Rita Bode

Rita Bode is Professor of English Literature at Trent University. She is co-editor of _L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-42_ (MQUP, 2015) and _L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s)_ (MQUP, 2018), which was awarded the Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) 2018 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for the year’s best work of Canadian literary criticism. She has published on nineteenth-century American woman authors (most notably, Harriet Prescott Spofford), and transatlantic female literary traditions (most notably George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe; Edith Wharton). Her research interests tend to focus on women writers, but her research and publications also include feminist analyses of canonical texts by male authors such as Melville.

She is on the faculty of the English MA in Public Texts (Peterborough) and has served as its Director. Her undergraduate teaching is Durham-based where she teaches a wide range of courses from Shakespeare to contemporary areas such as Latinx writing, and literature and health. She has delivered several conference papers on approaches to teaching specific literary texts and her teaching innovations include transatlantic projects of global outreach whereby members of her classes engage through online platforms with students from a European (or American) university class to discuss a literary work.