Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Gisèle M. Baxter

Welcome to a facsimile of my many-times updated academic website (first created in 1996 at Dalhousie University using html coding), where you can access current and recent course descriptions, as well as other useful information. The header is a screenshot of the final version of that now deleted website. See the right sidebar menu for a list of posts to this blog.

Message for Students Registered in ENGL 365/001 Summer 2026 Term 1:

As you likely know, Canvas is inaccessible: https://status.it.ubc.ca/ (or use this link for the specific report: https://status.it.ubc.ca/incidents/rb3pypbkly1q). Just in case it remains inaccessible for a while, I will be using my UBC Blogs site to post course information and materials. I will use Workday email to send general messages to all of you, and you can email me directly at Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca  (or by replying to one of these general messages). I do not use social media to communicate with students.

I’ll offer three tips now:

  • Check the email address you used to register (and that UBC uses to communicate with you) daily.
  • Do not stay logged into sites indefinitely.
  • Clear your browser cache regularly (I clear mine at least once a week).

However, let’s look forward to meeting next week and discovering the wonderful world of Modernist Literature and the revolutionary social and cultural shift from the 19th to the 20th century.

Useful links:

© Gisèle M. Baxter; all rights reserved.

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Publishing for Undergraduates

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Gisèle M. Baxter

Updated November 20, 2025.

If want some introductory experience of revising and editing for publication and of sharing your work with a broader audience, consider undergraduate journals. Undergraduate journals might carry less weight when you’re applying for post-graduate fellowships or jobs. However, they give undergraduates a valuable opportunity to publish and to gain experience with the peer review process, given the amount of competition in submitting to “standard” journals or edited collections, and there are are good undegraduate journals, both discipline specific and multidisciplinary.

It’s not impossible for undergraduates to publish in “standard” academic journals or edited collections, but please don’t opt for one of the increasing number of predatory journals promising speedy publication: publishing there would be detrimental if you are thinking of an academic career.

Look at some academic journals you’ve used for undergraduate essays, where you found articles you really liked (also look at those articles’ bibliographies: see what secondary sources they cite). Check the journals’ submission and publication requirements (peer review should be there); many journals by now have an internet site. See how the articles differ in focus and tone from essays written for courses: even an essay that earned a grade of A+ might require significant development and revision for publication. While undergraduate journals might invite material closer in length to undergraduate term papers, “standard” academic journal articles and book chapters tend to be longer (sometimes roughly the length of the three-credit Honours graduating essay at UBC).

Academic publications don’t allow simultaneous submissions: you must go through the process with one journal and just move on to the next when you’re certain the one where you’ve submitted won’t publish your article. That said, one piece of advice I got as a young scholar (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) was to start with a reasonably prestigious journal if it fits well with your subject, especially if you’re submitting an article developed from an essay that got very strong feedback: you never know, they might ask for some revisions and accept your article!

While you are thinking of publication, you might look for opportunities to present work at colloquia (for example, UBC’s English Students’ Association has an annual colloquium) or undergraduate conferences, as they’re great opportunities for collegial feedback and discovery of useful resources (and meeting people who share your interests). However, you don’t want to go into debt to attend conferences that require additional expenses beyond the conference fee, such as travel and accommodations and meals. (At the graduate and professional levels, sometimes sources of funding exist for conference travel.) Look for local opportunities as well as hybrid or wholly online conferences.

Finally, even though your essays were produced for courses in literary/cultural studies, you’re not limited to journals in their specific disciplinary areas. There are journals quite broadly concerned with a genre or or period or region. As well, there are multidisciplinary journals and journals in niche areas: the Irish Gothic Journal, for example, is well regarded both in literary and cultural/media studies. Gothic Studies is the journal associated with the International Gothic Association, and it too publishes in a broad range of areas, as does ESC: English Studies in Canada (ACCUTE’s journal). The Journal of Popular Culture is another to consider.

Submitting a literary-studies article to a multidisciplinary journal or one in an adjacent area might require some revision. For example, a film studies journal might require more emphasis on the technical language of film, such as mise en scene. I have a chapter published in an academic edited collection called Gothic Heroines (the UBC Library has it in full text online), which takes a film studies approach; what was originally a literary analysis of the Bluebeard story’s influence needed revision to work for both literature and film scholars.

Resource Links

© Gisèle M. Baxter. Not to be copied, used, shared, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner.

