Faculty
The Cultural Studies Ph.D. involves tenured and tenure-track members of Trent University’s Cultural Studies Program. This faculty is innovative in both pedagogy and research, and brings a sense of ongoing invention to the field of cultural studies. Collectively, the core faculty have published 45 books, hundreds of articles in prestigious and cutting-edge journals, and presented hundreds of original papers at scholarly conferences.
Contact information for faculty is found below, including email addresses and home pages where more detailed information about research interests and publications can be found.
Director
Alan O'Connor
Director, Cultural Studies PhD
E-Mail: aoconnor@trentu.ca
Alan O'Connor holds a degree in Sociology from Trinity College, Dublin, studied at York for his MA and PhD, and taught at Simon Fraser before coming to Trent. His research field is popular culture and media.
He has a particular interest in alternative community media and how they become the means for the expression of group and subcultural identities. This interest, which represents the expansion of cultural studies to a global context, takes him from Toronto, where he founded the countercultural café Who's Emma? to Central and South America where he has participated in community political action.
Alan O'Connor's new book on Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy is now available through Lexington Books. He is also author of The Voice of the Mountains: Radio and Anthropology (2006), Raymond Williams - Key Thinkers in Critical Media Studies (2005), and editor and translator of Community Radio in Bolivia: The Miner's Radio Stations (2004).
His current research, with Ian Mclachlan, is a book on the underground arts scene in Peterborough since 1970. This research is influenced by Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of cultural fields, and documents the extraordinary richness of community theatre, art and music in this small city. With start-up funding from the Symons Foundation, and a major research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the research is focusing on The Union (1989-1996), a collectively-run space in downtown Peterborough for community theatre, and part of the underground touring circuit for hardcore punk bands in the 1990's.
Check out: http://alanoconnor.wordpress.com/
Professors
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth 
E-Mail: ermarth@trentu.ca
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth is an interdisciplinary cultural theorist who writes on the ongoing shift from modernity into postmodernity and on its implications for practice: particularly democratic political practice, and the practice of historical explanation. Related topics of interest include the changing definitions of time, individuality and agency. She holds a BA from Carleton College in Minnesota, an MA from University of California Berkeley, and a PhD from University of Chicago.
She has published many articles in the leading journals of several fields, and five books, Realism and Consensus (1983; 1989), George Eliot (1985), Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (1992), The English Novel in History 1840-1895 (1997), and Rewriting Democracy (2007).
Before coming to Trent she was Presidential Research Professor at University of Maryland, Saintsbury Professor at University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and Cox Visiting Professor of Humanities at University of Colorado. She founded the New Hampshire (USA) Women's Political Caucus, and worked in a leadership seminar on Sustainability sponsored by the Bighorn Foundation of Colorado.
John Fekete
E-Mail: jfekete@trentu.ca
John Fekete received his BA and MA in English literature and literary theory from McGill. He then went on to take his PhD at Cambridge under Raymond Williams, writing a thesis which became The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan(Routledge, 1978).
An international figure in the field of modern and postmodern theories of value, he has served on the editorial boards of the Canadian Journal of Communications, the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Philosophy of Social Sciences, and Telos, as well as journals representing his teaching interest such as Science Fiction Studies. His other books are The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought (U of Minnesota P, 1984) and Life after Postmodernism: Essays on Culture and Value (St. Martin's P, 1988), both of these as editor. His Moral Panic (Davies, 1994) was influential in redefining the debate about human rights and academic freedom in government policy and in North American institutions of higher learning.
For his early work John Fekete was given Trent's Distinguished Research Award in 1990.
David Holdsworth
Email: dholdsworth@trentu.ca
Current interests: Observation and representation in physical theory; valuation and interpretation of mathematics; the (algebraic) topos as site of theory; political discourses and cultural organization of scientific community; interdisciplinary and professional practice within post-modern culture; environmentalism as a moral discourse.
