Who We Are

This site was developed and is maintained by Professors Marilyn J. Rose (Department of English) and Jeannette Sloniowski (Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film) at Brock University, along with a dedicated team of students and associates.

Marilyn J. Rose, Ph.D.

Marilyn Rose is a Professor of English Language and Literature and Dean of Graduate Studies at Brock University. As well as undertaking research in Canadian literature, with an emphasis on modern and contemporary Canadian Poetry, she has been involved in research in a number of areas of popular culture in recent years – including work on the uses of the canoe in Canadian national iconography, the Alice figure from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as re/visioned in the twentieth century, and portrayals of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as sleuth (in Austen's case) and criminal (in Bronte's) in recent crime fiction novels. Her work in detective fiction has included presentations on "Crime and the North Americanization of the North of England"as found in Peter Robinson's work, the Woman Detective in Canadian Crime Fiction, and Peter Hoag's Eurocentrism. She has also written encyclopedia entries on Canadian detective novelists such as Peter Robinson, Medora Sale, Ellen Godfrey, Eric Wright, and L.R. Wright and has produced papers on Howard Engel and Gail Bowen.

With Jeannette Sloniowski, Marilyn Rose developed and taught a graduate course in crime and detective fiction during the first year of Brock's Popular Studies MA Program, 2001-2..

Jeannette Sloniowski, Ph.D.

Jeannette Sloniowski is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Communications, Popular Culture and Film and she has always felt pleasantly
guilty about reading and enjoying Detective Fiction and watching Cop Shows,
Gangster Movies and Films Noir. Turning the guilt to her advantage, she
found a kindred spirit in Marilyn Rose and between them they created a
graduate course for Brock's MA in Popular Culture program called Dis/Covery
as Cultural Paradigm: Crime and Detection in Literature, Film and
Television. The arrival of the Skene-Melvin collection at Brock prompted
both to work on the creation of this database for other students and
scholars working in the field. It has been a guilt free experience.

Jeannette has published essays on documentary and Canadian television and
is the co-editor of Documenting the Documentary (with B. Grant), Canadian
Communications: Issues in Contemporary Media and Culture (with B.
Szuchewycz), Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture
(with J. Nicks) and Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries (with J.
Leach). She is also editing as series of books on Landmarks in American
Television with B. Grant, and is completing a monograph for the series on
Jack Webb's Dragnet.  She is also a member of the Popular Culture Niagara
Research Group and is working on a project on historic Niagara movie theatres.

Jeannette did considerable work on Film Noir at the MA level and has taught
undergraduate courses on Film Noir and Hardboiled Fiction. Last winter she
taught an Advanced Popular Culture course on Canadian Detective Fiction,
and will repeat that largely pleasureable experience in the Winter of 2006.
She will also offer a graduate seminar entitled "Hardboiled in Hollywood."

Jeannette is an admirer of Nancy Drew  

Philippa Gates, Ph.D.

Dr. Philippa Gates, of Wilfred Laurier University, will be making a contribution to the CrimeFictionCanada website as part of her new three-year research project funded by SSHRC. Her project centers upon an examination of the Classical Hollywood detective film, specifically the popular but under-examined ‘B’ detective series of the 1930s and 1940s in terms of the representation of American ideals of law and order, gender, race, heroism, and national identity.

Concurrent with this critical study will be a secondary project, ­to produce an extensive annotated filmography of detective films and bibliography of the historical and critical material regarding them as an addition to the Crime Fiction Canada site, developed by Drs. Marilyn J. Rose and Jeannette Sloniowski at Brock University.

Dr. Gates is an assistant professor and the Film Studies Coordinator at WLU. Her research interests include contemporary American film, Classical Hollywood film, gender (specifically masculinity) and genre (especially the detective film). Her recent publications include Detecting Men: Investigating Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film (SUNY Press, forthcoming) and the co-edited collection The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film
(Greenwood Press, 2002), as well as articles on the female detective in the serial killer film (Post Script, forthcoming), the contemporary Hollywood war film (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, forthcoming), and the African-American detective in film (Journal of Popular Film & Television,
2004).

THE CRIME FICTION CANADA TEAM

Graduate Research Assistant: Erica Kelly, M.A.

Undergraduate Research Assistants : Kate Davis, Stella Froese, Erica Kelly, Elise Ristau, Laura Smith, Bettina Stumm

Project Assistants: Janice McNabb, , Sandra Dee, Sheila Naylor

Website Design and Development: Brock University Student Web Development Team, under the direction of Andy Morgan, Information and Technology Services. Our current web developer is Peter Kuczera.