Use the tabs below to search the events catalouge and stay connected by checking out the latest happenings around the English Department, where a variety of thought-provoking and culturally enriching activities unfold throughout the academic year.
2026
The 2026 Spector Lecture will be given by Harvard Professor Robin Bernstein
29 January 2026, 6 pm
Redpath Museum Auditorium
859 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest
Montréal, QC H3A 2K6
Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who focuses on race and performance, mainly in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present. She is the author of Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, which she wrote with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Freeman’s Challenge won the Montaigne Medal and the PROSE Award for North American/US History; it also received the Nonfiction Honor for the Massachusetts Book Award. Bernstein’s previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards and was runner-up for two more. In 2021, she co-won the William Riley Parker Prize, given for the year’s outstanding article in PMLA. Her public-facing work has appeared in the New York Times, the Zinn Education Project, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inquest, and Teen Vogue. Bernstein teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.Ěý;
Bernstein's talk will be followed by a Q&A. This event is free and in person. Everyone is welcome.
Room capacity is limited. Please reserve your seat to ensure a spot!
This event is curated by Professor Camille Owens and co-sponsored by the Department of English and the 51łÔąĎÍřInstitute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.
MordecaiĚýRichler Writer-in-ResidenceĚý2025-2026
Ricardo Wilson
17 February 2026: Reading of new work by Ricardo Wilson - 5:30 pm
24 March 2026: Book Launch for Troubled Lands (Princeton UP, 2026) edited by Ricardo Wilson, 5pm
Locations TBA
Ricardo Wilson, a creative writer and scholar, is an associate professor of English at Williams College and the founder and executive director ofĚýThe Outpost Foundation, a residency and arts advocacy organization for writers of color from the United States and Latin America. He has, most recently, extracted from the archive and editedĚýTroubled Lands, a forthcoming and previously unpublished collection of short fiction from Mexico and Cuba translated by Langston Hughes in 1935 (Princeton University Press) and is the author ofĚýAn Apparent Horizon and Other StoriesĚý(PANK Books) andĚýThe Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of BlacknessĚý(Northwestern University Press).ĚýAn Apparent Horizon and Other StoriesĚýwas selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award.ĚýHis writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine,ĚýBlack Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo,ĚýThe Common, CR: The New Centennial Review,Ěýswamp pink, Northwest Review, The Offing, andĚýStirring. He is at work on his forthcoming novelĚýEven Worse than the Nightmare.
2025
2025 PhD Colloquium
Thursday 4 December 2025
McCall MacBain Arts Building,ĚýArts W-120
Presentation schedule
9:30 Riley Cook - Necropolitics and Disposable Populations in Two Victorian Novellas
10:00 Emily Magajna - A Politics of Haunting: Using Ghost Stories to Explore the Relationship Between Death and Disability
10:30 Ella Jando-Saul - From Conflict to Unity: The Role of Late Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints in Shaping Anglo-Norman Identity
11:00 Olivia Colpitts - Racialized Housing in Mid-Century British Literature: Floor Plans and the Architecture of Exclusion
11:30 Julie Wendel - Refugee Children and Allied Futures in Nevil Shute’s Pied Piper (1942)
1:00 Chloe Levman - Dolgin - From Tradwife to Tradewife: The Commodification of Housework on TikTok
1:30 Noah Bendzsa - Fredric Jameson’s Style of Reasoning
2:00 Mikaela Kassar - Resituating Chronology and Chronicity in Contemporary Illness Memoirs
2:30 Molly Pearce - Watershed Poetics: Gary Snyder and the Planet/Drum Bundles
3:00 Hannah Cheslock - Heretical Metatheatre: Redefining the Sacred in Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi
Black Legal Worldmaking in the 19th Century
A talk by Faith Barter
September 26, 2-4 pm
McCall MacBain Arts Building, Rm 160
853 rue Sherbrooke West
Faith Barter is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Black Studies at the University of Oregon. Her book, Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Culture (UNC 2025) argues that Black writers in the antebellum period mobilized legal forms in autobiography and fiction in understudied and innovative ways to reimagine their relationship to both time and place. Her writing on Black legal imagination, Black privacy, contemporary film, and Black feminist thought has appeared or is forthcoming in MELUS, African American Review, Meridians, Law, Culture & Humanities, and the European Journal of of English Studies, as well as in several edited collections and encyclopedias. A former lawyer, she is also a past participant at Penn State University's First Book Institute and the Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop.