Publications include ‘Becoming Interdisciplinary: Making Sense of DeLanda's Reading of Deleuze”, Paragraph, forthcoming (2006); ‘Transformational Economics and the Public Good’, in Bernard Hodgson (ed.), The Invisible Hand and the Common Good, Springer Verlag (2004); ‘Science, Politics and Science Policy in Canada: Steps towards a Renewed Critical Inquiry,’ Journal of Canadian Studies (2003); ‘Regulating Professional Practice in Canada: Misguided Steps away from Reflexive Modernity,’ Bridging Minds and Markets, 6th Internaltional auDes Conference; 'Science, Technology, and Discourse: Comments on "Textual Analysis in Technology Research', Technology Review (1996); 'Institutions for a Sustainable Civilization: Negotiating Change in a Technological Culture', Proceedings of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (1995); 'Evaluating Environmental Policy: National Contexts and Normative Planning', Proceedings, UNESCO Seminar on the Environment (1993); 'Universality and Rationality: Transdisciplinary Methods and Methodological Pluralism', Proceedings of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (1993); 'Risk Assessment and National Standards: Philosophical Problems' in J. Bonin and D. Stevenson (editors), Risk Assessment in Setting National Priorities (Plenum, 1989); 'Critical Survey of Quantum Logic', Scientia (1983).
Veronica Hollinger
E-Mail: vhollinger@trentu.ca
Veronica Hollinger received her BA from Marianopolis College in Montreal, and then went on to Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) for a Masters in Education. She completed the MA and PhD at Concordia University .
Her background in theatre arts has influenced her work on postmodern theatre and on theories of performance and spectacle. These interests have also helped to shape her research and writing in the areas of literary science fiction and speculative fiction. She is especially interested in the theoretical and imaginative constructions of hybrid and artificial subjects in technoculture, and in how such theories and fictions are influencing current developments in artificial intelligence and robotics.
As co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies, past vice-president of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and author of many articles, she has an international reputation in the field of science fiction studies. Her work has focused in particular on feminist and cyberpunk science fiction, as well as on the theoretical implications of postmodernism and posthumanism for science fiction as a popular genre. She is the co-editor of four scholarly collections: On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science Fiction Studies (SF-TH, 1992); Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (U of Pennsylvania P, 1997); Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (U of Pennsylvania P, 2002); and Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008).
With her co-editors at Science Fiction Studies, she has completed The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2010), an extensive collection of short stories designed for use in university and college science fiction courses.
Veronica Hollinger is a past chair of the Cultural Studies Program and past Director of Trent's MA Program in Theory, Culture and Politics.
Recent Publications
Doug Torgerson 
E-Mail: dtorgerson@trentu.ca
Director, MA program, Theory, Culture and Politics
Doug Torgerson graduated with a BA in political philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, moving on to receive a Master of Environmental Studies degree from York as well as an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Toronto.
He is interested in the intersection of cultural and political theory, especially in regard to how the meaning of the political is increasingly being thrown into question. Political action, more precisely, has come to include cultural and aesthetic dimensions as well as instrumental ones. In his recent work he has addressed the meaning of the political particularly in connection with the cultural politics evident in the discourses of public spheres and social movements, examining these discourses in terms of their cultural tensions and strategic orientations. His work on these topics has substantially focused on the green movement, as in such publications as "Comedy and Tragedy in Green Politics," a chapter of his book The Promise of Green Politics: Environmentalism and the Public Sphere (Duke UP, 1999); "Images of Place in Green Politics: The Cultural Mirror of Indigenous Traditions," in Living with Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse, F. Fisher and M. Hajer, eds. (Oxford UP, 1999); and "Farewell to the Green Movement? Political Action and the Green Public Sphere," Environmental Politics (2000).
Associate Professors
Zsuzsa Baross
E-Mail: zbaross@trentu.ca
Zsuzsa Baross trained at the Universities of British Columbia (BA), London (MA), and Amsterdam (PhD).
Her teaching concentrates on three major areas in Cultural Theory today: Questions for Contemporary Critical Discourse (“the return of the religious”; “the question of community: the refugee, the pariah and the exile”; “the retreat of the political”;"Violence and the Law" ); The Making of the Modern Body (biopolitics and the posthuman); and The Image and the Text (with Godard and Deleuze). Her research is influenced both by deconstruction (Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Blanchot) and the radical empiricism of Deleuze; it interrogates the ethics of writing, the lure of the image, and the complex relations that link the cinema and its apparatus to memory and history. Her publications (in Angelaki, New Literary History, International Studies in Philosophy, Symposium, Deleuze and Philosophy) include essays on ethics after Bosnia, the gift of writing, found footage cinema, and cinematic temporalities. Her volume of essays Posthumously, for Jacques Derrida is forthcoming in the Spring of 2011 (Sussex Academic Press). Her new book project, Repetitions, Reappropriations and Deconstructions, continues her double engagement with the force of the image and contemporary critical thought, will appear in the Spring of 2011.
