Dr. Stephen Ahern
Position: Associate Professor and Coordinator, Writing Centre, B.A. (Queen's), M.A. (Carleton), Ph.D. (McGill)
Office: Beveridge Arts Centre 417
Phone: (902) 585-1517
E-Mail: stephen.ahern@acadiau.ca
Web: www.acadiau.ca/~sahern
Research Interests: British literature of the long eighteenth century; history and theory of the novel; writing across the curriculum.
Stephen Ahern teaches Restoration and eighteenth-century literature; nineteenth-century literature; introduction to literature; and composition for second language students.
Professor Ahern's research focuses on British literature from the Restoration to the early nineteenth century. Recently appeared with AMS Press is his book Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel 1680-1810. He has also published articles on Behn's fiction and on Tennyson's verse, and contributed a chapter on the translation of early French novels to the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. His essay investigating "The Sex of Spleen and the Body of Sensibility in Early Romantic Lyric" appears in the collection The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions, and the essay cluster he edited on the topic "Diagnosing Romanticism" featured in a recent issue of English Studies in Canada. Professor Ahern's new book project is The Bonds of Sentiment: Affect and Abolitionism in the AngloAtlantic Enlightenment, a study that investigates how the politics of feeling shaped attitudes toward slavery at the turn of the nineteenth century.
As Coordinator of the Writing Centre, Professor Ahern is also engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning. He has completed a multidisciplinary project with colleagues in Psychology and History to study the academic achievement and well-being of international students whose first language is not English.
As Associate Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnocultural Diversity (ACSED), Professor Ahern is also working to foster interdisciplinary research on the Acadia campus. He was lead organizer of an International Workshop on migration issues hosted by ACSED in October 2010. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this event brought together scholars from 7 countries to discuss the pressing need for comparative perspectives on both external and internal migration of populations.