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My Curriculum Vitae

Posted on September 23, 2021 by Gisèle M. Baxter

Updated May 1, 2026

Dr. Gisèle M. Baxter

  • Sessional Lecturer
  • Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia
  • 397-1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
  • Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca || https://blogs.ubc.ca/giselebaxter/

Teaching and Research Interests

  • 19th-21st century literary and cultural studies; Gothic studies; Modernism; Victorian and 19th-century literature; speculative fiction; rhetoric and composition

Education

  • 1986-90: PhD, Dalhousie University. Thesis: Narrative Methods and Social Contexts in the Novel of Dislocation. Supervisor: Dr. Rowland J. Smith
  • 1981-82: MA, Dalhousie University. Thesis: Northern Diviner: The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Supervisor: Dr. S.E. Sprott
  • 1976-79: BA, Mount Saint Vincent University

Teaching Experience

All are English Department courses; all appointments are sessional.

  • University of British Columbia, 1997-2026: Courses taught include Strategies for University Writing (no longer offered); Reading and Writing about Language and Literatures; Approaches to Literature and Culture (all first year); Speculative Fiction; Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature; Literature and Film; Principles of Literary Studies (all intermediate); Victorian Period Literature; Nineteenth-Century Literature; Children’s Literature; Modern Literature; Twentieth-Century Literature; Contemporary Literature; Technical Writing (no longer offered); Combined Majors/Honours Seminar; Literature Majors Seminar (all upper year)
  • Dalhousie University, 1992; 1995-97; 1999: 20th Century Fiction; Framed Narratives; Introduction to Literature; Teaching Assistant for English/Women’s Studies: Fictions of Development
  • McGill University 1994-95: Modern British Fiction; Contemporary Women’s Fiction; Restoration to 20th Century
  • Université de Montréal 1995: Contemporary British Fiction
  • St. Francis Xavier University 1991-92: 20th Century Literature; Modern British Fiction
  • St. Lawrence University 1990-91: Introduction to Literature; English Literature since 1700; Modern British Novel; British Women Writers
  • Mount Saint Vincent University 1983-85: Literature for Children and Young Adults; Theory and Practice of Writing

Principal Academic Awards

  • 2025-26; 2019-20; 2002-03: Ian Fairclough Teaching Prize (for sessional teaching in English, UBC)
  • 1992-94: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship; affiliated with the University of East Anglia (supervisor: Malcolm Bradbury) and McGill University (supervisor: Kerry McSweeney)
  • 1989-90: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
  • 1988-90: Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship

Honours Graduating Essays (UBC; supervisor unless otherwise indicated)

