Suzanne Bailey

Professor (English)
English (Public Texts) M.A. Director
B.A. (Queen's), M.A., Ph.D. (Toronto)
Graduate Faculty, M.A. English Literature (Public Texts); Frost Centre for Canadian Studies (M.A., Ph.D.)

Suzanne Bailey is Professor of English Literature at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. She is the author of Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry (2010) and senior editor of P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal (2011). She has published on nineteenth-century intellectual history in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, Photography and Culture, Women’s Writing and other journals, and she writes the annual review of publications on Robert Browning for the journal Victorian Poetry. Her work on Canadian travel writing and poetry appears in Mosaic, University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Literature and Canadian Poetry. Her research and teaching issues range from literature and science, especially evolution, to women’s travel writing, the visual arts in Canadian modernism, and theories and representations of age in poetry and life-writing.

Teaching

I teach a range of courses from Victorian literature and culture to contemporary travel writing and women's writing. I have interests in Victorian and contemporary science (including photography and the work of quirky scientists like Francis Galton), aging and the life course, and the travel writing of the amazing Canadian poet, P.K. Page. What links my work is an interest in how we come to know what we know and how we can learn to see and understand the value of other stories and other perspectives. How do we balance an awareness of knowledge and its limitations with the need to act ethically and responsibly in the world?

Research

New and recent projects: Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning's Poetry (Routledge 2010), SSHRC-funded: an examination of perceptual and cognitive differences and their relationship to artistic production, especially poetry.

Suzanne Bailey and Christopher Doody, eds. P. K. Page, Brazilian Journal. Erin Mills, Ontario: Porcupine’s
Quill, 2011. Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of P.K. Page, eds. Zailig Pollock, Sandra Djwa, Dean Irvine.
Gold medalist, 2011 ForeWord Reviews (US Independent book publishers) Book of the Year Awards for Autobiography/ memoir.

“The Year’s Work in Browning.” “The Year’s Work in Victorian Poetry,” ed. Andrew Stauffer. Victorian
Poetry 49.3 (2011): 30-37.

“Francis Galton’s Face Project: Morphing the Victorian Human.” Photography and Culture. 5.2 (2012):
189-214.

Selected publications

Books

Bailey, Suzanne, and Christopher Doody. Critical edition of P. K. Page, Brazilian Journal. Erin Mills, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2011. 

Bailey, Suzanne. Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry. New York/Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010.0.

Articles

Bailey, Suzanne. “P.K. Page, Late Style, and Gerotranscendence: The “Here/There” of Aging.”  Aging, Gender, and Creativity. Eds. Núria Casado, Maricel Oró Piqueras, Brian Worsfold. Forthcoming

Peter Lang. Grup Dedal-lit: http://www.pro-age.udl.cat/ (Spain)

“The Art of Engraving as Modernist Genre: David Silverberg at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, Paris 1957.” Translocated Modernisms (University of Ottawa Press).  Forthcoming.

Bailey, Suzanne. “Travel, Ethics and Moral Distress in The Prophet’s Camel Bell.” University of Toronto Quarterly.  82.2 (2013): 168-184.  

“Ethics, Aesthetics, Modernism and the Primitive in P. K. Page’s Brazilian Journal.” Mosaic. 46.1. (2013): 53-75.  

“Francis Galton’s Face Project: Morphing the Victorian Human.” Photography and Culture. 5.2