Student Profiles

Roxanne completed her BA at York University with a double major in dance and creative writing.  She then went on to complete her MA at Wilfrid Laurier University in their English and Film program.  While completing her MA, Roxanne rediscovered her passion and interest in dance film by using mainstream psycho-feminist film theory to critically analyse dance films, challenging traditional University dance pedagogy.  Roxanne’s interdisciplinary pursuits have led her to pursue a PHD at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she will complete a dissertation that will analyse movement as a narrative strategy in dance films.  She will analyse films that challenge heteronormativity and traditional gender representations because they use movement as a narrative strategy in constructing subversive stories and representations.  Gender representation is a pertinent area of dance studies because dance and sexuality are metonymically linked, dance provides a stage in which the politics of sexuality are acted out through the body’s representation of femininity and/or masculinity.  Roxanne will engage with the question of whether dance films challenge or enforce hegemonic gender representations and how dance can continue its development and become a more diverse and inclusive art form.

Dissertation Title (tentative): Communicative Bodies: A Narrative Analysis of Subversive Sexual and Gender Representation in Dance Film.

Supervisor: Andrea Austin

Deborah Hernandez is a first year PhD student whose doctoral research will centre marginalized forms of knowledge to investigate intersections of gender, class, and education in the practice, transmission, and suppression of cultural teachings from the Philippines and their various expressions. Her project aims to focus on the meaningfulness of these teachings for diasporic communities, and how they are experienced even as practitioners face marginalization within dominant cultural frameworks and narratives. As a member of the Filipino diaspora, she will also examine how physical displacement figures into the dis/continuation of these beliefs and ways of accessing these cultural teachings.

Deborah completed her Bachelor of Journalism at Ryerson University and her Master of Arts in English at McMaster University, where her research focused on transnational Asian literatures and cultures through the lenses of intersectionality and cultural studies.

Advisor: Dr. Eleanor Ty

David Jackson is a third year PhD candidate whose research interests concern the cinematic sublime, early cinema, cinemas of the global south and popular genres, especially science fiction and horror. He completed a BA at the University of Manitoba and an MA in Film Studies at Carleton University. His master’s thesis is The Atomic Infinite: Aesthetics of the Sublime in 1950s Science Fiction Film. One chapter of this thesis became the article “Landscape and Science-Fiction Film”, published in Science Fiction Studies. He’s authoring another article on genre and ecology, this time concerning Alex Garland’s work that is forthcoming in Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His dissertation explores the history of the cinematic sublime and its relationship with the Anthropocene in speculative fiction film.

Supervisor: Katherine Spring

Alexander Jacobi is a 1^st-year Doctoral Candidate whose academic interests lie at the intersection of narrative theory, transmedia studies, game studies and cultural studies. Both his BA and Masters of English and Film were completed at Laurier. His Master’s Major Research Project, titled “Conquest in Plastic: Warhammer 40,000, Miniature Game Pieces, and Transmedial Secondary World Extension,” explored the narrativity of miniature game pieces and how their aesthetic-narrative qualities translate into both interactive game systems and the extended diegetic space of multimedia storytelling. His upcoming dissertation will follow a similar trajectory and examine how the interactive storytelling structures of tabletop roleplay games like Dungeons & Dragons and Cyberpunk construct and shape modern transmedial narratives. In addition, the project will highlight with how stories told on the tabletop transform when translated into different mediums, like video games, movies, and comic books. Alexander’s work on board game narrativity in Warhammer 40,000 has been presented internationally for Board Game Academics, and his research on visual storytelling in autobiographical graphic novels was featured at the 2023 Beyond Borders International Conference in Montreal.

Advisor: Andrea Austin

Allison Koopman’s interests lie in feminist film theory, genre studies, depictions of violence onscreen, and intersectional feminism. Her thesis project is a transnational comparative study of rape narratives. Her approach focuses on films that use temporal shifts (ex. flashbacks, frame narratives, etc.) to depict graphic sexual violence onscreen. She has narrowed down her transnational study to three distinct global cinemas: Hollywood, French Art Cinema, and South Korean hallyu cinema. Her aim is to uncover how various cultural gender norms can impact how and why temporal shifts are employed by filmmakers.