Reynolds Atelier Lecture
Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York and co-curator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial
March 25, 2025, 6 - 8 pm
Moot Court, Faculty of Law, 51łÔąĎÍř
3644 Peel Street
(Please use the entrance near the Law Library, 3660 Peel, same driveway as 3644)
This event is curated by Ara Osterweil and co-sponsored by
the MusĂ©e d’art contemporain de MontrĂ©al, the Department of English, and the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at 51łÔąĎÍř.
2025 Faculty Colloquium: "Situation & Situatedness"
February 21, 2025, 10 am - 12:30 pm
3475 Peel Street, Rm. 101
Presenters:
- Ned Schantz
- Sandeep Banerjee
- Amber Rose Johnson
- Maggie Kilgour
- Amanda Greer
- Katie Zien
- Catherine Bradley
Co-organized by Professors Ara Osterweil & Carmen Faye Mathes.
Coffee and pastries will be served.
2025 Spector Lecture
"On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace" by Phanuel Antwi
February 18, 2025, 6 - 8 pm
Arts W-120, McCall McBain Arts Building
Ěý
Professor Antwi's talk, "On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace", stems from the research leading to his latest book On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace. Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of 'cuddly' toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.
Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.
Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, the book demonstrates clearly that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, which we should face with resistance and solidarity.
Phanuel Antwi holds the and is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He is also an artist, curator, and activist, working with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”
2024
“Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald” with Richler Writer-in-Residence Ann-Marie MacDonald and Dr. Neta Gordon (Brock University)
Wednesday, December 4, 5-7 PM
Redpath Museum Auditorium, 859 Sherbrooke West
Join the Department of English for an evening of literature, literary criticism, and digital humanities with our 2024-2025 Richler Writer-in-Residence, the renowned playwright, director and novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald and esteemed Canadian literature Professor Neta Gordon (Brock University).
In discussion with Ann-Marie MacDonald and Professor Erin Hurley, Professor Gordon will describe her student-centred, interdisciplinary project, "Mapping Ann-Marie MacDonald," and its frameworks of data feminism and consensus-driven literary analysis. It also explores the unique situation for faculty and students working on the project to be collaborating with the creative artist.
MacDonald’s writing for the stage includes the award-winning play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), as well as The Arab’s Mouth, Belle Moral: A Natural History, and Hamlet-911. She also authored the libretto for the chamber opera Nigredo Hotel, and book and lyrics for the musical Anything That Moves.
Neta Gordon is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University, and the author ofĚýCatching the Torch: Contemporary Canadian Literary Responses to World War IĚý(Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016) andĚýBearers of Risk: Writing Masculinity in Contemporary English-Canadian Short Story CyclesĚý(McGill-Queen's UP, 2022). Most recently, Professor Gordon has turned to research on Ann-Marie MacDonald, focusing on the author’s decades-long invitational approach to making space for marginalized voices.
Historical Fiction with Richler Writers-in-Residence Ann-Marie MacDonald & Heather O’Neill
Hosted by Ara Osterweil & Alexander Manshel
Wednesday, October 30, 5-8 pm
Faculty Club Ballroom, 3450 McTavish
Come join the Department of English for an evening devoted to historical fiction in literature. 2024 Richler Writers-in-Residence Ann-Marie MacDonald and Heather O’Neill will read from their recent novels, followed by a discussion about historical fiction with Professors Alexander Manshel and Ara Osterweil.
MacDonald’s writing for the stage includes the award-winning play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), as well as The Arab’s Mouth, Belle Moral: A Natural History, and Hamlet-911. She also authored the libretto for the chamber opera Nigredo Hotel, and book and lyrics for the musical Anything That Moves.
Heather O’Neill is the author of six books, including Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, and When We Lost Our Heads. She has been awarded the Canada Reads Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, The Writer's Trust Fellowship, and the Hugh Mclennan Prize for Fiction. Her fiction has been nominated for the Giller Prize twice and the Women's Prize for Fiction three times. She is also an award-winning essayist who has written for The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and The Walrus.
