May 2025

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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.”

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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!!