Professor
Teaching Areas: Young People’s Literature, Arthurian and Speculative Fiction
My areas of research and teaching include popular fictions (in a variety of media) about King Arthur, primarily those produced since the mid-nineteenth century; young people’s literature, with a special interest in Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery and twentieth- and twenty-first-century fantasy fiction; and speculative fiction, with a special interest in feminist fantasy, including rewritings of fairy tales. I am happy to supervise students in any of these areas.
My most recent major research project has just resulted in Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). This book works at the intersection of feminism, adaptation studies, medievalism studies, and Arthurian literature. It investigates representations of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat, tracing their emergence in medieval literature, their adaptation in Tennyson’s poems, and their subsequent appearance in music, art, and literature of various genres. This book investigates the way that representations of the Lady/Elaine, particularly their death scenes, facilitate exploration of gender and agency, particularly in relation to femininity, desire, and artistic production. After chapters on the Medieval and Victorian pre-texts, music, art, patterns of adaptation in literature (including parody), young people’s literature, and historical fiction and fantasy, the book concludes by meditating on the relationship of narratives and programming, and the evolution of the Lady/Elaine in Victorian and post-Victorian popular culture. This project was awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2009-2012). Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat has been awarded The 2022 Inaugural Dhira B. Mahoney Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Arthurian Studies by the International Arthurian Society-North American Branch.
I am currently co-editing a book on medievalism and neo-Victorianism.
Current Courses:
Engl 2P11 Young People’s Literature after 1914 (Winter 2022)
Engl 3V01 Twentieth-Century Fantasy for Young People (Winter 2022)
Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures series. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. (See https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-47690-8)
A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana 1500-2000. Co-authored with Stephen R. Reimer, D. S. Brewer, 2006.
Rewriting the Women of Camelot: Arthurian Popular Fiction and Feminism. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 93, Greenwood Press, 2001.
Future Medieval: (Neo)Medievalism in Babylon 5 and Crusade. Studies in Medievalism vol. 26, 2017, pp. 161-75.
Arthur and Adaptation. Arthuriana (Special Issue in Honour of Elizabeth Sklar, guest edited by Amy Kaufman), vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 2015, pp. 36-50.
Secular or Spiritual: Rereading Anne of Green Gables. Christianity and Literature, vol. 62, no. 3, Spring 2013, pp. 251-72.
Famous in Song and Story: Arthurian Legends in Heather Dale’s Music. Arthuriana, vol. 22, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 3-20.
Going Beyond Our Directive: Wall-E and the Limits of Social Commentary. Jeunesse, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer 2010, pp. 45-70.
Reading Elaine: Marjorie Richardson’s and L. M. Montgomery’s Red-haired Lily Maids. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 86-109.
A fabulous site for Arthurian material is The Camelot Project Website edited by Alan Lupack.
