Faculty

Dr. Karin Beeler

Karin Beeler, Professor
Department Chair

MA Alberta, PhD Alberta

Office: ADM 3062
Phone: 250-960-6640
Email: karin.beeler@unbc.ca

Dr. Karin Beeler completed her PhD and MA degrees in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta and a BA (English Honours) at the University of British Columbia. Her research and teaching interests are television studies, film studies, animal studies, youth culture, Canadian literature and Comparative literary studies.  She is the co-editor of Animals in Narrative Film and Television: Strange and Familiar Creatures (forthcoming 2022). Other book publications include Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Charac​ters in Recent Television and Film (2009), and Tattoos, Desire and Violence: Marks of Resistance in Literature, Film and Television (2006).  She has also co-edited Children's Film in the Digital Age as well as Investigating Charmed: The Magic Power of TV (with Stan Beeler).  As one of UNBC's founding faculty members, she has contributed to the development of the university as an administrator for various units and served on the boards of several community organizations. She has taught courses with a wide range of delivery methods including online/web courses, video conference and audio conference technology. Dr. Beeler has been President, Vice-President and Treasurer of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association. When not occupied with academic activities, she enjoys acting in community theatre and participating with her dogs at various dog events.


Robert BuddeRobert Budde, Profess​or

MA Calgary,​ PhD Calgary

Office: ADM 3016
Phone: 250-960-6693
Email: robert.budde@unbc.ca

Dr. Rob Budde, a UNBC Professor of English, has published seven books (four poetry-Catch as Catch, traffick, Finding Ft. George, and declining america), two novels-Misshapen and The Dying Poem, and a book of short fiction-Flicker).  In 2002, Rob facilitated a collection of interviews (In Muddy Water: Conversations with 11 Poets). Rob teaches creative writing and Canadian Literature at UNBC in Prince George.  He has been a finalist for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promosing Manitoba Writer and the McNally-Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year.  In 1995 Budde completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.  He is currently working on a science fiction/cyberpunk novel called The Overcode, a study of Devel's Club called Panax, and a book of poems about a character named "Poem" called Poem's Poems. 


Lisa Dickson, Professor

BA Guelph, MA & PhD McMaster​

Office: ADM 3005
Phone: 250-960-5364
Email: lisa.dickson@unbc.ca

Professor Lisa Dickson Specializes in Renaissance Literature (especially Shakespeare and tragic drama), Literary Theory, and Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.  She is a 3M National Teaching Fellow and Founding Project Lead for the 3M NTF Mentoring Network. In her research, service and teaching, she explores the concepts of critical hope and empathy and seeks to build learning environments, both within her own classrooms
 
and in Higher Education as a whole, that awaken students to their own agency as learners. Her current project is a book about Shakespeare and Critical Hope, a collaborative endeavour with her fellow 3M Teaching Fellows, Shannon Murray (UPEI) and Jessica Riddell (Bishops U). She and her collaborators also produce a podcast, Wyrd Words: Conversations about Literature and Learning in Higher Education (available via all the usual podcatchers), and manage a website that includes the podcast, the Wyrd Words blog and resources on Early Modern Literature and Teaching and Learning, www.thewyrdhouse.com.

Kristen Guest, Professor

BA & MA Western Ontario, PhD Toronto

Office: ADM 3072
Phone: 250-960-6642
Email: kristen.guest@unbc.ca

Dr. Kristen Guest's research interests are in nineteenth century theatre and Victorian popular culture.  "I have published on Victorian melodrama, cannibalism, and on popular authors such as Marie Corelli (the first Big bestseller in the modern sense of the term) and Isabella Beeton (the nineteenth-century Martha Stewart, minus the prison time). I am currently at work on a SSHRCC funded project focusing on Victorian detective fiction that I hope to publish as a scholarly monograph.  This project is exciting for me because it extends my interests popular culture and theatre.  It will also include a chapter on depictions of policing and detection in western Canada in popular fiction about the North West Mounted Police.  Since taking up residence in Prince George, my husband and I have also tried to explore northern BC as much as possible.

Kevin Hutchings, Professor​

MA McMaster, PhD McMaster

Office: ADM 3024
Phone: 250-960-6621
Email: kevin.hutchings@unbc.ca
Website: http://www.kevinhutchings.ca

Dr. Kevin Hutchings is Professor of English and a UNBC University Research Chair. A past winner of the UNBC Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a two-time Canada Research Chair holder, he teaches British Romantic literatures, nineteenth-century Indigenous literatures, postcolonial literatures, critical theory, and ecocriticism. Kevin is the author of Transatlantic Upper Canada: Portraits in Literature, Land, and British-Indigenous Relations (2020), Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World (2009), and Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (2002); and he is co-author of the British Columbia Book Prize-winning Birds of the Raincoast: Habits and Habitat (2004). His co-edited collections include Transatlantic Literary Ecologies (2017), Transatlantic Literary Exchanges (2011), and Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture (2009); and he has published more than 35 journal articles and books chapters. Kevin’s current research project, entitled The Life and Literary Adventures of Sir Francis Bond Head, is funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. As a songwriter and independent recording artist, Kevin has released seven albums, including Songs of William Blake, Shadows in the Light, and, most recently, Truth to Power.

