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 and senior editor of P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal. 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.

Research and teaching interests include women’s writing, North-American and postcolonial; travel writing; visual arts, including printmaking and book illustration; nineteenth-century Canadian writing; Victorian literature; literature and science; literary theory; aging and the life course. 

Teaching

I teach a range of courses from Victorian literature and culture to contemporary travel writing and women's writing. 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
Current projects:

“Lines: Atelier 17, the Art of the Print, and Canadian Modernism.” SSHRC-funded.

Canadian modernist and Inuit printmaking and book art; artist interviews; creativity; print theory.

 ““Wanderers in a Distant Country”: Preserving and Adapting Britishness in the Writing of Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie.” SSHRC-funded.

Bibliographic project on the collected works of the Strickland sisters. Includes focus on nineteenth-century children’s writing, women watercolourists and botanical illustration, nineteenth-century periodicals and giftbooks.

Also exploring gerotranscendence in later life writing, in Margaret Avison and in Yeats.

Past projects: 

Edition of Brazilian Journal (with Zailig Pollock, PI, “The Collected Works of P.K. Page,” SSHRC-funded)

The Later Career of Robert Browning (SSHRC-funded)