Faculty

Dr. Woodward has edited two books about Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski and has written articles about the use of colour in Kieslowski’s films, the import of Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs, architecture in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and murderous girls in the movies, amongst other subjects.

Dr. Woodward directs the Bishop’s University Film Festival and is currently executive producer of the BU175 documentary-film series.

Dr. Brophy’s class structure is shaped by a conviction that learning is a social process. Through it, students practice creating and entering into public space. Ideally, this space begins to take shape through challenging but respectful discussion, guided by the recognition and negotiation of differing points of view, and directed towards the gradual development and expression of one’s own compelling and convincing positions.  He typically uses lectures to draw readings into conversation with present-day concerns, thereby helping students to map out continuities of human experience, as well as identify the irreducible differences of social and historical context that can serve to destabilize our own ideologies and assumptions.

Research

Dr. Brophy’s research spans film and literature, including work recently published in the New Review of Film and Television Studies (Summer 2021), Science Fiction Film and Television (April 2020), Victorian Review (Spring 2020), and the Journal of Victorian Culture (October 2019).

His current project, co-authored with Dr. Shawn Malley, is a book and multimedia project that connects formal arguments about film adaptation to urgent ecological and ethical questions concerning our evolving relations with the planet in the Anthropocene.

Research

Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television

Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very popular, though often critically-neglected, North American SF film and television texts–running the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters – Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to post 9/11 geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS. Liverpool University Press

Funding Sources

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Senate Research Committee, Bishop’s University

From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845-1854

In his examination of the excavation of ancient Assyria by Austen Henry Layard, Shawn Malley reveals how, by whom, and for what reasons the stones of Assyria were deployed during a brief but remarkably intense period of archaeological activity in the mid-nineteenth century. His book encompasses the archaeological practices and representations that originated in Layard’s excavations, radiated outward by way of the British Museum and Layard’s best-selling “Nineveh and Its Remains” (1849), and were then dispersed into the public domain of popular amusements. That the stones of Assyria resonated in debates far beyond the interests of religious and scientific groups is apparent in the prevalence of poetry, exhibitions, plays, and dioramas inspired by the excavation. Of particular note, correspondence involving high-ranking diplomatic personnel and museum officials demonstrates that the ‘treasures’ brought home to fill the British Museum served not only as signs of symbolic conquest, but also as covert means for extending Britain’s political and economic influence in the Near East. Malley takes up issues of class and influence to show how the middle-class Layard’s celebrity status both advanced and threatened aristocratic values. Tellingly, the excavations prompted disturbing questions about the perils of imperial rule that framed discussions of the social and political conditions which brought England to the brink of revolution in 1848 and resurfaced with a vengeance during the Crimean crisis. In the provocative conclusion of this meticulously documented and suggestive book, Malley points toward the striking parallels between the history of Britain’s imperial investment in Mesopotamia and the contemporary geopolitical uses and abuses of Assyrian antiquity in post-invasion Iraq. www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409426899

Funding Sources

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Senate Research Committee, Bishop’s University

Dr. Patrick McBrine studied Classics and Ancient History at UNB (BA), English Language and Literature at Queen’s (BA), and Medieval Studies at the University Toronto (MA, PhD). At Bishop’s University, he teaches Medieval and Renaissance Studies as well as courses on language and communication, including the History of English and Effective Writing. Beyond academia, he is Partner in a Toronto-based communications firm, where he writes copy for multi-national corporations and small businesses. In this capacity, he ghostwrites executive speeches, corporate newsletters, blogs and copy of all kinds for businesses of all sizes.

Dr. McBrine’s research involves the study of ancient and medieval languages, in particular the impact of language development on intellectual history. He has contributed numerous translations to books, and his most recent work, Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (UTP, 2017), studies the evolution of Latin biblical epic in late antiquity and its influence on the emergence of Christian writing in early England (in Anglo-Latin and Old English). He has also published on dominant themes in Old English literature and later Medieval Latin poetry, in particular the writings of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim. For the Old English Newsletter, one of the oldest publications in that field, he writes annual reviews of all works published in the area of Anglo-Latin literature.