  • 2025-26:
    • Bianca Feltrin, “Motherhood and Madness: An Analysis of Transformation and Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch“
    • Stella Griffin, “Objects for Male Pleasure: Female Consumption and Authoritarian Complicity in Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World” (reader)
    • Natalie Houle, “Vampire, the Suspension: Preying on Sensibility in the Nineteenth-Century Vampire Text”
    • Aisha Chaudhry, “‘We’ll Build a Creature’: Navigating Monstrosity and Queerness in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Carmen Machado’s In the Dream House” (reader)
  • 2023-24:
    • Natalie Knoll, “‘God Didn’t Want Me. And the Devil Was Afraid to Open the Door’: Vampire Tropes and the Gothic in Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire”
    • Nancy Soda, “The Unscrewing of Mental Sanity in The Turn of the Screw”
    • Gabrielle Lee, “Defining Desire: The Regulation of Female Adolescent Sexuality and Heterosexual Relationships in Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun” (reader)
    • Zoe Shelton, “‘The game is never up’: Cyborgian Experimentation in Women in Love‘s Posthuman Imagination”
    • Jessica Norn, “‘Base Metal, Gilded’: The Deconstruction of the Figure of the Hero in Ellen N. LaMotte’s The Backwash of War” (reader)
  • 2022-23:
    • Leila Avdic, “An Investigation of American Horror through The Silence of the Lambs”
    • Alexandra Lamb, “The Accidental Triumph of the Human Spirit in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau: An Objection to the Popular Critical Tradition Behind This Text, and Why It Fails to Prove the Human Merely Animal”
    • Haylee Kopfensteiner, “Harshest Lines and Sweetest Hues: Women’s Self-portraiture in Jane Eyre and the Paintings of Marie Bracquemond”
    • Henry Yong, “‘It’s Okay to Dream a Little’: Pseudo-Eros, Fictophilia, and Hyperreality in Science Fiction” (Blade Runner 2049, The Dark Forest, and Oryx and Crake)
    • Katrina Dowall, “A Portrait Frozen in Time: Exploring Queer Transtemporality and its Monstrous Effects in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray”
    • Lucienne Chang, “Subversive Death: Necessary Transcendence of the Bodily in 19/20C Homoromantic Literature” (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Women in Love)
    • Safa Ghaffar, “‘Eat again of the Tree of Knowledge’”: The ‘Why’s and ‘How’s behind Infinite Consciousness through Negative Capability in His Dark Materials” (reader)
  • 2021-22:
    • Gabrielle Alvarez, “Slave and Master Morality in Modern Western Children’s Narratives” (Nietzsche and boys’ adventure stories)
    • Saba Soltani, “Curiosity (almost) Killed the Pussy: The Patriarchy’s Attempt to Destroy the Female Sin and the Mothers who Intervened” (Persephone, Bluebeard, and “The Bloody Chamber”)
    • Kaleena Ipema, “Where are the Wise Women? Evil and Missing Mothers in The Little Mermaid and Other Disney Adaptations of Classic Fairy Tales”
  • 2020-21:
    • Teresa Chan, “Adapting the Wondertale: A ‘Sadeian’ Reading of ‘The Death of Koschei The Deathless’ and Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless” (reader)
  • 2019-20:
    • Lauryn Collins, “‘My Eyes are of No Use to Me’: Blindness, Agency, and Gender Anxiety in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch”
    • Kathleen Gigliuk, “Free Women: An Examination of Grendel’s Mother as Liminal Monster”
    • Aiden Tait, “Betwixt and Between: A Liminal Approach to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline”
    • Sydney White “‘He a man and I a woman’: Gender and Haunting in Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca”
    • Alex Allen, “Transmedia Exploration and Purposeful Decay in Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases and Other Works” (reader)
  • 2016-17:
    • Yi Le Lu, “Entering Bluebeard’s Chamber and Living Happily Ever After: A Conventional Fairy Tale Marriage in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle” (co-supervisor)
  • 2015-16:
    • Emma Riek, “Born Without Destiny: A Discussion of Child Heroism and its Function in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Witches”
    • Gemma Grimes, “In Defense of the Gentle[manly] Creature: An Exploration of the Human and the Animal in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows”
    • Jessica Schmidt, “Mutations of Maleficence: Versions of the Wicked Witch in Fairy Tales and Beyond” (reader)
  • 2014-15:
    • Elora Hunka, “A Performing Text: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a Visual Literary Story”
    • Vanessa Power, “Postmodern Degradation and Posthuman Transcendence”
  • 2013-14:
    • Olivia Dreisinger “‘What’s the Word for Things Not Being the Same Always’: Change, Change, Change and Collaborative Misfits in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman”
  • 2012-13:
    • Travis LaCroix, “Existentialism and the Toy Story Triad”
  • 2011-12:
    • Miranda Martini, “Get Them Young: Ecology and Children’s Culture of the Twentieth Century” (reader)
    • Amy Miles, “Written by the Scriptors: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a Response to Roland Barthes’s The Death of the Author” (reader)
  • 2010-11:
    • Alyzee Lakhani, “The Crisis of Knowing in The Penultimate Peril of Daniel Handler’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”
    • Jessica Li, “Representation of Cloning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion”
  • 2009-10:
    • John Brennan, “Technology and Globalism in William Gibson’s Spook Country and Pattern Recognition”
    • Jeremy Newcombe, “Examining Temporality in Graphic Novels: Representations of Time in Alan Moore’s Watchmen”
  • 2008-09:
    • Sulynn Chuang Xin, “Within the Vicious Cabaret: Masks, Identity, and How to Read a Superhero Body in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta” (reader)
    • Amanda Zapp, “When Wendy Grew Up: The Psychological Function of Fairyland in J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy” (reader)
  • 2007-08:
    • Darcie Frederick, “Surviving The Road” (reader)
    • Karen Teufel, “Tracking the Forces of Good and Evil in Harry Potter” (reader)
  • 2006-07:
    • Elizabeth Anderson, “Storytelling Then and Now: An Examination of the Effects of Oral, Literary and Electronic Forms on the Changing Nature of the Folk and Fairy Tale in Labyrinth and A Forfeit of Dreams”
    • Catherine T. Whitehead, “Worlds Apart: Children and Authority in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising, and His Dark Materials”
  • 2004-05:
    • Mysha Dewar-McClelland, “‘Nobody’s Meat’: A Study of Gender Roles in Traditional and Modern Fairy Tales”
  • 2003-04:
    • David Simpson, “Eco-Dystopia: A New Genre Born In The Last Frontier Of The New World”

