kitdobson

It was a profound honour to be one of the judges for this year’s Manitoba Book Awards. The awards were announced last Saturday, April 30th, and the list of the winners can be found here. Having the opportunity to judge provided a very welcome window into many of the books published over the past year in Manitoba; it was great to have the chance to become acquainted with many books that I otherwise might have missed. Congratulations to all of the nominees, to the winning books, to the writers and artists, to the publishers, to the arts organizations, and to the communities that allow for such deserving acts of recognition to take place!

I’m thrilled to have joined the organizing committee for the upcoming conference Mikinaakominis / TransCanadas: Literature, Justice, Relation, which will take place at the University of Toronto, May 25-27, 2017. You can find the full call for papers here. Proposals are due by 30 June 2016. The conference’s co-convenors, Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai, are shaping up what is sure to be a major event in Canadian literary studies.

This conference will mark the fourth iteration of the TransCanada conferences (though, you will note, the committee has decided not to number this one). For me, the TransCanada conferences have been among the most important in my engagement with the field of CanLit studies: I was fortunate to be featured as an emerging scholar at the first conference, at Simon Fraser University in 2005, and I subsequently joined the organizing committees for both TransCanada 2 at the University of Guelph in 2007 and TransCanada 3 at Mount Allison University in 2009. You can find background information on these previous conferences here.

For those to whom it is of interest, I heartily recommend submitting a proposal!

It was a tremendous pleasure to deliver the Winter 2016 Eakin Memorial Lecture at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada back on the 17th of March. My talk focuses on consumerism in Calgary as seen through film and writing (not to mention through my own time in my hometown!). I very much enjoyed the opportunity to speak with the McGill community at the Faculty Club. Some very good photos from the event are also up now, posted here. Thanks to McGill, to the Institute for the Study of Canada, to Director Will Straw, and everyone whom I’ve had the chance to meet during my time at McGill this winter!

Update! Due to a large number of RSVPs, my upcoming Eakin Lecture at McGill University has been moved to a larger venue. The talk will be at the Faculty Club, 3450 McTavish Street, from 5-6:30 on Thursday, March 17th. Cheers!

I am honoured to be delivering the Winter 2016 Eakin Lecture at McGill University.

The lecture will take place on March 17th, from 5-6:30 pm at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (2nd floor, 3463 Peel St., Montreal); the title for my talk is “The Cultures of Consumption in Canada: Retail Therapy in Downtown Calgary.” This talk is delivered as part of my work as the Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies and works through aspects of my ongoing project on shopping in Canada.

More information at the Institute’s website here.

During the winter 2016 semester, I am proud to be the Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies at McGill University. In this capacity, I am working at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada on my ongoing project on shopping in Canada. My thanks to McGill for hosting me! You can read more on the Institute’s website here.

I was recently the press editor for the novel Tarstopping by Christine Rehder Horne, published by NeWest Press. Congratulations to Christine on the publication of her book!

See the novel on the NeWest website here.

Welcome! I have started this website as a way of bringing together the work and events that I do. I hope that it will be a fruitful way of sharing with the communities with which I interact. Cheers!