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Our Research

Our faculty members are among the leading voices in their fields. Their ground-breaking research and creative works have taken many forms, including novels, works of literary criticism, edited anthologies, public lectures, documentary films, and poems. True to the spirit of interdisciplinary, creative, and politically engaged inquiry that has long been central to York University’s mission, these publications have earned plaudits from audiences around the world. Learn more about some of our recent publications by browsing the book covers below.

Featured Publication

Book cover of the "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction"

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end. 

Search our Publications

Book cover of

Lesley Higgins
2025

Confessing the Flesh is an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis of how aesthetic and religious discourses function in dialogue in the work of ...

Book cover of the

Jean-Thomas Tremblay
2024

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a ...

Mysteria book cover.

B.W. Powe
2024

B.W. Powe’s Mysteria fuses graphic poetry, prose, and visual art to explore memory, identity, and shifting realities. Through lyrical prose, evocative ...

Blue geometric shapes on blue background.

Kenzie Allen
2024

Intimate, dissecting, and liberating, Cloud Missives is a poetry collection of excavation and renewal. Like an anthropologist entering a dig site and ...

Book cover of

Deanne Williams
2023

Deanne Williams offers the very first study of the medieval and early modern girl actor. Whereas previous histories of the ...

Book cover for Rosella, or Modern Occurrences

Natalie Neill
2023

Mary Charlton's 1799 Rosella, or Modern Occurrences is a fascinating novel that brokers between conservative and feminist ideas, humour and horror, and ...

Book cover of Ladders Made of Water

B.W. Powe
2023

You’ll find included in this collection a selection of public presentations and thoughts on our spiritual and ecological crises, including ...

Book cover of

Jean-Thomas Tremblay
2022

In Breathing Aesthetics, Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked ...

Gothic Mash-Up book cover

Natalie Neill
2022

Gothic Mash-Ups explores the role of intertextuality in Gothic storytelling through the analysis of texts from diverse periods and media. Drawing ...

A stack of books with tile: Reading Mennonite Writing

Robert Zacharias
2022

Mennonite literature has long been viewed as an expression of community identity. However, scholars in Mennonite literary studies have urged ...

Book cover of 'The Politics of Vibration' by Marcus Boon

Marcus Boon
2022

In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary ...

Bookcover with rainbow background and black text reads: The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader

Jonathan Warren, Alison Halsall
2022

New book attends to global scope of LGBTQ+ comics criticism. York University Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) ...

Collage of maps with black title:

Lesley Higgins, Marie-Christine Leps
2022

After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the ...

Black and white photo of human skull

Brett Zimmerman
2021

Locating Poe firmly within his Zeitgeist vis-à-vis the science and pseudoscience of the early nineteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe as ...

Tina Young Choi
2021

Contingency is not just a feature of modern politics, finance, and culture—by thinking contingently, nineteenth-century Britons rewrote familiar narratives and ...

Lily Cho
2021

Under the terms of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, Canada implemented a vast protocol for acquiring detailed personal information ...