Research Classification
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Research Options
Recruitment
Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
Check requirements
- Familiarize yourself with program requirements. You want to learn as much as possible from the information available to you before you reach out to a faculty member. Be sure to visit the graduate degree program listing and program-specific websites.
- Check whether the program requires you to seek commitment from a supervisor prior to submitting an application. For some programs this is an essential step while others match successful applicants with faculty members within the first year of study. This is either indicated in the program profile under "Admission Information & Requirements" - "Prepare Application" - "Supervision" or on the program website.
Focus your search
- Identify specific faculty members who are conducting research in your specific area of interest.
- Establish that your research interests align with the faculty member’s research interests.
- Read up on the faculty members in the program and the research being conducted in the department.
- Familiarize yourself with their work, read their recent publications and past theses/dissertations that they supervised. Be certain that their research is indeed what you are hoping to study.
Make a good impression
- Compose an error-free and grammatically correct email addressed to your specifically targeted faculty member, and remember to use their correct titles.
- Do not send non-specific, mass emails to everyone in the department hoping for a match.
- Address the faculty members by name. Your contact should be genuine rather than generic.
- Include a brief outline of your academic background, why you are interested in working with the faculty member, and what experience you could bring to the department. The supervision enquiry form guides you with targeted questions. Ensure to craft compelling answers to these questions.
- Highlight your achievements and why you are a top student. Faculty members receive dozens of requests from prospective students and you may have less than 30 seconds to pique someone’s interest.
- Demonstrate that you are familiar with their research:
- Convey the specific ways you are a good fit for the program.
- Convey the specific ways the program/lab/faculty member is a good fit for the research you are interested in/already conducting.
- Be enthusiastic, but don’t overdo it.
Attend an information session
G+PS regularly provides virtual sessions that focus on admission requirements and procedures and tips how to improve your application.
ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM UBC FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across UBC on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Imagined pilgrimage in late medieval England (2024)
This dissertation explores the important but understudied medieval practice of imagined pilgrimage and four Middle English texts purportedly written by pilgrims who underwent physical journeys of their own. Recent historical and literary scholarship has helped to uncover how English monastic audiences engaged in imagined pilgrimage, which is the act of going on a holy journey in spirit rather than in body. However, to date, less work has been done to explore how secular English audiences turned to texts to undertake non-physical journeys. The focal point of medieval Christian pilgrimage, Jerusalem was largely out of reach for many medieval English men and women due to a variety of personal, political, and economic reasons. Imagined pilgrimage texts such as the ones discussed in this study fulfilled a need in readers for an alternative means to attain the same spiritual benefits that physical pilgrimage offered its participants. This dissertation explores four Middle English texts written in late medieval England: Sir John Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels (14th century), William Wey’s Itineraries (15th century), Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe (15th century), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (14th century). I discuss the history of pilgrimage writing and the complex monastic and secular debates surrounding the shifting benefits, dangers, and definitions of physical and imagined holy travel, as well as the important role that the inclusion of practical information played in these four imaginative pilgrimage texts. In our world of increasing virtuality, where individuals are living their lives more and more online, rather than out in the “real world,” people are choosing to turn to a related practice—virtual pilgrimage—in order to fulfill their desires for pilgrimage; in doing so, they are continuing a practice that, as this dissertation will show, thrived in the late medieval world.
View record
The nature of allegory : spatial tropes in medieval and early modern allegorical narratives (2023)
This dissertation offers an analysis of spatial tropes, amounting to an explication of geographic symbolism in allegorical narratives. In the past, the genre-defining trope of allegory has overwhelmingly been personification, which involves metaphors of psychic interiority or abstraction made into characters. However, topographical metaphors are at least as frequent and arguably as prominent in these stories. If allegory is best defined as extended metaphor, the key trope of these stories involves spatial extension for the metaphor of the way or the road in these narratives, with their various sites of instruction and conflict. This work of research proposes and analyzes seven morphogenetic topologies in allegorical narratives: 1) the use of abstract labels for places, 2) distribution of the fragments of a self throughout a series of places indicating psychic inflection in landscape, 3) references to the “book of nature” in tandem with narrative moments or digressions for the application of hermeneutical methods to topographical structures, 4) indexical symmetries or contraventions of normal spatial scale (mimesis), 5) the tying of abstract topic to differentiated topography, 6) the embodiment in space of significative temporalities, 7) and spatial disorientation vis-à-vis gestures toward a sub specie aeternitatis. The basis for these tropes can be found in habits of mind developed in allegorical interpretations of epics and the Bible, cosmological encyclopedias and medieval works of De Natura Rerum, as well as arts of memory. This dissertation also aims to show that although allegorical works constantly subvert “realism”, they still reveal intense interest in “local”, “literal”, and “historical” concerns of a topographical or architectural nature. A majority of the analysis of this dissertation is done in primary consideration of several key authors (William Langland, Stephen Hawes, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyan), whose works represent different instantiations of allegory in the Late Medieval and Early Modern eras.
