Below is a list of faculty that are active in the department, and available to students with course specific questions. If you need administrative support, we encourage you to refer your questions to one of the following;
- The Chair of the department can address detailed program questions, including program requirements, planning and selection, research opportunities, graduate studies, and more.
- The Academic Advisor, if available, can offer support including course registration and course load, important dates, academic policies and more.
- The Academic Deans serve as the academic and administrative anchors to the professors within their Faculties or Schools as well as the students.
Faculty of the English Department
Dr. Gregory Brophy
Full Professor, Chairperson
Dr. Gregory Brophy’s teaching draws upon a wide range of interests, including Victorian and Modern British Literature as well and film and visual culture. He’s studied at Trent and Queen’s University (B.Ed), and earned his Masters and PhD in English Literature at Western University.
Dr. Shawn Malley
Full Professor – Ombudsperson
Dr. Shawn Malley teaches a wide range of courses, including literary and cultural theory, postcolonial literatures, and creative writing. He earned his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of New Brunswick. His PhD in English Literature was completed at the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Malley’s teaching is broadly informed by a cultural studies approach. He encourages students to read, think, and write about texts within the cultural contexts and discourses in which they were – and continue to be – created. He believes that the critical study of texts is the critical examination of ourselves and our world.
Research
Adaptive Forms: Videographic Criticism and Contemporary Science Fiction Film
An examination of media adaptation in contemporary science fiction film, with 14 video essays.
Adaptive Forms employs videographic essays to explore the themes, ideas, and visual language through which media culture constantly evolves and adapts. Focusing on contemporary science fiction film, this analysis considers affinities between the genre’s expansive concerns with technological and social adaption, and cinema’s own evolutionary responses to technological and aesthetic change.
In dialogue with short critical essays, Adaptive Forms adopts a range of videographic styles—including documentary filmmaking, music videos, supercuts, and slash fanvids—to illuminate the formal techniques through which cinema engenders techno-cultural adaptation. This multimedia book entangles biological, semiotic, and cultural understandings of adaptation, gesturing to a post-human and post-cinematic future.
Originating in part from the authors’ own adaptation to the videographic mode of instruction and evaluation in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adaptive Forms is relevant to media, film, and science fiction studies, adaptation scholars, science fiction fans, and creators of videographic essays.
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.
Funding Sources
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Senate Research Committee, Bishop’s University
Dr. Patrick McBrine
Assistant Professor
Dr. McBrine’s area of expertise is the study and translation of ancient and medieval languages, in particular Classical and Medieval Latin and Old and Middle English. He has also served for many years on administrative committees assigned to oversee Composition programs and Writing across the Curriculum.
Dr. Jessica Riddell
Full Professor – 3M National Teaching Fellow (2015), Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence
Dr. Jessica Riddell is a Full Professor in the English Department at Bishop’s University specializing in late medieval and early modern dramatic and non-dramatic literature. Dr. Riddell teaches a wide range of courses, including medieval romance, medieval drama, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Sixteenth and Seventeenth century poetry and prose.
Dr. Steven Woodward
Full Professor
Dr. Steven Woodward has wide-ranging interests in the areas of film and media studies. He grew up in England, fully expecting to become a secret agent as an adult, but the closest he’s come to that is publishing an article on villains in the James Bond movies. After studying at Queen’s University, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto, he taught at Nipissing University, the University of Toronto, and Clemson University (South Carolina).
Part-time Faculty:
Adam Budd
Contract Faculty
Adam Budd has been making films and teaching for the last 15 years. After graduating from the University of Regina with a BFA in Fine Arts, he began Arid Sea Films with Simon Nakonechny and directed and produced four films that screened at film festivals such as Toronto International and Slamdance. Completing his MFA in Film Production from Concordia University, he has taught at Concordia, Bishop’s University, Champlain College Lennoxville, and Oxford Spires Academy in England.
Heather Davis
Contract Faculty, EWP 115 Instructor
Born in Montreal, but raised in Vancouver, Heather Davis completed her Bachelor of Education at the University of Victoria and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She teaches children’s literature, creative writing, and effective writing at Bishop’s and at Université de Sherbrooke. She has published in The Globe and Mail and Canadian Living Magazine and won the Quebec Writer’s Federation’s 2012 Carte Blanche Prize. She has written a number of textbooks for adult education in Quebec including Indispensable Grammar. She has led local creative writing workshops since 2010, is a member of the Townships Tellers, and has been a correspondent for both the Sherbrooke Record and CBC radio. She believes that everyone can be creative and that nobody is too old to be touched by a picture book.
Dr. Justin Pfefferle
Contract Faculty
Prior to coming to Bishop’s, Dr. Pfefferle taught at the University of Saskatchewan, the State University of New York at New Paltz, and McGill University, where he earned his PhD in 2015. His areas of teaching and research interest include transnational modernism, mid-twentieth century British and American literature, cultural studies, and cinema—with a particular focus on documentary. He is currently working on a few research projects: one, about James Bond’s paranoid reading habits; another, about representations of English pub culture in novels and films of the 1930s and 1940s; and a book-length study of “adaptogenic narratives” in British and American literature and film between 1938 and 1960.