Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Areas of Interest
- Comedy in Canadian fiction
- Ethnicity and art
Selected Publications
"Haunted by Hymns: The Fate of Melody in "Mennonite" Poetry." In Sound in the Lands (ed. Maureen Epp and Carol Ann Weaver). Pandora Press, 2010.
'The Mother Tongue in Cyberspace', published on line on the Journal of Mennonite Writing (JCMW), Spring, 2009.
'Canadian Literary Criticism and the Idea of a National Literature.' In The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (ed. Eva Marie Kroeller). Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (Routledge, 1992).
Current Research
I am working on the manuscript of a book entitled: Making It Up: Essays on Mennonites and Art. It is the underlying hypothesis of this book that the hostility to representation that was a central feature of the Reformation has paradoxically resulted, centuries later, in the flowering of the art of Mennonites in Canada. The focus of the book is primarily on those Mennonites who came to Canada from Russia, the first group arriving here as immigrants in the late nineteenth century, the second as refugees in the late 1920s. My arguments in the book are based on my view that the crisis of representation takes different forms in different cultures.
My own ethnicity has pushed me into this often uncomfortable interdisciplinary territory. After I finish this book I am hoping to turn to writing on comedy in Canadian fiction, the subject of my graduate teaching for many years.