Jonathan Bordo
E-Mail: jbordo@trentu.ca
Dr Jonathan M. Bordo, MA, M.Phil, PhD (Yale), is a philosophically trained cultural historian and theorist whose thought is grounded in the philosophical, scientific, religious and aesthetic culture of early modernity (1450 – 1710) cv link. His continuing work bridges his interests between picturing, testimony and institutions of memory. He is also one of the leading scholars in the interdisciplinary study of landscape. Dr Bordo has received many grants and held many fellowships including at present a Trent Research Fellowship, having been a Research Fellow at many distinguished Institutes and Centres most recently at the John Carter Brown Library. JCB poster
Jonathan Bordo’s research and publications have been on the cutting edge for some years. (recent work). His writings have been published widely in international and national journals and collections that include: . “The Homer of Potsdamerplatz – Walter Benjamin in Wim Wender’s Sky over Berlin/Wings of Desire, a Critical Topography” in Images (Brill Amsterdam, 2008) (link)
Jonathan Bordo’s scholarly research has two orientations -- a geopoetics and a critical inventory of and meta reflection on theory itself. The geo-poetics is entwined with the study of art, film and visual culture and it has led to his articulation of an approach that he refers to as “critical topography. ” At the same time Bordo persists with the question, what is theory? in order to interrogate the unstable middle station of theory between philosophy and cultural history. For Bordo, theory is a kind of cultural analysis that advances in part by checking tendencies of inexorable textual repetition and unmitigated speculation through lexico-philological work, critical inventory of concepts and case studies – Bordo’s gloss on Kant’s dictum: concepts without objects are empty, objects without concepts are blind. His current doctoral seminars are a contribution to a reflection on theory, in the formation of early 20th century cultural inquiry with special attention to the works of Freud, de Saussure & Benjamin. The Specular Witness, a collection of published and new essays, also nearing completion, gives attention to the very character of theory as a kind of testimony. Bordo’s two orientations are reflected in the projects and the approaches of the doctoral students with whom he is engaged: Forensic determinations of evidence and cultural memory in the matter of mass deaths (Cyr), Bataille and the Collège de Sociologie (Bell), Theories of social ontology of 'late capitalism' as a critical examination of autopoiesis and theory (Timms), Studies in the critical topography of famine and the Irish diaspora (Dunne).
Jonathan Bordo is the founding director of the Canadian Centre for the Study of Landscape, Art and Critical Topography (link).
Victoria de Zwaan
Department Chair
Cultural Studies Undergraduate Program
E-Mail: vdezwaan@trentu.ca
Victoria de Zwaan has been involved with Cultural Studies at Trent since she took some of the Department's first courses while pursuing her BA in philosophy and English. After studying literary and cultural theory for her MA at McGill, she pursued a PhD in English literature at the University of Toronto on the subject of American experimentalism.
Her dissertation research was published in book form as Interpreting Radical Metaphor in the Experimental Fictions of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker. In both her teaching and her current research into international experimental texts, she is always looking for the cutting edge at the interface of theory and fiction.
She is currently working on a series of comparative literary essays on such writers as Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, Italo Calvino, Milorad Pavic, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Salman Rushdie.
Ihor Junyk
E-Mail: ihorjunyk@trentu.ca
Ihor Junyk has a BA from the University of Western Ontario, an MA from Queen's University, and a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is also an alumnus of the Humber School for Writers where he worked with two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey. He comes to Trent from Cornell University.
His research interests include modernism and the avant-garde; classicism and myth; opera; trauma, memory, and history; and the contemporary novel.
His work has appeared in such publications as the Journal of Modern History, the Chicago Review, Arts and Letters Daily, and the New York Times. He is currently working on a study of modernist classicism in interwar Paris and a novel, tentatively titled The Portrait.
Check out: http://trentu.academia.edu/IhorJunyk
Davide Panagia 
E-Mail: davidepanagia@trentu.ca
Davide Panagia is a political and cultural theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is the Co-Editor of the cultural and political theory journal, Theory & Event, and is a contributor to The Contemporary Condition.
Outside of contemporary and historical studies in political theory his research and teaching interests are diverse and include work in aesthetics and cultural theory, modern and post-structural theories of value, visual culture, media studies, democratic theory and multicultural ethics.
Currently he is working on two major research projects. The first of these asks the following question: What are the theories and practices of beholding that inform the iconophilia of contemporary democratic politics? This project explores an ethics of appearances by addressing how individuals or groups in pluralist democratic societies attend to the emergence of political subjectivities at the level of their appearances. Thus, the postures of attention that we lend to appearances is of critical importance to contemporary democratic life because the advenience of an appearance holds the potential to solicit an actively responsive mode for discomposing our attachments to the world.
