Michael Zeitlin
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Research Options
Recruitment
Complete these steps before you reach out to a faculty member!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Supervision Enquiry
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.
“Beyond Fragmentation: Donald Barthelme and Writing as Political Act” extracts Barthelme from recursive debates over postmodernism and considers him, instead, within the intellectual contexts he himself recognized: the avant-garde, the phenomenological, and the transnational. It is these interests which were summoned by Barthelme in order to develop an aesthetic method characterized by collage, pastiche, and irony, and which together yielded a spirited response to political phenomena of the late twentieth century. I argue that Barthelme was an author who believed language had been corrupted by official discourse and who believed, more importantly, that it could be recovered through acts of combination and re-use. Criticism influenced by the cultural theory of Fredric Jameson has frequently labeled Barthelme’s work a mimesis of an age in which meaning had become devalued by rampant production and consumption. I revise this assumption by arguing that Barthelme’s work reacts to what was in fact a stubbornly efficient use of discourse for purposes of propaganda, bureaucracy, and public relations.Drawing on the biographical material available, and integrating that material with original archival work, I uncover the specific sources of Barthelme’s political discontent: Watergate, the war in Vietnam, a growing militarization in the United States, and the ideological rigidity of the 1960s counterculture. In three biographical chapters I connect these concerns to Barthelme’s novels and short stories, which represent attempts to create avant-garde objects that might challenge the specific rationalities (the commonality of violence, for example) political action is premised upon. I show Barthelme inserting political subject matter into texts alongside a formal apparatus that suggests the way such matter had been misconceived and misrepresented, often with horrific consequences. In two chapters of close reading, I first read the short story “Paraguay,” from City Life (1970), as a critique of American neo-imperialism in Latin America. In that piece, Barthelme explores the dual ways--official and cultural--a homogenizing American influence is felt abroad. Next, I compare Barthelme to author and activist Grace Paley, whose story collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) provides revealing context for Barthelme’s own political interventions.
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In this dissertation, I consider the relationship between the rhetoric of conversion thatinforms the American prison system and the pervasive use of the conversionnarrative in the life writing of American prisoners. I argue that ever since the firstpenitentiary opened its gates at the beginning of the nineteenth century, prisonreformers have relied on the conversion narrative to redefine the rehabilitative goalsof the modern prison. Prison reformers, moreover, have historically deployed avariety of strategies—indeterminate sentencing, the “mark system,” the parole board,and the prison file—to ensure that prisoners articulate their experiences behind barsaccording to a conversion paradigm.Reflecting the master discourse of the American prison system, the prison life writingarchive contains myriad versions of the conversion story, particularly in the post-warperiod when conversion was reconfigured as “rehabilitation” and prisoners had todefine themselves as rehabilitated before they could be released from prison. HenceI explore how the ideology of the prison is implicated in the life writing of prisonersand ex-prisoners who have achieved a notable, or notorious, visibility in Americanculture: Jimmy Santiago Baca (A Place to Stand), Jack Henry Abbott (In the Belly ofthe Beast), and James Carr (Bad). More importantly, I show how these writerscomplicate any notion that prison life is inherently emancipatory. Some prisoners andex-prisoners reinscribe the ideology of the American prison system by shaping theirnarratives according to the conversion paradigm. But others use the conversionnarrative (consciously or unconsciously) in ways radically different from thoseintended by prison reformers. Their creative, frequently subversive deployments ofthe conversion narrative end up complicating the attempt to define the emancipatoryrole of prison writing or the teleology of post-prison citizenship.
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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.
Throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, there has been an increase in critical attention paid to Richard Yates, the New York-born author whose writing career stretched from the 1950s up to his death in 1992. There is still, however, a lack of scholarship dedicated to understanding Yates in his own right and the mechanisms driving the bleak and devastating emotional impacts of his writing. This thesis examines two of Yates’ novels, Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, for their depictions of what Yates, in a 1972 interview with Ploughshares, termed “real suffering” (qtd. Clark and Henry). This thesis argues that depictions of real suffering in Yates’ novels rely on the author’s method of foregrounding the characters, an approach central to George Levine’s description of realism and György Lukács’ theory of the novel. This thesis examines Yates in light of these discussions of genre, also bringing in the Aristotelian view of tragedy, to examine exactly how Yates achieves such moving depictions of realistic and novelistic suffering. In Yates’ work, the foregrounding of character entails a consistent acceptance and understanding on the part of the narrator of the ways characters conceive of their own lives, the interactions between developed characters with differing conceptions of themselves and each other, and the importance these conceptions and conflicting conceptions have for the development of the plot. Drawing on tools from cognitive linguistics, such as Narrative Spaces Theory and intersubjectivity, this thesis tracks how Yates creates incredibly heart-breaking depictions of an interior, mental suffering not from the intrusion of evil but from the everyday interactions of people trying to navigate life in a way that satisfies them. The emotional force of Yates’ writing therefore lies in the terrifyingly realistic and understandable tragedy that can arise from the everyday interactions of ordinary people.
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Ratner’s Star is considered one of Don DeLillo’s more inaccessible texts, and with good reason: taking the history of mathematical progress as its major temporal arc, Ratner’s Star eschews many conventions of fiction in order to create a unique system that operates—as manycritics have noted—on a complex interplay of opposites.Fewer critics, however, have noted the importance of genre to this text. Going beyond the customary nod to Menippean satire, critics David Cowart, John Johnston and Mark Osteen, in particular, investigate the history of this genre to pose texts such as Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland as important models for Ratner’s Star. Extending existent scholarship, this present study roots DeLillo’s text firmly within the tradition of Menippean satire as defined by M. M. Bakhtin, not only to situate DeLillo’s concerns within the context of satire (this hasalready been accomplished) but also to activate a full-scale analysis of Ratner’s Star in Bakhtinian terminology.With Raphael’s School of Athens as a visual touchstone, this study investigates how DeLillo frames and re-frames the tension between the mathematically abstract and the materially tangible by employing Bakhtin’s definitions of the grotesque and heteroglossia. As a stronglygrotesque character, Robert Hopper Softly and the “antrum” of his creation encapsulate such interplay of the abstract and the tangible while leaving this tension ambivalent and unresolved. The “New York episodes,” brief flashbacks where DeLillo grounds his protagonist in prosaiclife, present a world according to the Menippean style of carnivalesque “slum naturalism,” wherein languages live and are lived in, rooted to their surroundings. On the other hand, Logicon, an artificial “universal” language, opposes the lived experience and heteroglossia of these New York episodes. In order to demonstrate DeLillo's suspicion of the destructive capability of such a universal language, this study concludes by defining Logicon as the primaryantagonist of the novel, a tyrannical and abstracting force that threatens heteroglossic language and the plural realities it represents, Menippean satire as a genre embracing relativity, and most crucially, the artistic discourse of the novel itself.
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