Postdoctoral Fellows
The Department of English has been fortunate to host postdoctoral fellows conducting research in a number of fields. We encourage potential applicants to contact the Chair of the department, as well as faculty working in areas in which they intend to pursue their postdoctoral work. The Department provides support (office space, library facilities) for fellows and makes every effort to include them in all aspects of the department’s life.
Current Postdoctoral Fellows:
Nathan TeBokkel
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, English, 2025-2027
PhD, University of British Columbia; Vanier Scholar; Killam Fellow
Project: Working Feeling: Affect, Agriculture, Romanticism
Supervisor: Dr Joel Faflak
Ecological and economic crises are deeply felt by farmworkers and beekeepers, with one-third of crops dependent on precarious honeybees and half the world’s farmworkers living in poverty. TeBokkel approaches his research through lived experience and literary history. He studies agricultural capitalism, the impact of its alienation and the resistance from farmworkers as well as Romantic poets. He hopes to use his research for sustainable community-building and public education, including two proposals for de-alienating experience: a hands-on educational agriculture tour and a beekeeping mentorship network, developed at Western as models for broader socioecological change.
https://www.nathantebokkel.com/
Andrew Sargent
Western Postdoctoral Fellow, English, 2025-2027
Project: Post-Romantic Wastelands: Early Victorian Poetry and the Survival of Romantic Citation
Supervisor: Dr Joel Faflak
This project re-examines how we understand Victorian literature and its relationship to Romantic poetry. I contend that Victorian literature both inflects and denies what I call “Romantic citation”: not simply the quotation of or allusion to the past but an urgent response to history. Figuring time and temporality as disastrous, Romantic citation addresses the future as burdened by the acceleration of present and past catastrophes: geological upheavals, species extinctions, political revolution, and intensifying warfare. Parallel to our era of climate change pre-determined by a catastrophic history of resource consumption, Romantic writers cite the past as having already unfolded the future’s depletion. For the first time they capture the experience of confronting the present and future as disasters that have already occurred. Critics centre the Victorian period around the novel as distinct from an outmoded Romantic poetry. But the early poetry of Victorian authors Matthew Arnold, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Lord Tennyson repeats rather than breaks from Romantic poetry, especially its concern with a sense of catastrophe repressed in the Victorian novel’s optimism about the future. Their hyper-citation of Romantic poetry comes to a head between the end of Romanticism (c. 1830) and the consolidation of Victorianism in Arnold’s 1853 “Preface” -- an inter-period ignored entirely by literary criticism. My project thus theorizes for the first time this ghost period’s neglected legacy by tracing how Romantic citation at once haunts and transforms early Victorian poetry. This crucial but unstudied moment in history coheres by refiguring Victorian notions of progress as the tipping points of a receding future we now inhabit.
Andrew’s dissertation, supervised by Dr. Tilottama Rajan with Dr. Joel Faflak serving as Second Reader, was funded through a Joseph Armand Bombardier SSHRC Scholarship. He received the McIntosh Prize in 2021 and successfully defended his dissertation in 2024.
His first book, based on his dissertation, is currently under revision with the University of Toronto Press.
Recent Fellows:
Erin Julian, "Rape under erasure in early/modern Shakespeare" (2016-2018)
Karen Bourrier, "Nineteenth-Century Disability: A Digital Reader" (2011-2013)
Michelle Faubert, "Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychiatrists" (2003-2004; now Associate Professor, Department of English, Film, and Theatre, University of Manitoba)
Jason Haslam, "Penned America: The Prison in America Fiction, 1840-1917" (2004-2005; 2004 Polanyi Prize winner; now Associate Professor, Dalhousie University)
Charn Jagpal, "Twist and Shout: Dances of Hybridity in South Asian Women’s Diasporic Fiction" (2012-14)
Mark McCutcheon, "The Medium is the Monster: Canadian Frankensteins, Global Articulations." (2008-2009; now Assistant Professor, Department of English, Athabasca University)
Jonathan Murphy, "Pro Aeris et Focis: Transfigurations of Finitude in 19th-Century American Fiction" (2010-11; now Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities, Texas A & M International University)
Wendy Pearson, "Performing Alter/Natives: Performativity and Identity in the indigenous Arts in Canada and Australia" (2004-2006; now Assistant Professor, Women's Studies and Feminist Research, Western)
Grace Pollock, "Engendering Celebrity: Idolatrous Economies in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (2006-2008; currently co-director of The Public Intellectuals Project at McMaster University)
Nicole Schukin, "Animal Signs: Languages, Literature and Theory" (2005-2006; now Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Victoria)
Emma Wilson (Commonwealth Scholar), "’How how, chopt-logic?’: Comparing How the Literary Styles of Milton and Shakespeare Work Using Renaissance Logical and Rhetorical Methods"