View record
A co(s)mic guide to getting bent: shifting perspectives between science and literature in twentieth-century England (2021)
This dissertation uses the comics form as a theoretical and formal intervention to explore a shift in perspective unfolding between science and literature in early twentieth-century Britain. Each comic chapter visually and narratively explores a shared investment in moving beyond singular, geocentric, and anthropocentric frames of reference in the works of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Olaf Stapledon, and Virginia Woolf. Eddington maintained that standpoint matters in the contemplation of the world, signalling a shift away from a Newtonian cosmology, which held that space and time exist independently of any perceiver, toward an Einsteinian one, where length, time, and mass differ depending on the frame of reference. A more robust vision—Eddington contended—is obtainable by combining multiple viewpoints, an idea which Jeans, Stapledon, and Woolf also explore in their writings. Chapter 1 presents two exercises of perspective to reveal how Eddington and Jeans require readers to move beyond geocentric, anthropocentric, and singular viewpoints in their science popularizations. I investigate the tension between their approaches, where Jeans struggles to embrace a multiplicity that Eddington foregrounds in his explications. Chapter 2 explores how Stapledon’s "Star Maker" illustrates a radical performance of multiplicity and a re-inscription of the singular perspective that relativity supplanted. Chapter 3 asks readers to construct a three-dimensional model of Woolf’s "The Waves" in order to participate in four interactive exercises of perspective, each differently demonstrating how Woolf articulates a shift beyond singular and anthropocentric viewpoints by modelling the entanglement among humans and nonhumans. Chapter 4 moves the discursive frame beyond the human by unleashing two dogs whose lives separately intersected Woolf’s and Stapledon’s lived experience. In doing so, I juxtapose Woolf’s "Flush" and Stapledon’s "Sirius" to reveal how both authors’ depictions of a dog’s-nose view of the world and interspecies love blur familiar human/nonhuman boundaries and contest human presuppositions of ‘a priori’ separations between dog and nondog. Crucially, this comics dissertation creates a site of co-operative meaning making, not only through the interacting of historical fact and fictional speculation, but also with the reader’s own perspective being a part of—not apart from—the multiplying perspectives at play.
View record
Game on: medieval players and their texts (2017)
This dissertation addresses the social significance of parlour games as forms of cultural expression in medieval and early modern England and France by exploring how the convergence of textual materialities, players, and narratives manifested in interactive texts, board games, and playing cards. Medieval games, I argue, do not always fit neatly into traditional or modern theoretical game models, and modern blanket definitions of ‘game’—often stemming from the study of digital games—provide an anachronistic understanding of how medieval people imagined their games and game-worlds. Chapter 1 explores what the idea of ‘game’ meant for medieval authors, readers, and players in what I call ‘game-texts’—literary texts that blurred the modern boundaries between what we would consider ‘game’ and ‘literature’ and whose mechanics are often thought to be outside the definition of ‘game.’ Chapter 2 examines how recreational mathematics puzzles and chess problems penned in manuscript collections operate as sites of pleasure, edification, and meditative playspaces in different social contexts from the gentry households to clerical cloisters. The mechanics, layout, narrative, and compilation of chess problems rendered them useful for learning the art and skill of the game in England. Chapter 3 traces the circulation, manuscript contexts, and afterlives of two game-text genres in England—the demandes d’amour and the fortune-telling string games—in order to understand how they functioned as places of engagement and entertainment for poets, scribes, and players. Chapter 4 illustrates how narrative and geography became driving forces for the development and rise of the modern thematic game in Early Modern Europe. This chapter charts how changing ideas of spatiality enabled tabletop games to shift from abstract structures enjoyed by players in the Middle Ages, in which game narratives take place off a board, to ludic objects that incorporated real-life elements in their design of fictional worlds—thereby fashioning spaces that could visually accommodate narrative on the board itself.This dissertation places games into a more nuanced historical and cultural context, showing not only the varied methods by which medieval players enjoyed games but also how these ideas developed and changed over time.