She specializes in women’s archives, theories of affect and archives, and women’s writing in Canada. As recent examples, she examined Jane Rule’s archive in her edited book, Moving Archives (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2020), which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English (2020). She also co-wrote an article, “The Sound of a Silenced Letter,” about Souvankham Thammavongsa with Dr. Gregory Betts for Studies in Canadian Literature, and  reviewed Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club for The Conversation and Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Blue Bear Woman for Montreal Review of Books.

Her most recent book is The Routledge Introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Literature in Canada (2023), which spans over 200 years of literature. Her other monograph, Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship (University of Toronto Press in December 2014), was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English in 2015.  During her research for the latter book, she discovered Jane Rule’s hand-written autobiography, Taking My Life, in the University of British Columbia archives. She subsequently transcribed, edited, and prepared the autobiography for publication (Talon 2011) and also wrote the afterword. Taking My Life was shortlisted for the Lambda Award (2012), received a nomination for the Stonewall Book Award (2011), and garnered many positive reviews. One such review appeared in The Globe and Mail. She is drawing upon this research to write the biography of Jane Rule, her current research in progress.

She has collaborated with several scholars to produce many other volumes of criticism, including Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (with Dr. Schagerl, WLUP 2012); Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures (with Cree-Metis scholar, Dr. Deanna Reder, WLUP 2016); and Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland: Letters (with Dr. Laura Davis, U of Alberta P, 2018).

Dr. Morra has won several teaching awards, including the Departmental teaching Award (2008-2009) and Best Professor of the Humanities (2007-2008 and 2009-2010), and has been nominated for several others, including the William and Nancy Turner Teaching Award (2010-2011). She was also awarded the Faculty Evaluation Committee Merit Award for Research/Teaching in 2010 and then again in 2013.

She has won several distinctions as a podcaster for her co-produced show (with Marco Timpano), Getting Lit With Linda. It was awarded Outstanding Education Series by the Canadian Podasting Awards in 2022 and is a Finalist for the People’s Choice Podcasting Awards in 2023.

She served as the President of the Quebec Writers’ Federation (2014-2016), for which she developed their Youth Prize, and sat on the advisory board for Guernica Press, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She runs the Morris House Reading Series at Bishop’s University and the Student Writing Week/End in the Eastern Townships (SWEET).

Visit her website.

Dr. Riddell is also the inaugural Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence: in this capacity, she explores innovative teaching and learning practices, creates mentorship opportunities for students and faculty, mobilizes knowledge around learning in higher education (with a particular focus on the humanities), enhances professional development initiatives for her colleagues, and participates in a wide range of visioning and consultations at the national and international levels. She is the VP Canada on the Board of ISSoTL (International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) as well as a Board member for the 3M National Executive Council. Dr. Riddell is the faculty columnist of University Affairs and her articles appear in a series called “Adventures in Academe.” Dr. Riddell was awarded the 3M National Teaching Fellowship in 2015, the first recipient of the award at Bishop’s University. She was also awarded the William and Nancy Turner Award for Teaching Excellence (2011-2012), the most prestigious recognition of teaching excellence at Bishop’s. Dr. Riddell earned her MA and PhD in English Literature from Queen’s University.

Research

Dr. Riddell’s research interests encompass late medieval and early modern literature, performance and ritual theory, and the articulations of subjecthood in courtly and civic drama from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Her disciplinary research theorizes that sixteenth-century drama provides well-documented intersections between politics, performance, and power. Her SSHRC Insight Development Grant enabled her to investigate how technologies in the sixteenth century (the printing press, illuminated manuscripts, heraldic scrolls, portraits) recorded and shaped identity and gender, especially pertaining to political leadership in Elizabeth I’s court. Her recent work has examined early Tudor representations of sovereignty in theatrical, visual, and verbal forms in order to argue that there is significant and strategic generic experimentation in the recording of royal, aristocratic, and civic spectacle – spectacle designed to advance the political agendas of the monarch, the aristocracy, and the civic authorities. She is currently working on a book length project on Elizabeth I that probes 1) the manner in which the queen and her male courtiers commissioned innovative and hybrid genres; 2) the representational strategies within these genres by means of which gender is contested and re-formed; and 3) the modes of dissemination of these hybrid performance-texts (i.e. manuscript and print). By examining how performance is textualized in these new genres, Dr. Riddell’s work attempts to expose the tensions animating the often fraught relationships among the Queen, her nobility, and the civic populace.