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Dr Will Smith

Formerly at Lancaster University

Will Smith

Current Teaching

ENGL204 - American Literature to 1900
ENGL304 - American Literature from 1900

Career Details

Recent Publications

“‘You might understand Toronto’: Tracing the Histories of Writing on Toronto Writing,” British Journal of Canadian Studies (forthcoming 2016).

“‘First and foremost a writer of fiction’: Revisiting two Toronto novels, Hopkins Moorhouse’s Every Man For Himself and Peter Donovan’s Late Spring,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 28.2 (2015): 167-186.

“Reading for a civic public poetic: Toronto in Raymond Souster’s “Ten Elephants on Yonge Street” and Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies.” Public Poetics. Ed. Travis Mason, Bart Vatour, Erin Wunker, and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. 139-158.

“Cree, Canadian and American: Negotiating sovereignties with Jeff Lemire’s Equinox and the ‘Justice League of Canada’ (2014),” Luminary 6 (2015). <http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminary/issue6/issue6article2.htm>. 

"David Bezmozgis." Critical Survey of Short Fiction. 4th ed. Ed. Charles E. May. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012.

"Curating Toronto." Rev. of City of Words, ed. by Sarah Elton and Witness to a City by David Miller and Douglas Arrowsmith. Matrix 88 (2011): 57-58.

"Fluid Translations: Counter Torontos in David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For." Canada Exposed/Le Canada À Découvert. Eds. Pierre Anctil, André Loiselle and Christopher Rolfe. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009. 243-52.

"A Place to Meat? Victory Meat: What and Where Is New Fiction from Atlantic Canada?" Dynamics of Canada/Dynamiques Du Canada. Eds. Keith Battarbee and Melanie Buchart. Brno, Czech Republic: European Network for Canadian Studies and Masaryk University, 2009. 227-37.

Rev. of The Beautiful Children by Michael Kenyon. The Malahat Review 168 (2009): 109-12.

Academic Monograph

Torontos: Toronto in Contemporary Literature currently in preparation.

Recent Conference Presentations

“Critical and Creative Meetings: A Case Study in Knowledge Exchange and Canadian Literature.” Making Sense of Can Lit. University of Leeds. 7th September, 2015.

“‘I don't want to be a great Toronto artist’: Power and the Provincial in Toronto's Literary Pasts” Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference 2015. Ryerson University, Toronto. 30th April-5th May, 2015.

“Mead Demon: The Complex Environments of Francis Pollock’s 1930s novels, Bitter Honey (1935) and Jupiter Eight (1936).” Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada (ALECC) Conference 2014. Lakehead University, Thunder Bay. 6-10th August, 2014.

"Natural Toronto: confronting the urban wild in Karen Solie’s Pigeon." Shifting Territories: Modern and Contemporary Poetics of Place. Institute of English Studies, London. 22nd May, 2013.

"Massing literary credit: How do the reviews of Isabelle Hughes shape a middlebrow response to Canadian literary modernism?" 38th Annual Conference of British Association for Canadian Studies. British Library, London. 3rd April, 2013.

"Poetry is Public is Poetry: Toronto, Civil Space and Public Poetics in the work of Raymond Souster and Dennis Lee." Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics. Mount Allison University, Sackville NB. 21 September 2012.

"Natural Toronto: the environment of human-animal relations in Alissa York’s Fauna." 37th Annual Conference of British Association for Canadian Studies. Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. 2nd April, 2012.

 

Research Interests

I'm interested in transdisciplinary work which embraces cultural geography, spatial theory and literary criticism. I have a particular interest in the overlap of urban theory and located literary cultures. 

Profile

Will Smith gained a BA (Jt. Hnrs w/Int Study) in English and American Studies from the University of Nottingham, spending a year at the University of Toronto. His undergraduate dissertation, "Avant-Garde Canadian Comics: Seth and Chester Brown," was researched in Canada. He wrote an MRes thesis on Atlantic-Canadian Literature at the University of Nottingham where he also completed his doctorate. He has previously taught at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham.

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