Allison Koopman received both a BFA and an MFA in Screenwriting from York University. Her SSHRC-supported MFA thesis was an original eight-episode series that explored religious trauma, sexual abuse, and sapphic representation. She is using her unique knowledge of filmic narrative and plot conventions to explore rape narratives and rape culture in film.

Advisor: Jing Jing Chang

Will Kummer completed his BA in English with a Major in Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse Studies at Brock University, during which time it was not unlikely to discover him haunting the hallways of Mackenzie Chown and basking in the beauty of the Niagara escarpment. Following this, he completed his MA in English and Film at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he remains to this day. This degree culminated in a Major Research Paper on Ali Smith’s Autumn, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Brexit and the French Revolution, written under the guidance and with recourse to the wisdom of Dr. Lynn Shakinovsky.

Will’s current interests include but are not limited to: nationalism, xenophobia, mediated selves, life writing, contemporary film, music, poetry, literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and seeking the elusive topic that combines each of these things.

Advisor: Dr. Eleanor Ty

Daniel T. Moore completed his BA with honors in History and English at McMaster University in Hamilton, followed by an MA in Literature and Critical Theory at the same institution. His Master’s thesis focused on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and offered a critical analysis of the age-oriented power dynamics in that trilogy. That thesis was entitled "Rewriting the Fall: Lyra Belacqua’s Resistance to Adult Ideology in His Dark Materials.”

Daniel spent several years teaching ESL abroad: two years teaching elementary and high school students, and one year lecturing at Siyuan University in Xi’an China. He has officially taught every age range from kindergarten all the way through to the second year of university. Daniel is currently a fourth year PhD candidate at Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo campus and will be pursuing further ESL teaching qualifications during his studies. In his time at Wilfrid Laurier, he will focus on the application of queer theory to the unique power dynamics of adult-child relationships, and the importance of adolescence as a liminal space in various works of YA literature. Daniel is President of PSAC 902, the Graduate Teacher’s Union at Laurier.

Supervisor: Katherine Bell

Mazin Saffou completed his MA in Media Studies as well as BAs in Film Studies and in English (with a Concentration in Creative Writing) at the University of Regina. His MA thesis, “American Dreams: Portrayals of Race, Class, and 21st Century Capitalism in David Simon’s and Ed Burns’ The Wire” focused on how detrimental neoliberal ideological frameworks of late capitalism are internalized by the characters in the critically acclaimed television series, The Wire—from various spheres of urban life, from the police to the justice system to the drug trade—leading to instances of tragedy and severe institutional and social dysfunction in the pursuit of the ever increasingly elusive American Dream. Mazin is a second year PhD student researching contemporary dystopian fiction in film, television, and literature as a response to current ecological crises.

Supervisor: Andrea Austin

Denise (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She thinks, writes, and rambles on about literature for young readers as a realm in which to imagine and build meaningful and sustainable relationships with ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world. Her dissertation examines the Queer(ing) potentials of polyphonic narration techniques in 21^st Century YA texts such as The Twelve Days of Dash & Lilly, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, The Silence Between Us and The Tiger Flu to name a few.

Denise received her Combined Honors Bachelor of Arts in English and Women’s and Gender Studies with a minor in Youth and Children’s Texts and Contexts from Laurier in 2018. From 2018-2019, Denise completed her Master of Arts degree at Laurier, culminating in her major research project entitled “Since When is the Person You Want to Screw the Only Person You Get to Love?’: Exploring the Queer Potentiality of Friendship, Intimacy and Love in Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Will Grayson, Will Grayson. 

Denise is grateful to have the support of her supervisor, Dr. Katherine Bell, as well as the support of a Canadian Graduate Scholarship for her project.  As Denise works through the PhD process, she strives to live by the words of Miss Frizzle: Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!

