and Trauma: Braiding Narratives in the Face of Historical Violence.” Next Friday, March 29th, join us for a great afternoon of free coffee, tea, cookies and discussion from 2:30pm onwards in CLE C344!

The Department of English is welcoming our Lansdowne speaker, Dr. Kirby Brown. He is an Associate Professor of Native American Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Oregon. He will be giving the following two lectures: - Tuesday March 19th at 7:00 pm in the Human & Social Development Building, Room A240, “American Indian Modernisms and Modernities” - Wednesday March 20th at 10:30 am in CLE A307, “Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970”. We hope to see you there!

For the past 10 years, The Warren Undergraduate Review has had the pleasure of being the University of Victoria's only open-concept journal. A wealth of student talent has graced our pages throughout the past decade, from poetry to visual art to video game criticism. While we are stoked to be turning ten, more than anything else we are so grateful and chuffed that the campus continues to be interested in interdisciplinary publication and in the work the Warren undertakes. In light of this, we'd like to bake you all some cake. No, for real. Consider this a formal invitation to our BIRTHDAY PARTY! March 9th 2019 @ Felicitas Campus Pub 19+ Only $3 Cover Doors 9pm

The English Department's FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) Invites You to a Special Panel Discussion on the Use and Abuse of Teaching Evaluations Caroline Winter, Corinne Bancroft, Robbie Steele, Richard Van Oort, Janice Niemann and Tim Personn will discuss the diverse ramifications of teaching evaluations — from learning opportunities to discriminatory biases. Join us on March 1st at 2:30 in CLE C110 for another great afternoon of coffee, tea, cookies and discussion!

The Department of English is welcoming Dr. Claire Omhovère from the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier. She will be giving a talk “What Place Takes Place in Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps? “ Please join us on Tuesday, February 26th, 2019 at 2:30 pm in COR A125. We hope to see you there.

What Can You Do with Your Degree in English? Wednesday, February 13, 4:30-6:30pm CLE A202 Six happily employed UVic alumni with degrees in English will talk about their career experiences. Topics covered will include everything from negotiating a contract to student loan forgiveness program. Sectors represented include the BC public service, the hospitality industry, politics, non-profits, graphic design and branding, and the public libraries.

Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge (Department of English) In their new book, The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover the overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. In this presentation, they will share illustrated treasures from Special Collections, where they teach and do research, and the library whose holdings provided the foundation for their study published by Ohio University Press. Date: Wednesday, February 6, 2019 Time: 3 p.m. Location: Special Collections and University Archives, Mearns Centre for Learning - McPherson Library, Room A003

The English Department's FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) invites you to the first FYI event of 2019! Michael Nowlin presents "'Fatally Regarded as a Negro Writer’: The Case of Richard Wright". This talk will focus on Richard Wright’s efforts to chart a new literary path after the phenomenal success of Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Samuel Wong presents "Taking Things in Order: Chronological Imaginations of Literature". How does the imagination of temporal sequence inform the way we discuss the works we teach? Does the absence of a sequence—when the time of a text is unknown or speculative—subvert, or liberate, that discussion? This talk grows out of Samuel Wong's own dependence on chronology as a way of thinking about texts, often at the expense of other approaches, and the use of chronology as a kind of convenient shorthand for teaching literary history. When we set a timeline, what is revealed and what is obscured? On Friday, January 25th, join us for a great afternoon of free coffee, tea, cookies and discussion from 2:30pm onwards in CLE C344!

The English Department's FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) invites you to the last FYI event of the semester! Next Friday, November 30th, Alison Chapman will give a presentation titled "Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid,’ and ‘the weeds and the wilderness’: The ‘darksome’ origins of place poetry" which will ask why Hopkins frames “Inversnaid” as the origin of pristine wildness, and how his poem's poetics attempts to capture the specificity of wild places. Additionally, Joel Hawkes will introduce the Mary Butts Letters Project in his presentation titled "The Mary Butts Letters Project: Mapping and Creating Transnational Spaces and Communities," and Eric Miller will give a presentation titled "Tis Procrastination Alone That Can Save Us" in which he will read a short extract from his novel, The Canadian Act. Join us for a great afternoon of free coffee, tea, cookies and discussion from 2:30pm onwards in CLE D126!

