My Curriculum Vitae

Updated July 22, 2024

Dr. Gisèle M. Baxter

• 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 especially haunted houses and vampires; Modernism; Victorian and 19th-century literature; science fiction and fantasy, especially dystopian/post-apocalyptic narratives; literature and film; children’s literature; rhetoric and composition including technical/professional communication

Professional Organizations

• Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE); International Gothic Association

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-present: Courses taught include Strategies for University Writing (no longer offered); Reading and Writing about Language and Literatures; Approaches to Literature and Culture (first year); Speculative Fiction; Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature; Literature and Film; Principles of Literary Studies (intermediate); Victorian Period Literature; Nineteenth-Century Literature; Children’s Literature; Modernist Literature; Twentieth-Century Literature; Technical Writing; Combined Majors/Honours Seminar (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

• 2019-20: Ian Fairclough Teaching Prize (for sessional teaching in English, UBC)
• 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)

• 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)
• 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 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.