View record
Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
There and back again: fortune and possibility in medieval romance and Dungeons and Dragons (2025)
This thesis explores alternative readings of fortune in medieval romance through examining the role of chance in the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Using game studies, medieval, and medievalism scholars, I highlight these mediums’ key similarities, including: relational creation and transmission, nearly limitless possibilities, and the hopeful message that individuals can achieve a happy ending. As D&D and romance have a similar format, content, and function, examining the living tradition of TTRPGs can provide new insight into the medieval medium. I argue that chance, limitations, and the possibility of failure underlies and structures D&D’s hopeful nature, allowing the stories it generates to reassure its audiences that they can also seize their own happy ending both despite and because of the reality that they cannot completely determine their fate. When applied to romance, this reading of fortune allows for an optimistic interpretation that differs from Boethius’ fickle Fortune in The Consolation of Philosophy, the primary medieval authority on fortune. Studying actual plays, TTRPG web shows broadcast for an audience, alongside romance manuscripts provides concrete examples of how these parallel storytelling traditions work. I examine the participants’ strategic rule modification while respecting chance in Exandria Unlimited: Calamity to argue for a secularization of Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, a joyous turn that depends on the possibility of failure, that emphasizes the limitations underlying D&D’s optimism. I then turn to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale to examine how the dual narrators draw attention to the limitations of philosophical consolation and how both Boethius’s imprisonment and the Knight’s conservatism affect their views of Fortune. The text’s failure to endorse faith in God or nobility points to romance itself as fulfilling this emotionally consoling role. Finally, I highlight the optimistic workings of chance in Sir Orfeo, arguing that Orfeo’s limitations are central to his successful rescue of Heurodis in another secular eucatastrophe. Orfeo’s incorporation of disorder and limitations signals the waning relevance of religion and the monarchy in the late medieval period, which, along with the audience’s embodied response to the narrative, assures the audience that they too can seize an ultimately happy ending.
View record
An island nation : saltwater, freshwater, and imperial identity in late medieval insular romance (2023)
Extensive scholarly work has been completed investigating the place of the sea in Middle English literature, as well as the place of fens and meres in Old English works. This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in scholarship, turning to inland waters in Middle English Romance, as well as a few texts from adjacent literary cultures. Building on scholarship from the fields of medieval ecocriticism, the blue humanities, cultural identity studies, and Celtic studies, this work investigates the interactions between water in Middle English texts and English imperial identity. Interacting specifically with Sebastian Sobecki’s work on the sea in Middle English literature, the first chapter reconsiders interactions between the sea and the king in King Horn and Havelok the Dane, concluding that the sea, once it has proved the king worthy, works in service of the state. This is also true in Sir Gawain and the Turke and Fouke le Fitz Waryn, though in these texts the ecotonic spaces of islands serve as a refuge for elements which threaten the stability of the English state. The second chapter turns to inland waters such as bogs, marshes, and mists, discovering that in many Middle English texts they act against the state, creating space for the imagined other to resist assimilation. This study represents a preliminary investigation of the ecotonic spaces and inland waters of Middle English romance. Further work will consider a larger corpus of texts and bring in material from other literary cultures of the North Sea.
View record
The once and future fairie king : reading Sir Orfeo as a political allegory (2023)
In this thesis I analyze the depiction of fairies in Sir Orfeo, an anonymously composed Middle English Breton lay. In previous scholarly analyses of Sir Orfeo, the wider historical context of the lay’s composition is rarely treated as a source of interpretive insight. This failure to consider the relationship between text and context represents a gap in current scholarship on the lay. My thesis addresses this gap, pairing a close reading of Sir Orfeo’s narrative, with a careful examination of the lay’s historical circumstances. My close reading focuses on the lay’s unique representation of fairies, and their function within the narrative as hostile, politically destabilizing figures engaged in conflict with Orfeo, an English king. While this conflict seems to revolve around the fairies’ abduction of Orfeo’s wife, Queen Heurodis, I argue that human-fairie conflict is, in fact, the result of spatial transgressions that constitute infringements on sovereignty. I then highlight and analyze numerous parallels between the human-fairie conflict depicted in Sir Orfeo, and the drawn-out geopolitical conflict between medieval England and Wales. Anglo-Welsh conflict was a result of English efforts to conquer and colonize Wales, with English claims to dominion over Wales being met with Welsh counter-assertions of sovereignty. I demonstrate that this real-world conflict constitutes part of Sir Orfeo’s wider historical circumstances and argue that, in view of the parallels between text and context, we may read Sir Orfeo as a political allegory in which conflict between medieval England and Wales is fictionalized as a fantastical conflict between humans and fairies. According to such a reading, the lay’s threatening representation of fairies reflects English colonial anxieties about the colonized Welsh and their potentially more legitimate claims to territorial authority within Britain. My thesis thus demonstrates that, by looking to the wider historical context in which Sir Orfeo was composed, we gain valuable insight into the lay’s unique depiction of fairies, and a more robust understanding of the lay as a whole.