Camille Owens’s book launch – Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America
in conversation with Professor Amber Jamilla Musser (City University of New York)
Thursday, October 10, 5-7 pm
Thompson House, 3650 McTavish
Like Children (New York University Press, 2024) is a history of American childhood that rethinks black children’s excluded status, demonstrating instead white Americans’ possessive investment in black children's value and the violence of humanist inclusion.
ModPo Live Webcast
Hosted by Amber Rose Johnson
Thursday, September 26th at 6:30pm
Morrice Hall Theater, 3485 McTavish
ModPo is an open-online course with over 10,000 participants from around the world. Each year the ModPo crew travels to another country for one of their live webcasts. For this week, participants (including the audience, if you'd like!) will discuss poets from the rise of modernism – especially the likes of Gertrude Stein, amongst others. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join us.
No ticketing, just show up!
Faculty Colloquium:ĚýRevelations and Reminiscences
Friday, February 16, 09:00-11:30, 3475 Peel
The Department of English invites faculty and students to the 2024 Faculty Colloquium, "Revelations and Reminiscences." Presentations by faculty members will be followed by discussion. Coffee and pastries will be served.
Alexander Manshel, "High School English: A History of American Reading"
Carmen Faye Mathes, “Avoiding Groupwork”
Camille Owens, “The Second Photograph”
Myrna Selkirk, “Opening Up Creativity Through Clown and Mask”
Catherine Bradley, “Fleeting and Permanent”
Organized by Camille Owens & Ara Osterweil
Reading Group: Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes
Meeting Dates:
November 16, 2023, 16:00-18:00 PM, Leacock 738
January 17, 2024, 15:00-17:00 PM, English Graduate Lounge (Arts B-22)
February 2024, Location TBD
The Department of English invites graduate students and faculty to a reading group onĚýChristina Sharpe'sĚý, finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Discussion will be facilitated by Dr. Amber Rose Johnson, 51łÔąĎÍřThird Century Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
The group will meet three times leading up to Prof. Sharpe's Spector Lecture in March 2024. Please forward any questions to Professor Ara Osterweil [ara.osterweil [at] mcgill.ca].
Graduate Group: PRAXIS
Meeting Dates:
January 9, February 7, March 13, April 2
English Graduate Lounge (Arts B-22)
10:00-12:00
Taking place this winter 2024 semester, PRAXIS is a standing invitation to join fellow graduate students in the newly redesigned grad lounge every Wednesday from 10:00-12:00. There will be free coffee from Humble Lion provided, butĚýbring your own mug!ĚýThis open, drop-in style meeting time presents an opportunity for us to talk, share resources, and bring our research projects, ideas, and questions out of books and into the world.
2023
Event: PhD3 Colloqium
Wednesday,ĚýDecemberĚý6,Ěý2023Ěý
09:15-14:30
The PhD3 Colloquium 2023 will take place on Wednesday 6 December in Ferrier 408, beginning at 9:15 AM. All faculty, instructors, and graduate students in English are welcome to attend. Students in the PhD3 cohort will present their research-in-progress, stemming from their Compulsory Research Project, and there will be time for questions after each presentation.
Production: Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
November 22-24 and November 29-December 1, 2023
19:30
51łÔąĎÍř's Department of English Drama & Theatre Program Presents: Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in a new version by Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Doctor Teresa Stockman has discovered her town’s dirty little secret. But when she tries to tell the truth, she finds a much worse lie has poisoned her community to the core.
Book Launch:ĚýAlexander Manshel'sĚýWriting Backwards
Wednesday,ĚýNovemberĚý15,Ěý2023Ěý
18:00-20:00
Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Writing Backwards documents how the historical novel took over American literature, and how the push to recover lost or overlooked histories has affected writers of color most of all.Ěý
Join the author, Prof. Alexander Manshel, Assistant Professor of English at 51łÔąĎÍř, in conversation with Prof. Ara Osterweil.
Reading: In Conversation withĚýKasia Van Schaik & Padma Viswanatha
Thursday,ĚýOctoberĚý19,Ěý2023Ěý
17:30-19:00
The Department of English invites you to a joint reading with the Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated authors Kasia Van Schaik & Padma Viswanathan. The readings will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Professor Ara Osterweil. This event does not require registration.
