Professor (English)
B.A. (Victoria), M.A., Ph.D. (McMaster)
E-mail: msteffler@trentu.ca
Research interests
Canadian fiction; Canadian women’s life-writing and autofiction; girlhood studies; Mennonite/s writing; children's literature
Current Research Projects
Editor, P. K. Page’s Children’s Literature. Volume 6 of The Collected Works of P.K. Page
Girlhood bodies and narratives in Canadian literature
Selected Publications (2014-2018)
“Writing Through the Words of Those Lost: Memoir and Mourning in Novels by Rudy Wiebe and Miriam Toews.” The Journal of Mennonite Studies 36 (2018): 117-35.
“Thebes Troutman as Travelling Tween: Revising the Family Story.” Girlhood Studies (Theme Issue: Locating Tween Girls) 11.1 (2018): 126-40.
Co-edited with Janet Miron. “Destabilizing Canada.” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes. Volume 51. Issue 1 (2017).
“Dwelling in Intimate and Grand Spaces: Natural, Bodily and Narrative Landscapes in Alice Munro’s ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’” Literary Geographies 3.1 (2017): 87-102.
“Loss and Intimacy in David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris: Learning Mortality Through the Son and the Stranger.” 11 Encounters with Mennonite Fiction. Ed. Hildi Froese Tiessen. Winnipeg: The Mennonite Literary Society, 2017. 119-37.
“The Presence of Absence: Sister-Loss and Home-Loss in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows.” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 90.1 (January 2016): 51-72.
P.K. Page: Mexican Journal. Ed. Margaret Steffler. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2015. Volume 3 in The Collected Works of P.K. Page.
“‘Being a Christian’ and a Presbyterian in Leaskdale, Ontario.” L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942. Ed. Rita Bode and Lesley Clement. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. 54-73.
“Editing Brazil and Mexico: Light and Shadow, Strands and Gaps.” Co-authored with Suzanne Bailey. Canadian Poetry 75 (Fall/Winter 2014): 83-101.
“‘To Be Faithful to the Idea of Being Good’: The Expansion to Goodness in Carol Shields’s Unless.” The Worlds of Carol Shields. Ed. David Staines. University of Ottawa Press, 2014. 143-60.