Faculty Sponsor, UBC Student Directed Seminars

  • ASTU 400P: Why the Undead Walk Among Us: An Exploration of Zombies in Literature and Popular Culture (Coordinator: Kate Reilly, 2016)
  • ASTU 400G: Spectral Spirits, Suspense, and the Sublime: Gothic Literature in Speculation (Coordinators: Gemma Grimes and Catherine Read, 2014)
  • ASTU 400D/002: Science Fiction & the City (Coordinator: Matthew Blunderfield, 2009)
  • ENGL 490/015: Chick Lit: Making (Over) a Context (Coordinator: Anita Law, 2008)
  • ENGL 466: Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’Roll: Popular Culture, 1970s to Today (Coordinator: Ashley Bayles, 2006)

Other Supervision and Examination

  • 2006-07: Robert Willis, Master’s Thesis (UBC School of Journalism) “Cool to Be Christian?: Dissecting the North American Christian Rock Scene” (reader)
  • 2006: Leslie M. Meier, Master’s Thesis (Simon Fraser University School of Communication) “In Concert: The Coordination of Popular Music, Youth Practices, and Lifestyle Marketing” (external examiner)
  • 2000: Maria Ticinovic, Master’s Thesis (UBC Department of English) “Sublimity and History in Don DeLillo’s Underworld” (reader and examiner)
  • 1991: SallyAnne Wolek, Independent Study Project on South African women writers (St. Lawrence University Department of English): “What is Legitimate: Exploring Perceptions of Race and Sexuality (Gordimer, Tlali, Head)” (supervisor)

Publications

  • Book chapter: “Bluebeard’s Women Fight Back: the Gothic heroine in contemporary film and Heidi Lee Douglas’s Little Lamb (2014).” Gothic Heroines on Screen: Representation, Interpretation, and Feminist Enquiry, edited by Tamar Jeffers McDonald and Frances A. Kamm, Routledge, 2019.
  • Editor: Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature edited by Brett Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014.
  • Canadian Literature reviews: https://canlit.ca/canlit_authors/gisele-m-baxter-2/
  • Review: Kathryn James, Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature. English Studies, vol. 92, no. 8, 2011, pp. 933-934.
  • Review: Mavis Reimer, ed. Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. The Dalhousie Review, vol. 88, no. 3, Autumn 2008, pp. 455-57.
  • Review: “Nightmares and Daydreams” (review of various picture books). Canadian Children’s Literature, vol. 27, no. 3.103, Fall 2001, pp. 71-2.
  • Article: “‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’: Exile, Marriage and the Resistance to Commitment in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 24, no. 2, Spring 1994, pp. 127-40.
  • Article: “The Generous Spirit: The Moral and Physical Experience of a Man at War in Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The Dalhousie Review, vol. 73, no. 3, Fall 1993, pp. 68-80.
  • Article: “Clothes, Men and Books: Cultural Experiences and Identity in the Early Novels of Anita Brookner.” English, vol. 42, no. 173, Summer 1993, pp. 125-39.
  • Reviews for The Dalhousie Review: Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Vocation and Identity in the Fiction of Muriel Spark; Sanford Sternlicht, ed., In Search of Stevie Smith (Fall 1992); Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (Fall 1991); Anita Brookner, Lewis Percy (Winter 1990).

