Cecily Devereux
Associate Professor
Cecily Devereux is a specialist in English-Canadian literature and women's writing. Focusing on popular fiction, poetry, and feminist writing produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in and in relation to Canada as a part of the British Empire, most of her work addresses questions of race, gender, and the movement of bodies through imperial space, less in terms of constructions of settler identity and culture than of mobility and the representation and performance of empire on a principle of embodied occupation, with a particular interest in problematic discourses of whiteness. She has published articles and book chapters on imperial feminism, maternalism, white slavery, and eugenics as points of intervention in the construction of white female subjectivity during the period of high imperialism in Canada. Recent publications include Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (MQUP 2005), a study of the imbrication of first-wave feminism in Canada in ideologies of race culture, and two collections of women's writing in and on the British Empire in Canada: the first of these volumes, Women Writing Home (Pickering and Chatto 2005), edited with Kathleen Venema (U Winnipeg), provides a selection of Anglo-imperial women's letters demonstrating the involvement of white women in the construction of the empire's frontier as a matter of gendered embodiment; the second, Women and Empire (Routledge forthcoming 2008), offers a range of texts in which it is possible to see women producing an imperial discourse whose gendering is indicative both of the participation of women in the building of empire and of the extent to which imperialism is itself not a "male" terrain. New work takes up questions of race and class in the construction and representation of women's bodies in imperial space, focusing on erotic dance and strip culture in North America from the late nineteenth century to the present. Cecily has taught senior courses in imperial narrative and sexual anxiety, prairie women and the discourse of imperial expansionism, representation and feminist theory, and the long poem in Canada. She has supervised dissertations on women's popular writing in Canada, the representation of women in the accounts of the Whitechapel murders in the late nineteenth century, and "Scottishness" in Canadian popular fiction. She has published an edition of L.M. Montgomery's 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables (Broadview 2005). A study of English-Canadian women's writing from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries is underway (forthcoming U of Toronto P).