The second project analyzes David Hume’s contributions to contemporary political and cultural theory and will be included as a volume in the Rowman and Littlefield series, Modernity and Political Thought.
Davide Panagia has published two books. The most recent, entitled The Political Life of Sensation (Duke UP, 2009), posits sensation as a radical democratic moment of aesthetic judgment and contends that sensory experience interrupts our perceptual givens, creating occasions to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of a political order. In the book he analyzes diverse sites of cultural engagement including the visual dynamics portrayed in the film The Ring, the growth of festival culture in late fifteenth century Florence, the practices of convivium espoused by the Slow Food movement, and the architectural design of public newsstands. These occasions for sensation are then linked to notable moments in the history of political thought in order to show the political potential of a dislocated subjectivity therein. Democratic politics, he concludes, involves a taking part in those everyday practices of sensation that interrupt our common modes of sensing and afford us an awareness of what had previously been insensible.
Davide Panagia’s first book, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke UP, 2006), was selected for Honorable Mention for the First Book Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Division of the American Political Science Association. That work inquires into contemporary accounts of the nature of political argument from the perspective of modern political and aesthetic thought.
Davide Panagia’s writings have been published in various peer-reviewed journals including “Political Theory,” “Diacritics,” “Theory & Event,” “The Journal for Cultural Research,” “Polity,” and “Citizenship Studies.” He is also the recipient of several awards for scholarly and research excellence including a Rhodes Scholarship (1993), a SSHRC Post- Doctoral Fellowship (2003), a Canadian Foundation for Innovation Grant (2004), and a SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2006).
For a selection of Davide Panagia's writings as well as his CV, please click on the following link:
http://trentu.academia.edu/DavidePanagia
James Penney
E-Mail: jamespenney@trentu.ca
James Penney received his BA and MA in comparative literature and film studies at the University of Alberta, going on to earn his PhD in the graduate program in literature at Duke, where he specialized in comparative literature and critical theory. He has been teaching at Trent since 2003.
His research pivots around the implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the study of culture and Left politics. Published by SUNY Press in 2006, The World of Perversion examines the debate in queer theory between Foucault and psychoanalysis on the subject of sexuality by linking the term 'perversion' to its pre-sexual meanings.
Prof. Penney's forthcoming book, The Structures of Love: Art and Politics beyond the Transference, reframes the terms of cultural analysis with a fresh take on transference theory in Freud and Lacan and a critical engagement with the philosophy of Alain Badiou.
His writing--on thinkers as various as Kristeva, Pascal, Bataille, Fanon, Sartre, Marx, Hocquenghem, Plato, Genet, Deleuze, Kant, Diderot, Freud, Lacan, Butler, Laclau--has appeared in the journals Paragraph, Angelaki, Communication Theory, New Formations, Radical Philosophy, Diacritics, Umbra, and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; as well as in the volumes The Psychoanalysis of Race (Columbia UP, 1998), Perversion and the Social Relation (Duke UP, 2003), and Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities across Time and Cultures (Palgrave, 2010).
Professors Emeritus
Constantin V. Boundas
Professor Emeritus
Professor Boundas studied law and theology at the University of Athens, Greece and philosophy and religion at Indiana and Purdue Universities.
He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue. His teaching and writing interests include Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Critical Theory, and Deconstruction. He is a Professor of Philosophy at Trent University, and a member of the Trent Centre for the Study of Theory, History and Culture. He taught at York University and the Université Canadienne en France, and spent leaves of absence visiting the Université de Paris VIII and the Université de Paris at Nanterre.
Professor Boundas is the recipient of the Tom Symons Award for Excellence in Teaching
He is one of the first translators and commentators of Gilles Deleuze in North America; the editor of The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); with Dorothea Olkowski, of The Theater of Philosophy: Critical Essays on Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). He organized the first international conference on Gilles Deleuze at Trent University in 1992 and, with Andrew Wernick and Morny Joy, the Trent University 1996 international conference on The Gift: Theory and Practice.
In 1999, he organized an international conference at Trent University on Rhizomatics, Genealogy and Deconstruction, and in 2004 he organized a fourth international conference at Trent, on Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction. His translations include Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and Gilles Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay in Human Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Professor Boundas has published essays on Nietzsche, Gadamer, Deleuze and Guattari and he is on the editorial board of Symposium: Canadian Journal for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought and of Angelaki: A Journal of Theoretical Humanities. He has been the guest editor of two special issues on Deleuze (The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24:1 [Jan. 1993] and Man and World 29:3 [July 1996]); the guest editor of a special issue on Rhizomatics, Genealogy and Deconstruction (Angelaki, 5:3, Summer 2000), and of a special issue on Gift, Theft, Apology (Angelaki, 6:2, August 2001).