Maryna RomanetsM​aryna Romanets, Professor

MA Chernivtsi Ukraine, PhD Kyiv (Ukrainian National Academy of Arts and Sciences), PhD Saskatchewan

Office: ADM 3079

Phone: 250-960-6658
Email: maryna.romanets@unbc.ca

Professor Romanets holds two doctoral degrees, from the former Soviet Union and Canada, and specializes in comparative, postcolonial, and women’s literatures, and contemporary critical theory. She has published articles and book chapters on the issues of representation and gender, postcolonialism and intertextual relations, politics and language, and translation theory and praxis. She is the author of Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised Traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature (2007) and coeditor of Beauty, Violence, Representation (2014, 2017). Her latest title, Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions: First Postindependence Wave, appeared in 2019, and she is currently working on an edited volume that examines Central and East-European neo-Gothic cultural productions after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

Dr. Monica Mattfeld

Monica Mattfeld, Assistant Professor

MA University of British Columbia, PhD University of Kent

Office:  ADMIN 3077
Phone:  250-960-5801
E-Mail:  monica.mattfeld@unbc.ca

Dr. Monica Mattfeld is an Assistant Professor of English, and she specializes in animal studies and the literature and history of eighteenth-century England.  She has published on the interplay between animal and human disability, early-modern horsemanship practices, theatrical animals, the early circus, and performances of gender.  Dr. Mattfeld is the author of Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (2017), and co-editor of multiple animal-studies publications.  She is currently working on Poor Jades (forthcoming from Palgrave, 2024), a monograph focusing on discourses of equine disability and welfare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her other interests include the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century equestrian drama, circus Ephemera, and the poetry of William Somerville.

 

Mattfeld is interested in supervising students in the areas of eighteenth-century literature; seventeenth-century literature; animal studies; disability studies; and eighteenth-century theatre.

 

Dr. Christing Campana

Christine Campana, Assistant Professor

MA Carlton University, PhD Western University
Office:  ADM 3086
Phone:  250-960-6641

Christine Campana completed her PhD at Western University in 2023.  Her doctoral research examined the work of Indigenous, diasporic, and white settler women writers who travel through and away from Canada to illuminate the ways that poetry can reveal how different forms of movement are foundational to the projects of settlement and decolonization.  She looks forward to researching, teaching, and supervising in areas including Indigenous literatures, Canadian literature, women's literature, theory and criticism, poetry/poetics, diaspora studies, and Indigenous - settler relations.  As a white settler scholar originally from Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the land of the Anishnaaabeg and Metis people, she aspires to teach literature in such a way as to encourage students to reflect on their relationships with Indigenous peoples and their lands, including the land of the Lheidli T'enneh First Nation on which they pursue their university studies, from their unique positionalities and perspectives.

Professors Emeriti

Blanca Schorcht

Blanca Schorcht

MA British Columbia, PhD British Columbia

Dr. Blanca Schorcht holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from UBC, and one of her particular interests lies in the interface between oral and written traditions, particularly in the context of popular culture: her book Storied Voices in Native American Texts explores some of these connections. Recently she has shifted her research focus to explore oral traditions in the context of an autoethnographic study that examines and compares some of the official narratives constructed around German post-World War II Identity with more unofficial, hidden, and oral narratives that continue to circulate within families and communities.

Stan Beeler​​, Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor

MA Dalhousie, PhD Alberta
Email:
 stan.beeler@unbc.ca​

Dr. Stan Beeler completed his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Alberta, Canada and his MA and BA from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.  He is interested in popular culture, film and television studies, and the application of technology to research and teaching in the humanities.  He has published on 17th century literature, popular culture, television studies and humanities computing.  He is a member of several professional societies including the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, Science Fiction Research Association, Emblem Studies Association and Canadian Association of chairs of English.  Dr. Beeler is the Past President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association.

Dee Horne

Dr. Dee Horne - Emeritus and Adjunct Professor

MA Toronto, PhD​

Professor Horne teaches creative writing and modern and contemporary literatures.  She has published books, book chapters, articles and poems.  Her latest book is Mary Oliver's Grass Roots Poetry in which she examines global warming and climate changes in the context of Mary Oliver's poetry.

Adjunct Professor

Troy Bordun

PhD Trent University

E-Mail:  troy.bordun@unbc.ca

Dr. Troy Michael Bordun completed his doctoral degree in Cultural Studies at Trent University. His research interests include film genres, transnational cinema, celebrity studies, porn studies, and comics. Bordun’s publications in film studies include Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema: Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017),  recent articles in Mise-en-scène and Cinephile, and a chapter in Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). He has published articles and reviews on sf cinema in Science Fiction Film and Television, CineAction, and Science Fiction Studies, and articles on the history of pornography in Synoptique, Porn Studies, and Celebrity Studies. Bordun was a co-director of Trent Film Society and his programs included a summer of global sf cinema and two three-day exhibitions, on non-narrative cinema and the history of pornography up to 1972, respectively. Bordun is also an occasional amateur video essayist.

Sessional Instructors

Dr. Carla Glen

PhD Simon Fraser University

E-Mail:  carla.glen@unbc.ca

Alex Wagstaffe

PhD Student - McMaster University 

E-Mail:  ali.wagstaffe@unbc.ca

Fatemeh Namaei

MA University of Northern BC

E-Mail:  fatemeh.namaei@unbc.ca