Dissertation Title [tentative]: Diverse Voices and Queer Trajectories: Exploring the Potentialities of Polyphony in 21^st Century Young Adult Literature.

Supervisor: Katherine Bell

Using diaspora studies, affect theory (specifically, Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective objects and mobilizing unhappiness), Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s subaltern, Dina Georgis’s politics of storytelling, and debates surrounding Canadian multiculturalism as her theoretical framework, Sanchari Sur’s research highlights how South Asian Canadian women writers use deterritorializing writing practices in order to subvert the current global vision of Canadian multiculturalism as a picture of happiness. Her project also intersects with other areas of research such as disability theory and trans theory. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow in fiction, and her work has been published in Toronto Book Award-shortlisted The Unpublished City (Toronto: Book*hug, 2017), Prism International, Arc Poetry Magazine, Room, and elsewhere. She is also the curator/cofounder of Balderdash Reading Series (est. Jan 2017).

Dissertation title: (Un)Happy Frictions: Mobilising (Un)Happiness through Subaltern Bodies in South Asian Canadian Women’s Literature

Supervisor: Mariam Pirbhai

Alek is a PhD student researching the intersections between American crime fiction narratives and the limited series in the age of internet streaming. The cable-network and broadcast-network models that dominated Western television have been superseded by internet streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon over the last decade, vastly changing both crime narratives and the television medium. Expanded runtimes, narrative pacing, accessibility, advertising or lack thereof, changes in spectatorship, and increasingly explicit content previously seen only in the sanctum of the cinema have influenced new crime narratives published to these platforms. He will investigate the resurgence of the limited series and explore how it grapples with notions of seriality as a stepping stone toward the influence of internet streaming platforms on television production, aesthetics, and narrative form through works of American crime fiction.

Historically intertwined with the crime genre, issues of gender, race, class, social justice, and criminality as they surface in new crime series of the last decade will also be explored in the context of the anonymity of social media and its facilitation of instant connections between criminals, victims, and law enforcement. Importantly, these narratives reflect how the crime genre both exploits and reassures a public obsessed with systemic problems, from police brutality to the Black Lives Matter movement, from COVID-19 to the January 6^th insurrection in Washington.

Alek completed his BA in English Studies at Nipissing University and went on to complete his MA at Wilfrid Laurier University in English and Film Studies, where he remains today.

Adrian is a first year PhD student in the English and Film studies department. Adrian's research interests intersect with a philosophical and critical engagement with the concept of resistance—specifically regarding the idea of a capacity to resist—and film. In other words, how does film mediate and change our capacity to resist in regard to how we see the world? This involves interrogating both the negative and affirmative dimensions of resistance that manifest across a broad spectrum of films both formally and narratively, and how the medium of film challenges the valence of a capacity to resist by enhancing this capacity (bolstering) or breaking it down (altering).

Advisor: Russell Kilbourn

Anton Bergstrom, “Holy Estrangement: The Poetics of Estrangement in John Donne's Divine Poems and Sermons.” Supervisor: Dr. Anne Russell. Successfully defended: January 2020.

Grace McCarthy, “'Not Shap'd For Sportive Tricks': Representations of Disability in Film and Digital Broadcast Cinema Adaptations of Early Modern Drama.” Supervisor: Dr. Russell Kilbourn. Successfully defended: January 2020.

Michael McCleary, “Never Seen Before-Again: Aesthetic Adaptation and Transmedia Storytelling Networks in the Age of Digital Cinema.” Supervisor: Dr. Russell Kilbourn. Successfully defended: October 2018.

Sarah Rangaratnam, “Girls’ Voices of the Eighteenth Century: The Development of a Genre for Young Female Readers, 1749-1800.” Supervisor: Dr. Eleanor Ty. Successfully defended: September 2018.

Murrielle Michaud, "'A Meruelous Thing!': Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina the Astonishing, and Performative Self-Abjection in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 114." Supervisor: Dr. Robin Waugh. Recipient of the Award for Outstanding Work at the Graduate Level. Successfully defended: January 2018.

