Marginalia: New Perspectives on Old Spaces
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
12pm-2pm
Dr. Charles A. Sankey Chamber
Featuring presentations by the 2026 Master of Arts in English Language & Literature Candidates
Annalise Quesnelle
Public Intimacy and Poetic Address in Canadian Text-Based Art Installations
My project argues that text-based installations — a genre situated at the intersection of poetics, public art, and performance — cultivate forms of public intimacy by engaging diverse, unpredictable viewers in spaces shaped by hegemonic cultural norms.
Annalise Quesnelle is a graduate student in English: Text/Community/Discourse at Brock University. Her research explores how Canadian text-based art installations intervene in public spaces, reimagining viewers’ engagement with art, spatial perception, and the possibilities for dialogue.
Mia Smith
Fashioning the Feminine: Interrogating Rhetoric and Gender Ventriloquy in the Querelle des Femmes (1610-1620)
My thesis project will investigate the role of masculine and feminine ventriloquy during the querelle des femmes pamphlet controversy in England (1610-20), carving out a new way to understand early modern voice and further, apply such observations to contemporary gender discussions.
Mia Smith is an English MA Candidate at Brock University, holding BAs in both Psychology and English. Her research focuses on women’s writing in the early modern period alongside contemporary studies of gender and representation in contemporary and digital spaces.
Lauren Gallant
Between Kinship and Conquest: Women, Nature, and Settler Colonial Identity in Early Canadian Women’s Writings
My project employs ecofeminist theory to analyze three early Canadian women’s texts, examining relationships they construct between women and nature in a settler-colonial context. Through this framework, I will consider how these writers resist or reproduce colonial ideologies in their perceptions of and recorded interactions with natural spaces.
Lauren Gallant is currently completing a Masters of Arts in English: Text/Community/Discourse at Brock University while holding an Honours Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature. Lauren’s research interests lie in seventeenth and eighteenth century Canadian and British women’s literature. Her current research deals with examining the works of early Canadian women writers and their relationships to nature through an ecofeminist lens.
Steph Penner
Imprisoned in Nothingness: Constructions of Space in House of Leaves and Life a User’s Manual
My project foregrounds the conscious use of absence in two postmodern texts— House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and Life a User’s Manual by Georges Perec. I am interested in analyzing this overwhelming “presence” of absence as it relates to the themes of entrapment apparent in both novels.
Steph Penner is a graduate student in English Literature at Brock University. Steph’s interests include the dissolution of the sovereignty of language in experimental postmodern texts, as well as the places these kinds of texts confront and intersect with genre fiction.
Erin Borg
Searching for “Bliss” in Digital Minimalist Discourses
This project aims to consider the ways in which various digital minimalist discourses address growing cultural anxieties surrounding increasingly invasive digital technologies in both private and public spheres.
Erin Borg is a graduate student in the MA English program at Brock University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature as well as a Bachelor’s in Education, and is an accredited English/French teacher with the Ontario College of Teachers.
Elder Benitez Garcia
The Great American Myth: Heroes and Killers in Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers
My MRP concerns Gustav Hasford’s forgotten antiwar novel The Short-Timer’s (1979) and its satirical and surrealistic portrayal of authority and graphic violence to undermine what Richard Slotkin terms American frontier myths in the Vietnam War.
Elder earned a BA in English at Brock University, where he is a graduate student. His Major Research Project is a study of Gustav Hasford’s semi-autobiographical anti-war novel The Short-Timers. Broadly speaking, his academic interests include literary responses to state violence and oppression in Latin American literature and representations of war in 20th century American literature.
Sandra Ruszewska
After Tomorrow: Working-Class Youth Amidst Horizons Lost to Smoke
My project traces the convergence of neoliberal precarity and environmental crisis as structural forces driving a temporal suspension- a state that tethers working-class youth to a present moment devoid of futurity. Drawing upon Fisher, Bauman, Berlant, and Han, I seek to analyze class-specific narratives emerging from this temporal impasse to better understand its role in shaping contemporary identity-formation.
Sandra Ruszewska is an MA student in English (Text/Community/Discourse) at Brock University, having previously completed her BA in English and BEd (Inter/Sen). Her research interests lie at the intersection of theory, rhetoric, and philosophy in contemporary non-literary texts, with a focus on working-class discourse and narratives of hope.