Doctoral Program

The specialization in gender and genre emerges from the intersection of two broad conceptual areas within literary and film studies. In the wake of feminist theory and criticism, performance theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies, and queer theory, gender is recognized as a crucial factor in the production, circulation, and consumption of literary, filmic, and other cultural discourses. Genres, recognized and defined by particular cultures or communities, serve to shape, identify and make legible social discourses and otherwise amorphous representations. Theorizing and exploring genre in literary, cinematic, historical, performative, psycho-social, and political contexts, the field incorporates a range of inquiries and methodologies that situate the cultural construction of gender and sexuality in relation to the genre in which these constructions appear.

Faculty working in gender and genre studies include: Andrea Austin, Katherine Bell, Kathryn Carter, Jing Jing Chang, Tamas Dobozy, Philippa Gates, Jenny Kerber, Russell Kilbourn, Tanis MacDonald, Richard Nemesvari, Mariam Pirbhai, Markus Poetzsch, Lynn Shakinovsky, Katherine Spring, Eleanor Ty, Robin Waugh and Lisa Wood.

Literary and filmic works, visual and oral narratives contribute to one's sense of belonging to an "imagined" community, whether to a domestic family, to a socio-cultural or religious group, or to a broader ideological and political system, such as a nation or empire. In addition to national literatures and films from Britain, Canada, and the United States, the field explores contemporary debates and theoretical developments in post-colonial, global, minority, indigenous, and diasporic studies (including Asian, Caribbean and African). Theoretical, cultural and historical concerns include those of war, imperialism, settlement, slavery, race, hybridity, mobility, globalization, human rights, and gender.

Faculty working in nation, diaspora, culture include: Sandra Annett, Katherine Bell, Kathryn Carter, Jing Jing Chang, Tamas Dobozy, Madelaine Hron, Tanis MacDonald, Richard Nemesvari, Ken Paradis, Mariam Pirbhai, Lynn Shakinovsky, Eleanor Ty.

Textuality is a discursive practice that valorizes text as context, and examines the modes of cultural production and consumption through which ideologies are disseminated, normalized or contested. Films and literary works are best read in awareness of their historical, cultural, and discursive milieus. In literary studies, these range from the Medieval, Early Modern to postmodern periods; in film studies, from early, classical to contemporary films. The field invokes the postmodernist principle that the meanings of a text or a film constitute themselves through reflexive processes of origin, configuration, response, interpretation, and reinterpretation. Scholarly activity in this area can include such varied approaches as aesthetics, translation, adaptation, intertextuality, structural codes and conventions, editing, performance analysis, transmission, circulation, and reception of manuscripts, scripts, and other kinds of texts, source study, stylistics, semantics, semiotics (verbal, visual, aural, gendered); and discourse analysis.

Faculty working in textuality, media, and print studies include: Sandra Annett, Andrea Austin, Philippa Gates, Madelaine Hron, Russell Kilbourn, Richard Nemesvari, Ken Paradis, Markus Poetzsch, Katherine Spring, Robin Waugh, Lisa Wood.