Victoria Kennedy, "Narrative Pleasures and Feminist Politics: Popular Women’s Historical Fiction, 1990-2015." Supervisor: Dr. Andrea Austin. Successfully defended: March 2017.

Anders Bergstrom, "In Search of Lost Selves: Memory and Subjectivity in Transnational Art Cinema." Supervisor: Dr. Russell Kilbourn. Successfully defended: December 2016.

Susan Hroncek, "Volatile Compositions: Chemistry and its Occult History in Victorian Speculative Fiction."  Supervisor: Dr. Lynn Shakinovsky.  Successfully defended: August 2016.

Katherine Quanz, "The Struggle to be Heard: Toronto's Postproduction Sound Industry, 1968 to 2005."  Supervisor: Dr. Katherine Spring. Successfully defended: July 2016.

J. Coplen Rose, "Laughing for a Change: Dramatic Criticism of National Crises in Second Interregnum South Africa." Supervisor: Dr. Mariam Pirbhai. Successfully defended: December 2015.

Justin Shaw, "'Falling Men' in Post 9/11 American Fiction." Supervisor: Dr. Tamas Dobozy. Successfully defended: November 2014.

Ada Sharpe, “Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814.” Supervisor: Dr. Eleanor Ty. Successfully defended: August 2014. Recipient of Gold Medal for Academic Excellence, Faculty of Arts, Fall 2014 Convocation. SSHRC Postdoctoral grant, September 2014, Harvard University: “The Miniature Domain: Place-making and the Amateur Arts in British Women’s Writing, 1790-1825.”  Supervisor: Dr. Deirdre Lynch.

Patrick-Laurent Faubert, "'Perfect Picture Material': History, Adaptation, and the Formation of a Studio Identity at Warner Bros., 1934-1941." Supervisor: Dr. Paul Tiessen. Successfully defended: September 2013. Recipient of Gold Medal for Academic Excellence, Faculty of Arts, and Governor General's Award, Fall 2013 Convocation.

Elizabeth Clarke, “War and the Sexes: Gender and American Film, 1898-1927.” Supervisor: Dr. Philippa Gates. Successfully defended: August 2013. SSHRC Postdoctoral grant, September 2013, University of California at Santa Cruz: “Writing Women in Film History: Women Screenwriters of the Silent Era.” Supervisor: Dr. Shelley Stamp.

Sylvia Terzian, “Arab Pluralities and Transnationality: The ‘Crisis of Diasporic Consciousness’ in Arab American and Arab Canadian Fiction.” Supervisor: Dr. Mariam Pirbhai. Successfully defended: December 2012.

Jenny Wills, “Aporetic Origins: North American Narratives of Transnational, Transracial Asian Adoption.” Supervisor: Dr. Eleanor Ty. Successfully defended: August 2012.

Stefan Sereda, “Cinema in Scare Quotes: Postmodern Aesthetics and Economics in the American Art Cinema.” Supervisor: Dr. Russell Kilbourn. Successfully defended: January 2012. Recipient of Gold Medal for Academic Excellence, Faculty of Arts, Spring 2012 Convocation.

Miriam Raethel, “Witnessing From a Distance: Postwar Literary Representations of the Holocaust.” Supervisor: Dr. Lynn Shakinovsky. Successfully defended: August 2010.

Lisa Funnell, “The Warrior Women of Transnational Cinema: Gender and Race in Hollywood and Hong Kong Action Films.” Supervisor: Dr. Philippa Gates. Successfully defended: April 2010. Recipient of Gold Medal for Academic Excellence, Faculty of Arts, Spring 2010 Convocation.

Michael Ackerman, “Phantoms of Old Forms: The Gothic Mode in the Dramatic Verse of Tennyson and Browning.” Supervisor: Dr. Michael Moore. Successfully defended: August 2009.

Lisa Butler, “Mis-Education and the Crisis in Male Subjectivity: William Godwin’s Middle Novels, 1799-1817.” Supervisor: Dr. Eleanor Ty. Successfully defended: August 2008.