View record
The queer histories of Edward II and Richard II of England (2019)
Beginning during their reigns, kings Edward II and Richard II of England developed “queer” reputations that have been perpetuated and renegotiated through the present day. Scholars continue to debate how best to understand these elements of Edward and Richard’s legacies, sometimes focusing on possibilities of gender transgression and intimacy between men, and sometimes dismissing such lines of inquiry as stemming from the unfounded allegations of politically-motivated chroniclers. This debate overlaps with a broader conversation about how scholars should reckon with the empiricist, historicist approach that has heretofore been dominant in work dealing with issues of gender and sexuality in history. Drawing on Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon’s notion of queer unhistoricism, as well as Carla Freccero’s work on queer spectrality, this thesis uses an expansive definition of queerness to move past “were-they-or-weren’t-they” disputes about Edward and Richard, and engage more fruitfully with the presence of queerness in both medieval and modern texts about these kings. Two late medieval poems written in praise of the currently-reigning king, Adam Davy’s Five Dreams about Edward II (c. 1308) and Richard Maidstone’s Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie (c. 1392), are similar in their creation of a textual intimacy between the king and the author—a socially-imbalanced intimacy that mirrors the highly-criticized relationships between the kings and their male favorites. I examine these poems in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chronicles that disparage Edward, Richard, and their relationships with their favorites, linking bad kingship with the feminization of men and excessive intimacy between men. Expanding on Claire Sponsler’s reading of Froissart’s chronicles, I look at a modern British docudrama’s depiction of Edward II and Hugh Despenser’s deaths, suggesting that the series follows Froissart in presenting the queer man as a figure to be denounced in order to suppress the possibility of improper intimacy between men. Finally, I take Richard’s attempt to canonize his great-grandfather Edward as an opportunity to look at how Edward II and Richard II’s legacies as queer kings intersect and reflect each other.
View record
Dreams and Lovers: The Sympathetic Guide Frame in Middle English Courtly Love Poems (2015)
When is a dream not a dream? The Middle English convention of the ‘dream vision’ has been read by modern scholars as a genre that primarily reveals the medieval understanding of dreaming and dream theory, so that events and stories presented within a dream frame are necessarily read through that specific hermeneutic. But what might reading ‘dream visions’ without this theoretical framework do to our understanding of the text? Can removing this default mode of interpretation inspire cross-genre comparisons between narratives that present themes of courtly love? My thesis embraces this ‘genre-blind’ standpoint and traces the development of rhetorical frames through texts of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth century. Beginning with Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess as a ‘dream vision’, which takes inspiration from the highly popular Romance of the Rose, I move to Lydgate’s two ‘dream visions’ A Complaynte of a Lovers Lyfe and The Temple of Glas, and then finally into the realm of ‘romances’ with Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, The Tale of Sir Thopas, and the anonymous Squire of Low Degree. All six texts contain a lover’s complaint within their narrative bodies that is uniquely encased by what I have termed the sympathetic guide frame. The progression of this frame from Chaucer’s writings and beyond shows the sympathetic guide frame as an increasingly conventional device in courtly love texts due to its ability to effectively present and intensify emotion. Without the constraints of genre expectations, the modern reader can focus on the literary and emotional importance of a text, guided by a character specifically created by the author to witness a lover’s complaint and then respond emotionally to it. The identification of this kind of development of a rhetorical device would not be possible if one is hesitant to compare any texts that do not share the same genre classification. I advocate for a renewed understanding of ‘dream visions’ as more than just a dream.
View record
Unmoored interpretations: the consequences of (mis)reading in "Emare" (2011)
This project examines how one fourteenth-century popular romance, Emaré, responds to contemporary concerns about interpretation and misreading through a close analysis of how correct and incorrect textual interpretation and its consequences are portrayed within the text. I am most interested in how the reading environment and reading practices of the fourteenth century, most especially the rapid increase in lay literacy and the inclusion of women in romance readership, turned popular romance in particular into a locus for concerns about (in)correct interpretation, and in the effect of these concerns on the romance texts themselves. How did romance writers respond to the charges being laid against their texts by contemporary critics? To what extent did they attempt to direct their readers' interpretation of these texts and prevent misreading? And how did the gender of both reader and writer affect how the text was perceived and utilized? In order to address these questions, I have performed close, historicized readings of three key episodes in Emaré: the Emperor’s misreading of Emaré’s wondrous robe, a female-authored text that makes use of a particularly feminine mode of production and is not easily readable by men such as the Emperor; Emaré’s mother-in-law’s deliberate misreading of her son’s letters; and Emaré’s final use of her son—a jointly-authored text produced by herself and her husband—to facilitate both understanding and reconciliation between herself and the two men most heavily implicated in the earlier episodes of misreading. By examining these moments within the broader context of cultural fears around the rise of female literacy and the popularity of vernacular romance, I have mapped how one such work presents a rehabilitative model of female and lay literacy. Emaré demonstrates, via the exemplary format favoured by texts of its genre, the dangers posed by disunity among female writers and male readers, and male writers and female readers, and the power that lies in an approach to reading that acknowledges both gendered lenses, and ultimately provides the sole means of correct interpretation and the moral redemption that comes with it.
View record
Current Students & Alumni
If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details and provide recruitment preferences.
Membership Status
Program Affiliations
Academic Unit(s)