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research &
teaching |
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A cultural historian by training, I am
responsible for collection development in
humanities, classical studies, and religious
studies at
York
University. I also hold a
Faculty of
Graduate Studies appointment to the
Graduate
Program in Humanities and teach regularly through the
Writing
Department in the
Faculty of
Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. I am
currently serving a three-year term as Secretary-Treasurer of the
Canadian Association for the Study of Book
Culture. The Association meets annually at
the
Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Cultural studies is a vague field.
As
Peter Burke notes, cultural historians have
extended their reach in almost every direction:
upwards to consider the cultural practices of
social and intellectual elites, downwards to
include low and popular culture, and sideways to
embrace topics such as corporate culture,
science culture, and so on. More recently, the
field has been further broadened to incorporate
the study of material objects and the
cultural significance they acquire through representation and use.
Much of my current research falls into this last
category. With reference to
Pierre Bourdieu's theories of cultural
production, I am particularly interested in the
role books played as religious status objects in
the formation of North American denominational
identity throughout the nineteenth century. I am
also interested in how these forces of cultural
production are affected when the objects of
their consecrating rhetoric cross borders and
enter new markets and new geopolitical contexts.
I have also published articles on Victorian
Gothic fiction, vampires in popular culture, and
philosophical theology in the works of Charles
Williams.
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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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There is an enormous mass of labour
which is just merely wasted; many
thousands of men and women making
nothing with terrible and inhuman toil
which deadens the soul and shortens mere
animal life itself. |
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William Morris |
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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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scholarly
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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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
to be 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
to be presented at the annual conference of the
Canadian
Historical Association,
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]
[International
Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book
and Libraries]
[The
Reading Experience Database 1450-1945]
[A
Charles Williams Bibliography]
[Analytical
Index to Image of the City and Other Essays] |
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