This page was last updated on November 4, 2009
Welcome to the ACCUTE Graduate Caucus
What is the GSC?
Current Projects
GSC Executive and Departmental Reps
Minutes and Archives
Annual Survey of Graduate Student Life (2008 Survey posted below)
Professionalization and Other Links
Join the GSC Facebook Group
Join ACCUTE
What is the GSC?
The Graduate Student Caucus (GSC) of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) exist to represent the needs and varied interests of graduate students of English in Canada.
The caucus itself is composed of student representatives from English (and Comparative Literature) departments across Canada.
The GSC elects an executive body at its annual meeting during Congress. Minutes and annual reports are available on the archives page.
One of the most important of the GSC activities is the ministration of an annual survey of graduate student life in Canada. A full description of the survey, including the current survey questions and previously published editions can be found here.
GSC News
**New for 2009** The GSC has set up a Facebook group to facilitate communication with members. This group has take the place of our Yahoo List-serv.
Student ACCUTE members can join the Facebook group by searching for the “ACCUTE Graduate Student Caucus” in Facebook groups.
We do our best to keep this site up-to-date with news that affects you. Please take up any concerns or confusion with current or absent content on the site by emailing Jamie Paris or Michael Brisbois.
[The GSC is keenly interested in graduate student professionalization; in fact, they sponsored a panel on professionalization at last year's congress in Ottawa, and they have created a burgeoning website. The beginnings of this page are available here. This is a new project, so if you have any ideas or thoughts on how it might proceed, please write to Jamie Paris or Michael Brisbois. We are also compiling a list of professionalization resources. If your department has any kind of professionalization series, or collection of workshops, feel free to send us a link to them.
Given its mandate, the GSC works closely with the Professional Concerns Committee (PCC), and we will continue this relationship in the future. If there are concerns that you would like to see brought to the PCC, feel free to email them to Jamie Paris and he will pass them along.
This year’s edition of the GSC survey will be distributed to campus reps in mid-September. This years survey has been set up to be more interactive, and will allow campus reps to give more personal feedback. Please ask your representative about the survey. If your school does not have a representative, feel free to contact Jamie Paris and volunteer to become a representative.The Current GSC Executive:
GSC President: Jamie Paris (British Columbia)
President Elect: Lynne Evans (Dalhousie)
VP Information (Survey): Hajer Ben Gouider Trabelsi (Montreal)
Secretary:Jayne Hildebrand (Concordia)
Chair of Committee on Professionalization and Hiring Practices: Michael J. Brisbois (Calgary)
Webmaster: Michael J. Brisbois (Calgary)
Departmental Representatives to the GSC:
Student reps to the GSC are elected by their own departmental student associations. (Note that this process of election may differ widely from one department to another, where some have entrenched structures of association, and others not). If your department does not have a process for electing student representatives, please contact the GSC and we will be happy to help you set something up.
Student reps to the GSC must be members of ACCUTE, and should join the GSC facebook group.
For services rendered to their department, many reps have been able to get their ACCUTE fees (annually $40) refunded by their department. However, some departments prefer not to do this, or are not able to, and some have not yet been asked. (Students wanting help addressing this question with their department are invited to write Jamie Paris).
Student representatives exist to open and maintain lines of communication between English students in departments across Canada, as well as between students and ACCUTE, the national association that represents their interests (ie. at Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, the CFHSS that runs the annual Congress, and at Social Science and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC, that manages national funding programs for students, faculty and Congress).
This is done in two ways. First, student representatives represent ACCUTE to his or her department. This involves forwarding occasional emails, informing students about the association and its current mandates, and soliciting new members among the student body. Second, student representatives are responsible for representing their departments to ACCUTE. Perhaps the most important form that this representation takes involves the ministration of the GSC’s annual survey of graduate student life. This normally takes place sometime between November and February, and the final report is published in the June newsletter after been approved by reps in late April.University of Acadia (MA)
Jeremy MacFarlane
University of Alberta (MA, PhD)
Mary Chan
www.humanities.ualberta.ca/english/index.html
www.arts.ualberta.ca/~gsea/ (Graduate Students of English Association)
University of British Columbia (MA, PhD)
Jamie Paris
http://www.english.ubc.ca/projects/grcaucus
Brock University (MA)
Laura Comfort
http://www.brocku.ca/english/
University of Calgary (MA, PhD)
Michael Brisbois
www.english.ucalgary.ca
Dalhousie (MA, PhD)
Megan Timney
http://english.dal.ca/index.php
Guelph (MA, PhD)
Rob Zacharias
http://arts.uoguelph.ca/sets
Lakehead University (MA)
Jodene Wylie
University of Manitoba (MA, PhD)
Becky Hardie
www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/english/
University of McGill (MA, PhD)
Meredith Donaldson Clark
http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/english/english.html
McMaster (MA, PhD)
Paul Huebener
www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/graduate.html
Memorial (MA, PhD)
Jess Huber
www.mun.ca/english/home/
University of Montreal (MA, PhD)
Richard Cassidy
www.etang.umontreal.ca/
www.geocities.com/egssmontreal/index.html (English Graduate Student Society)
University of New Brunswick (MA, PhD)
Patrick Toner
www.unbf.ca/arts/english/
University of Ottawa (MA, PhD)
Markus Bohlmann
www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/english/program_cours.html
Queen’s University (MA, PhD)
Andrew McKendry
www.queensu.ca/english/grad.html
www.queensu.ca/english/ges/index.html
University of Regina (MA)
Shawna Geissler
www.uregina.ca/arts/english
Saskatchewan (MA, PhD)
Holly Luhning
www.usask.ca/english/
Université de Sherbrooke (PhD)
Joanna Daxell
Simon Fraser University (MA, PhD)
Dorritta Fong
www.sfu.ca/english
University of Toronto (MA, PhD)
Lara Okihiro
www.utoronto.ca/english
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~geawww/index.htm
University of Victoria (MA, PhD)
Treava Ann Kellington
www.engl.uvic.ca/Grad/index.html
Waterloo (MA, PhD)
Alexis McQuigge
University of Western Ontario (MA, PhD)
David Drysdale
www.uwo.ca/english/
University of Windsor (MA)
Stephen Flemming
www.uwindsor.ca/english
York University (MA, PhD)
Shannon Meek
http://www.arts.yorku.ca/english/graduate/index.html
Annual Reports and Meeting Minutes
[FORTHCOMING]
GSC Annual Report 2004
GSC Annual Report 2005
GSC Annual Report 2006
Annual Reports can also be found in ACCUTE Newsletters
The Annual Survey
The Annual Survey
Every year the GSC conducts a survey of English Departments in Canada, in order to collect and compile information felt to be relevant to graduate students. Survey questions and final reports are available below. To comment on this year’s survey, or for any other related information, please write this year’s VP Information in charge of the survey, Hajer Trabelsi.
