I am a faculty member whose work brings together concerns about culture, place, and the arts. I have written about literatures in Canada across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This work has been hailed as “foundational” for literary studies in Canada. In 2015, I was awarded the inaugural Outstanding Scholar Award by Mount Royal University’s Faculty of Arts, and in 2016 I was awarded the Eakin Visiting Fellowship in Canadian Studies at McGill University and the Rita and Charles Bronfman Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2020 I served as a visiting scholar at the University of Salamanca, Spain.
My books are Transnational Canadas: Canadian Literature and Globalization; the edited collection Transnationalism, Activism, Art (with Áine McGlynn); and the book of interviews Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (with Smaro Kamboureli). I am the editor of the selected works of derek beaulieu, the 2014-16 Poet Laureate of Calgary, a book entitled Please, No More Poetry: The Selected Poetry of derek beaulieu. In the fall of 2017, I published a book of literary non-fiction about shopping malls in Canada titled Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada. Most recently, I have published two collections of essays for which I serve as one of the editors. These books are Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (2020; edited by Ada Jaarsma and Kit Dobson) and All the Feels / Tous les sens: Affect and Writing in Canada / Affect et écriture au Canada (2021; edited by Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser, and Kit Dobson). Both are with the University of Alberta Press. My current manuscript project is concerned with questions of literary listening and the landscapes of northern Alberta.
At present, I serve on the editorial boards of the Edmonton-based non-profit publisher NeWest Press, the journal Canadian Literature, and the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literatures. I am a Professor at the University of Calgary. I am based in Calgary, Alberta, on the territory of the signatories to Treaty 7; the traditional territory of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Iyarhe Nakoda (Stoney), and Tsuut’ina; and of the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.