Research - Dr. Linda Morra
Dr. Linda Morra
Department of English
Dr. Linda Morra is currently working on a new book project, titled Ira Dilworth, A Modern Canadian Man for Modern Canadian Times, which grows out of her first book, Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (2006). She argues that his decisions leading up to and during his tenure with CBC radio (1938-62) intervened in existing formulations of cultural nationalism and had significant implications for the making of nation and race in modern English Canada.
She was awarded a SSHRC (2006-2009) and then a FQRSC (2009-2012) to work on the monograph she completed in October 2012, Archival Articulations and Agencies: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women's Authorship. She examines how Canadian women writers were regulated and contained, and how they existed in or resisted both personal and professional antagonist relationships. These antagonisms generated the very divisions, the conflictual set of relations, by which women then engaged in productive disruptions. The manuscript is being considered by the University of Toronto Press.
During her research for the monograph, she discovered Jane Rule's hand-written autobiography, Taking My Life, in the University of British Columbia archives, which Rule had given her permission to peruse; she subsequently transcribed, edited, and prepared the autobiography for publication (Talon 2011) and wrote the afterword. Taking My Life was shortlisted for the LAMBDA Award and nominated for the Stonewall Book Award, and garnered many positive reviews. One such review appeared in The Globe and Mail, at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/taking-my-life-by-jane-rule/article2135237/
In a related research trajectory, she collaborated with Dr. Jessica Schagerl to edit Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in the Materiality of Canadian Women's Archives (WLUP, 2012). This book articulate the problematic negotiations—and sometimes contradictions—involved in responsibly dealing with the tangible records of women's public and private lives when most preserved archival documents were seen as part of a systematic nation-building process. She also collaborated with Dr. Deanna Reder (SFU) on Troubling Tricksters: Critical Revisioning Conversations (WLUP 2010), in which the essays evaluate Trickster criticism. Nominated for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English for 2010, the book suggests how Tricksters—and the criticism around this subject—have often been used in the service of a predominantly white and colonial culture and invites more responsible criticism located within specific Indigenous socio-historical contexts. Her other publications include Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth (UTP 2006), At the Speed of Light there is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan (2004, co-edited with John Moss), and articles about such writers as Jack Hodgins, Tomson Highway, Jane Rule, and Mordecai Richler. The articles have appeared in such journals as Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and American Review of Canadian Studies.
Another collaboration is in progress: with Australian scholar, Maryanne Dever, she is organizing a series of international workshops titled “Archive Futures: Manuscripts, Materiality, Methods.” The first of these is scheduled to take place in Canada in June 2013, followed by another in Australia and Britain. The workshops are especially concerned with examining questions of materiality and method in relation to manuscript sources in the era of digitization.
Linda currently sits on the Quebec Writers' Federation's Board of Directors. She is on the advisory board for Guernica Press, Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and ECW. She runs the Morris House Reading Series at Bishop's University and the Student Writing Week/End in the Eastern Townships (SWEET). Linda is also pleased to have won a number of teaching awards, including the Departmental teaching Award (2008-2009) and Best Professor of the Humanities (2009-2010), and to have been nominated for several others, including the William and Nancy Turner Teaching Award (2010-2011).