Principal Papers and Talks

  • March 11, 2021: English Students Association Colloquium, UBC: “‘Like a real girl’: gaze, gender, and synthetic humans in Gothic science fiction” (revision)
  • 4 June 2019: SSHRC Congress, Contract Faculty Research Symposium, UBC: “‘Like a real girl’: gaze, gender, and synthetic humans in Gothic science fiction”
  • 2 May 2019: Gothic Feminism 3: Technology, Women, and Gothic Horror On Screen, University of Kent: “ ‘Like a real girl’: gaze, gender, and Gothically haunted humanoid inventions in the Blade Runner films and Ex Machina”
  • 2 August 2018: International Gothic Association Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University: “The Posthuman Prometheus: artificial beings, so lifelike they’re scary, among Frankenstein’s inheritors in recent science-fiction films”
  • 22 August 2016: Temporal Discombobulations: Time and the Experience of the Gothic, University of Surrey: “Bluebeard’s Victorian-Gothic Grand Tour”
  • 27 May 2016: Gothic Feminism: The Representation of the Gothic Heroine in Cinema, University of Kent: “Bluebeard’s Women Fight Back”
  • 29 October 2015: Brands of Magic Colloquium (UBC): “Fanfiction and Fan Communities”
  • 1 August 2015: International Gothic Association Conference, Vancouver: “Bluebeard in Tasmania: Heidi Lee Douglas’s Little Lamb as Gothic retelling and historical drama”
  • 25 April 2009: Breaking the Boundaries: A Research Conference on Radical Children’s Literature (UBC): “The Problem of Teen Fiction” (keynote speaker)
  • 7 July 2008: Creative Writing MFA Summer Residency Program (UBC): “Literary Machines: The Writer and the Cybersphere” (panelist)
  • 1999-2008: Brock House Society Lecture Series (Vancouver): topics included Spanish Civil War narratives; Peter Pan; Frankenstein; Dracula; 1920s Paris Literary Scene; Anita Brookner; Christina Stead; Under the Volcano
  • 21 March 2002: Organizer, UBC English Department Colloquium: “Millennial Gothic” (Paper: “Dracula’s Grandchildren: Undomesticating the Count”)
  • 24 January 2001: Chair, UBC English Department Colloquium: “No Future: Punk Revisited” (Paper: “Never Mind the Situationists, or, Public Image Limited: Theorizing the Punk Myth”)
  • 3 June 1999: ACCUTE Conference, Sherbrooke: “Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children: Why Still an Unread Book?”
  • 12 June 1997: Malcolm Lowry Symposium: An International Celebration, Toronto: “Mutual Dislocation: Marriage in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano”
  • 20 April 1996: NEMLA Convention, Montréal: “D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of Nation” (response to session D.H. Lawrence, Nation and Race)
  • 5 June 1994: ACCUTE Conference, Calgary: “Man Alive and the Mob-Spirit: Physicality, Integrity and Conscription in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo”
  • 28 December 1989: MLA Convention, Washington, D.C.: “Orwell and Hemingway in Spain: The Moral and Physical Experience of a Man at War”

Other Experience and Academic Service

  • 2022-present: Editorial Board, The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale (academic journal)
  • 2020-21: Undergraduate Committee, UBC Department of English Language and Literatures
  • 2020-21: Online Teaching Working Group, UBC Department of English Language and Literatures; Coordinator: ENGL Online Teaching Resources Canvas site
  • August 2017-present: Technical writing workshops for incoming students (Master of Food Science program, UBC)
  • October-December 2017: Second Year Popular Culture sub-committee, Curriculum Development Committee, UBC Department of English Language and Literatures; designer of prospectus for ENGL 243: Science Fiction and Fantasy/Speculative Fiction
  • 2017: Author, blended (classroom and online) ENGL 301: Technical Writing (UBC; no longer offered)
  • February-March 2016: Instructor, AW107-W16-A: Writing for Graduate Students (UBC Writing Centre and Continuing Studies)
  • 2008-13: Online course authoring, UBC: ENGL 462 (now 365/Modern Literature): The Modern British Novel, with Catherine Nelson-McDermott; ENGL 112: Strategies for University Writing (no longer offered) and ENGL 468 (now 392): Children’s Literature, with Suzanne James
  • 2008-2015: Marker for CM1, a technical writing course offered by the Certified General Accountants Association (now Chartered Professional Accountants Canada); CM1 lecturer (UBC) 2010-12
  • 2012-13: Advisory Committee, development of Certificate in Professional Communication (UBC Continuing Studies)
  • 2003-2004: Humanities 101 lectures on Dracula: the novel and its cultural legacy (UBC)
  • Summer-Fall 2000: Website and Publicity Materials for Wilde 2000, a symposium at UBC’s Green College marking the centenary of Oscar Wilde’s death
  • July 1996-July 1997: Executive Assistant, The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE: Dalhousie English Department)

© Gisèle M. Baxter; all rights reserved.

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