I grew up in Edmonton and studied at the University of Alberta (BA, MA), Université de Dijon (Diplôme Supérieur d’Études Françaises), Dalhousie (PhD), and UBC (International Program for the Scholarship of Educational Leadership: UBC Certificate on Pedagogy and Curriculum in Higher Education). Before joining UBC, I taught at Dalhousie, Saint Mary’s University, Mount Saint Vincent University, and Okanagan University College.  I am  currently an Associate Professor of Teachiing in the English Department and chair of UBC’s Master of Arts in Children’s Literature.

Like most academics in UBC’s educational leadership stream, my working life is divided between teaching, research, educational leadership, and service. I did my graduate work on the eighteenth-century novel and later researched literary representations of disease in the eighteenth century before turning my attention to writing for the young.  This year, I’m teaching courses on children’s and young adult Literature  (ENGL 392) and first-year writing and literature (ENGL 100 and ENGL 110), eighteenth-century literature (ENGL 353), and comics and graphic media (ENGL 245). My research focuses on children’s and young adult fiction, and I’m especially interested in how contemporary writing for the young represents posthuman challenges to liberal humanist models of the self. My recent educational leadership has involved developing genre-theoretical approaches to writing instruction and supporting graduate-level instruction in children’s and young adult literature.