MA, Carleton, PhD, McMaster
Supervisory and research interests
I can supervise Ph.D theses in the following areas: autobiography and life writing; cultural studies and popular culture;, English Canadian literature and book history. The Ph.D students I have supervised or am currently supervising are working in these areas: cancer narratives by women, multiculturalism and reproduction, Asian Canadian writing, Utopian landscape in feminist Canadian writing, and Canadian women's political memoir.
I have supervised M.A. theses and have evaluated M.A. projects in the following areas: Gender Identification Discorder and queer theory, Gertrude Stein and autobiography, blogs as corporate learning tools, mountaineering writing and Gilles Deleuze, blogs as identity projects, feminism and Louise Erdrich, mountaineering literature and postcolonial theory, Oprah Winfrey as a public intellectual.
Courses taught
My undergraduate teaching focusses on popular culture, autobiography, theories of reading, critical theory (including gender and sexuality) and contemporary Canadian literature and cultural studies. In 2008 I taught courses about Celebrity, Reading and Interpretation, Gender and Sexuality and contemporary Canadian literature and culture.
The last three graduate courses I taught were English 567 Public Intellectuals and Institutions; English 693 Auto/biography in Canada and English 693 Memoir, Citizenship and Print Culture.
I have supervised Honors Tutorials and directed readings on the following topics: trauma theory, Jacques Derrida, Alice Munro, Walter Benjamin and the city, mountaineering writing, Canadian women's autobiography, women's autobiography, postcolonial Canadian literature, utopian literature, gender and mainstream radio.
Representative publications
Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. Finalist for the 2006 Raymond Klibansky Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities (English Language).
Editor, Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions . Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005.
Editor, with Jeremy Popkin. On Diary, by Philippe LeJeune. Translated by Katharine Durnin. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009.
“The Electric Self: Doing Virtual Research for Real in Second Life®.” Biography: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly special issue “Life Writing and Translations” eds. Miriam Fuchs and Cynthia Huff. 32.1 (Winter 2009): 148-160.
2008: “Canadian Idols: CBC Television and Imported National Biography.” Programming Reality: Perspectives on English-Canadian Television. Eds. Zoe Druick and Patsy Kotsopoulos. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 51-68.
Remarks
I work on all aspects of nonfiction in print and other media. I'm writing a book about memoir for American mass markets, and I have just finished work about memoir fraud and Canadian Literature as an institution. My next book will be about gender in mountaineering narratives. I'm also the Managing Editor of English Studies in Canada and was the first On-Site Chair (like President, but not as hierarchical) for the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS).
URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~jrak/research_interests.htm