Pregnancy in Victorian novels is everywhere—and seemingly nowhere. Female characters give birth (that is, babies appear), but are these women ever represented as pregnant? In an era of restraint in bodily representation, how did novelists suggest that their female characters were expecting? This talk will offer background on the cultural history of sex, pregnancy, and childbirth in 19th century Britain, before launching into a hands-on exploration of how women’s bodies—and especially pregnant bodies—are constructed in a range of illustrated and serialized novels.

Monday, November 19th at 1pm - Digital Scholarship Commons (A308), Mearns Centre for Learning, McPherson Library. John C. Lilly, who made dolphins famous as cosmic minds in the water, was obsessed with their bioacoustic practices. Sound technologies, especially tape, were the conditio sine qua non of Lilly’s cetacean research. He used tape to decrypt dolphin communications, and he is part of a confluence of creative experimentation with tape around 1960. The taped infrastructure of his quest for alternate worlds makes Lilly’s work of vital interest for media history, our understanding of sound, the tape medium, and the quest for otherness. It also invites us to reflect on how media formats provide interfaces with the natural world.

Thursday, October 25th at 7.30pm David Lam Auditorium, MacLaurin A144 University of Victoria All welcome - admission is free Come celebrate with us at a once-in-a-lifetime reading from this book, in the voices of over twenty poets from Vancouver Island and nearby, including Nicholas Bradley, Lorna Crozier, Eve Joseph, Terence Young, Iain Higgins, Don Van Wart, Eric Miller, Richard Olafson, Arleen Paré, Linda Rogers, Garth Martens, Sonnet L'Abbe, Jan Zwicky, Jamie Dopp, Rhona McAdam, Alexander Varty, David Eso, John Barton, Marilyn Bowering, Patricia Young, Sandy Shreve & Susan Musgrave.

The next FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) event is coming up soon! On Friday, October 26, join us in CLE D126 at 2:30PM for another great afternoon of coffee, tea, cookies and discussion! Suzan Last will give a presentation titled "First-Year Writing Pedagogy" and Misao Dean will give a presentation titled "Recognition, or the depressive pleasure of reading Atwood's Surfacing." We hope to see you there!

The English Department’s FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) invites you to the first FYI event of the semester. Gary Kuchar will give a presentation titled "Milton, Shakespeare, and Canadian Confederation: Thomas D'Arcy McGee as Literary Critic," and Stephanie Lahey will give a presentation titled "The Imperfection Index: Parchment Flaws and the Perils of Statistical Description."

Dr. John Rumrich from the University of Texas, Austin, will be giving a lecture titled: "Eve's Dream and Milton's Theodicy".

Dr. Alison Chapman (Professor, Department of English) and Denae Dyck (PhD candidate, Department of English) In the 1840s, Victorian Britain witnessed heated discussion about industrialisation and urban poverty, especially about child labour in factories. R. H. Horne's report for the Royal Commission (1842) astounded the Victorians with accounts of children working up to 16 hours each day. Special Collections holds important material related to this topic, including the poem that was most influential in effecting legislative reform: Elizabeth Barrett's "The Cry of the Children". This talk will cover the two earliest publications of this poem, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and in Barrett's 1844 Poems (a new Special Collections purchase), discussing such issues as its political impact, periodical context, transatlantic circulation, and innovative poetics.

When the pen is mightier than the paper

FYI Faculty Forum - March 23rd, 2018

The English Department's FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) invites you to CHANGES TO THE B.C. ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS 10-12 CURRICULUM: WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS??

The English Department's FYI (Forum for Your Ideas) invites you to WHAT DO WE WANT FROM BOTS?