2025

by Sattler, Christine

Professor Stephen Ahern speaks at the University of Cambridge, UK

While on sabbatical leave Professor Ahern was invited to present to faculty and graduate students in the 18th Century and Romantics Research Seminar. He spoke on his current research, and then led a discussion on the usefulness of drawing on current affect theory to elucidate older literary texts. His talk was titled “On Affect’s Effects: Interpretation, Critique, and the Transports of Eighteenth-Century Literature.”

Read more …

by Sattler, Christine

Two awards for Nick Lundrigan

Nick Lundrigan (second from right) at CFUW presentation

Third-year English (WGST double major) student Nick Lundrigan has been awarded the Honor Essay for the Children’s Literature Association’s Carol Gay Award. The judges commented that they were impressed by how Nick’s essay “Jerry of Green Gables: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Acadians in Anne with an E’s Avonlea” “provides a fresh perspective on Anne of Green Gables/Anne with an E through its analysis of an overlooked character.” Nick has been invited to present the paper at the June 2025 ChLA conference, an international conference which will be online this year. Nick also presented this paper at the recent Annual Atlantic Undergraduate English Conference at UNB.

Additionally, Nick was awarded the Canadian Federation of University Women Award for their paper, "Alice is a Friend of Dorothy: Queer Allegory in Wonderland and Oz" which the judges assessed as “a superb example of a comparative literary analysis, in this case between the work of Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum, exploring the use of queer language in these classic stories” and presented it to the Wolfville Chapter of the CFUW on 17 April. Congratulations to Nick!!

Read more …

by Sattler, Christine

Acadia Conference on Scholarship in Humanities May 1-3

Acadia is hosting the "Research Creation, Community Engagement, and Open Social Scholarship" conference from May 1-3 at the Wu Welcome Centre. Supported by the INKE SSHRC partnership, Acadia's English and Theatre Department, and Acadia RIGS, this conference explores new methods of public facing, creative, and accessible scholarship in the humanities.

https://inke.ca/research-creation-community-engagement-and-open-social-scholarship/

Read more …

by Sattler, Christine

Congratulations to Margaret Finlay

Congratulations to Margaret Finlay on the publication of her first article!  Margaret pursued a first-class Honours English degree at Acadia before going on to the University of York (UK) for a Master’s in Medieval Studies; Margaret is now questing after a medieval literature PhD at the University of Groningen. Her article, ‘“A noble knyght and a myghty man”: Gareth as Disruptive Presence and Absence in Malory’s Morte Darthur’, is a revised version of her 2023 Tolhurst Lecture, a plenary lecture delivered by an early career scholar at the St. Louis Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies; it appears in Arthuriana, vol. 34, no. 4, and is a compelling reassessment of Gareth’s thematic centrality to Malory’s Morte and (contrary to a good many leading scholars) the ways in which Malory’s presentation of the character of Gareth bespeaks his artistry and originality.

Read more …

by Sattler, Christine

English Students at AAUEC

Six Acadia English students were selected to present their research or creative writing at the Annual Atlantic Undergraduate English Conference at UNB Fredericton on 14-16 March. Nico Hernando, Nick Lundrigan, Alexa Wilcox, Sophie Ashton, Chyler Webb, and Vivien Kelly did a fantastic job of representing the stellar undergraduate work being undertaken at Acadia. They also won the trivia competition as the Acadia A+ Team! The faculty organizer was new professor Tom Laughlin. Professor Laura Robinson also gave the academic keynote that opened the conference, so Acadia English was well represented.

Read more …