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 Fellow:
Nathan TeBokkel
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in 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/
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"