He is the General Editor of The Companion to the Twentieth Century Philosophies, jointly published by Edinburgh and Columbia University Presses in 2007. He is curently working on a major project on New Issues in Post-Continental European Philosophy.
Richard Dellamora
Professor Emeritus
Richard Dellamora is a cultural historian theorist, and literary critic whose research and teaching focus on the relationship between sexual and cultural dissidence in 19 th and 20 th century literary and other media, in England, Western Europe, the United States, and Canada.
His publications include Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism(1990), Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (1994) and three edited collections: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (1995), The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference (1997, co-editor with Daniel Fischlin); and Victorian Sexual Dissidence (1999). His most recent book, Friendship’s Bonds, is a study of democracy and the ethic of friendship in Victorian fiction.
Professor Dellamora currently lives in Santa Monica, California.
Sean Kane
Professor Emeritus
Sean Kane was appointed to the University of Toronto English department, following his Ph.D. there in 1972. He left to join Trent University, becoming the chair of Cultural Studies when it was founded in 1978. These institutions are remembered in his Inward of Poetry (2011), a memoir of the golden age of English Studies at U of T, seen in the letters of his teachers, and in Virtual Freedom (2002), a mass market novel about Trent that was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal.
Kane’s interests fall in the sub-fields of oral metaphysics, ecophenomenology, biosemiotics, complexity theory and (possibly) speculative materialism. These are the intellectual settings of his continuing study of the nineteenth-century Haida thinker Skaay of Qquuna, whom he presents as Canada’s first philosopher. Preparation for this enquiry was made by Kane in his Wisdom of the Mythtellers (1994, 2/e 1998) which was adopted as a text in many places and established him as “an important successor to Northrop Frye” (Literary Review of Canada). Besides the influence of this teacher, Kane’s intellectual horizons were formed by the wondertales told by the storytelling artist Alice Kane, whose work he published as The Dreamer Awakes (1995), and by his early research at the Warburg Institute and the University of Toronto on the poet Edmund Spenser, published as Spenser’s Moral Allegory (1989).
Ian McLachlan
Professor Emeritus
Ian McLachlan is a poet, novelist, actor, and playwright who is also a literary scholar with far-reaching publications on 20th century writers like Bertolt Brecht and Ezra Pound. He found inspiration in Chinese and other cultures whose languages he has taken the trouble to work in.
After earning an MA at Oxford, he founded the Comparative Literature department at the University of Hong Kong, where he developed a concern for Asia as revealed in his Shanghai 1949, his translations of Chinese and Vietnamese poetry, and his In the Margins of the Empire: Reading Cambodia, as well as a forthcoming novel. McLachlan's earlier novels are The Seventh Hexagram (1976), which Mordecai Richler qualified as "the brilliant debut of an enormously talented novelist," and Helen in Exile (1980), published in New York and Toronto.
Locally, Ian McLachlan is active as a writer, producer, director and performer with several multimedia works of performance such as Pioneer Chainsaw Massacre, Postscript, Lear One/One, Frankenstein Meets the Recession, as well as plays created for the Fourth Line Theatre. He is curator of visual arts exhibits such as Arts against Repression, and founding member of magazines like border/lines, which express the concern in all his work and teaching for the political power which may be mobilized through artistic creation.
Andrew Wernick
Professor Emeritus
Andrew Wernick, a social theorist, intellectual historian, sociologist of culture and jazz musician, was one of the founders of the Trent Cultural Studies Program, and has twice been its Chair (1983-88, and 2003-7). He is also a Visiting Professor and member of the Cultural Studies PhD degree committee at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Ukraine, and a Life Member at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His writings on social theory and contemporary culture have appeared in C-Theory, Theory Culture & Society and Angelaki and in many anthologies. He is the author of Promotional Culture (Sage 1991), a seminal text in the study of advertising, and Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 2001), the first major study of Comte's later work. He co-edited the collections Shadow of Spirit: Religion and Postmodernism (Routledge 1993) and Images of Aging: Representations of Later Life (Routledge 1994), and is on the editorial boards of C-Theory, Revista de la Publicidad and TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. His current work focuses on nihilism and its manifestations in post Cold war North America, and he is also engaged in projects on world heritage and collective memory and on the gift economy and justice.
Check out: http://trentu.academia.edu/AndrewWernick
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