This survey is very important as it provides:
a) a chance for each of us to get a clearer sense of how our departments are organized and run (and to generate conversations among students in our department about the institution that we inhabit),
b) a chance to witness how each of our department structures compares with other's across the country (in the hopes that significant differences may become the stuff of changes and exchange), and
c) a chance to see how each of our departments evolves over time (if at all).
As students swamped with all sorts of our own individual requirements, we may find it difficult to respond to some of the questions on the survey. As such, the survey therefore also provides us with an opportunity to meet with department faculty and staff, and so, to initiate conversations between students and faculty that may not otherwise arise.
Hajer Trabelsi has been charged this year with ministering and reporting on the survey. Michael Brisbois (Calgary) will be reporting on professionalization. Their collective report, once it is approved by the GSC at this year’s Congress, will be published in ACCUTE’s June newsletter.
Surveys and Reports, in Word:
Survey 2006-07
Survey 2005-06
Report 2005-06
Survey 2004-05
Report 2004-05
Links to Sites of Interest
This page is organized into the following sections:
- Professionalization
- Literary Resources
- Journals and other Reading
- Study Break
Links to Departments of English in Canada are available on the GSC representatives page.
Any suggestions, comments, or broken links? Let Michael Brisbois or Mary Elizabeth Curtin know.
Professionalization
ACCUTE CareerLinks http://www.accute.ca/careerlinks.html
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/
UPennEnglish Calls for Papers http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/
The Modern Language Association (USA) http://www.mla.org/
Chronicle of Higher Education (USA) http://chronicle.com/
Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (job postings) http://www.aucc.ca/about_us/jobs/index_e.html
The Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures http://www.alcq-acql.ca/
The Association for Canadian Comparative Literature http://wither.unbc.ca/ccla/
The Canadian Association for Cultural Studies http://www.culturalstudies.ca/
Literary Resources
The EServer is an e-publishing co-op which publishes works free of charge to readers http://eserver.org/
The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/
Literary Resources on the Net http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/
Voice o the Shuttle (VoS) http://vos.ucsb.edu/
English Literature page at Academic Info http://www.academicinfo.net/englit.html
Digital Libraries page at Academic Info http://www.academicinfo.net/digital.html
The Canadian Literature Archive http://umanitoba.ca/canlit/
Rhetorical and Cultural Studies: Critical Theory Resources http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/resources/critical_authors.html
Early Canadian Women Writers Database http://www.lib.sfu.ca/researchtools/databases/dbofdb.htm?DatabaseID=424
Silva Rhetoricae http://rhetoric.byu.edu/
Journals and Other Reading
The Village Voice Literary Supplement http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/
New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/
The Times Literary Supplement http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/
The New York Times Book Review http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/review/index.html
London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/
Granta Magazine http://www.granta.com/
Guardian Unlimited Books http://books.guardian.co.uk/
Canadian Literature http://www.canlit.ca/
CTheory http://www.ctheory.net/home.aspx
Postmodern Culture http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/
Essays on Canadian Writing http://www.ecw.ca/home.htm
The Semiotic Review of Books http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/index.html
English Studies in Canada http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/
Gateway: An Academic History Journal on the Web http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/
Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com/
Bookslut http://www.bookslut.com/
Globe and Mail Books http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/
Study Break
wood s lot http://www.accute.ca/gsc%20links_and_sites_of_interest.htm
MobyLives (news and commentary about books and writers) http://www.mobylives.com/
Piled Higher and Deeper http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php
Theory Trading Cards http://www.theorycards.org.uk/main.htm
DIY Jackson Pollock Art http://jacksonpollock.org/
The Bureau of Public Secrets http://www.bopsecrets.org/
The Onion http://www.theonion.com/content/index
Stay in touch with the GSC
**New for 2009** The GSC has set up the “ACCUTE Graduate Student Caucus” Facebook group to facilitate communication with members. This is an excellent place to post questions about GSC, ACCUTE, or your graduate programs; suggestions for issues you would like to see the GSC take up on behalf of graduate students; or news that you would like to share with graduate student members of ACCUTE, including CFPs.
Student ACCUTE members can join the Facebook group by searching for the “ACCUTE Graduate Student Caucus” in Facebook groups http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20085404447&ref=ts
Join ACCUTE
To find out more about ACCUTE, or to fill out a membership form, follow the link to ACCUTE’s membership page.