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research &
teaching |
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A cultural historian by training, I am a faculty member
in the Graduate
Program in Humanities at York
University and an associate librarian
in the Scott Research and Collections Department. In the latter role I am responsible
for collection development in humanities, classical studies, and religious
studies. I am also Secretary-Treasurer of the
Canadian Association for the Study of Book
Culture and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the
Bibliographical
Society of Canada. Both groups meet annually at
the
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
My current research interests lie mostly at the intersections of religion
and print culture. I am also interested in the expression of religious values
and themes in literature.
Although these two agendas are quite distinct in focus and method,
most of my published work is marked by a common
preoccupation with religion and the
nature of things: the human soul as a
thing; literary representations of being and
goodness; and, more recently, the relationship between religion and material culture.
At the moment, I have several research projects underway. Using
Pierre Bourdieu's theories of cultural
production as a jumping off point, I am working on a
monograph that considers the role books and periodicals played as
material status objects in the formation of North American
religious identity throughout the early nineteenth
century. I am also working on several smaller projects that
center around John Wesley's activities as an eighteenth-century
publisher. In addition, I recently completed
a research fellowship at the
American Antiquarian Society where I explored how early Upper Canadian
Sunday school libraries functioned not only as sites for the routine promotion of basic literacy skills and
religious sectarianism, but also how they evolved into vibrant transnational spaces with the
potential to inculcate subversive ideas about the colony's political structures.
I will present some of the results of this research at the annual meeting of
the
Canadian Society of Church History
in Victoria, BC this spring.
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favourite
quotations |
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The distant baying of a hound, calling
to faraway, friendly, and familiar
places, provides the most beautiful
proof of the immortality of the soul. |
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Søren
Kierkegaard |
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Improvement makes us straight roads;
but the crooked roads, without improvement,
are roads of Genius. |
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William Blake |
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Civilization depends upon the vigorous
pursuit of the highest values by people
who are intelligent enough to know that
their values are qualified by their
interests and corrupted by their
prejudices. |
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Reinhold
Niebuhr |
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The very outside of a book has a charm
to me. It is a kind of sacrament - an
outward and visible sign of an inward
and spiritual grace; as, indeed, what on
God's earth is not? |
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George MacDonald |
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No place affords a more striking
conviction of the vanity of human hopes
than a public library. |
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Samuel
Johnson |
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Offices of the Methodist Book and
Publishing House at 78 King St. East in
Toronto (circa 1838).
Image from Centennial of Canadian
Methodism (1891). |
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selected
publications |
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Production and Distribution of
Popular Editions of the Bible from 1750.
New Cambridge History of the
Bible Volume IV: Modernity, Colonialism, and Their
Successors. Edited by John Riches. With
Leslie Howsam.
Forthcoming. |
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Brandishing Their Grey Goose Quills: The Struggle to Publish an Official Life of John Wesley, 1791-1805.
Book History.
Forthcoming. |
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Before the Christian Guardian: American
Methodist Periodicals in the Upper Canadian Backwoods, 1818-1829.
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada. 49.2
(2011): 143-165.
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European Bible Societies.
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. Area editor
James Deming. Vol. 3. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 1086-1088. |
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Saving the Monsters? Images of Redemption in the
Gothic Tales of George MacDonald.
Christianity and Literature.
55.2 (2006): 245-269.* |
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Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in
the Novels of Charles Williams.
Mythlore. 93/94 24.3/4 (2006): 5-29. |
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The Evolution of Joss Whedon's Vampire Mythology
and the Ontology of the Soul.
Slayage:
The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. 18 5.2 (2005): 29 pars. [Link] |
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A Problem of Morality: Sacramentalism in the
Early Novels of Charles Williams.
Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature.
56.2 (2004): 109-127. |
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* Recipient of the
Lionel Basney Award |
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recent
papers |
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"The Making of a Saint: Battling biographers and the
struggle to construct an official life of John Wesley, 1791-1805." Paper
presented at the
annual conference of the
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing,
Dublin, Ireland, July 2012. |
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"Rekindling the Canada Fire: Print culture and the
reconstruction of Upper Canadian Methodism after the War of 1812." Paper
presented at the annual conferences of the
Canadian
Historical Association and the
Canadian Society of Church History,
Waterloo, Ontario, June 2012. |
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"All
The World As My Parish: Transatlantic Methodism and the Origin
of Denominational Publishing in America, 1776-1812." Paper
presented at the annual conference of the
Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture,
Fredericton, New Brunswick, June 2011. |
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"Methodist Periodicals and the Construction of Transnational
Religious Identities in North America, 1818-1833." Paper
presented at a joint session of the annual conferences of the
Bibliographical Society of Canada and the
Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture,
Montreal, Quebec, May 2010. |
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professional
associations |
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links &
sundry |
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[The
Journals of Nathan Bangs 1805-1806, 1817]
[AS/WRIT2300
Course Website (11/12)]
[History
of the Book in Canada Project]
[Images of Early
Canadian Methodism]
[The
Reading Experience Database 1450-1945]
[A
Charles Williams Bibliography]
[Analytical
Index to Image of the City and Other Essays] |
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