ACCUTE is very pleased to present our 2023 Plenary Speaker Series:

Dionne Brand

ACCUTE Plenary Speaker, co-sponsored by Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA), Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL), and Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (CAPS)

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of international social justice. She became prominent first as an award-winning poet, winning the Griffin Poetry Prize for her volume Ossuaries, and a Governor General’s Literary Award and Trillium Book Prize for Land to Light On. Among other honours, she was awarded the 2003 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for thirsty and the Trillium Book Prize for The Blue Clerk, which was also nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. She served as Poet Laureate of the City of Toronto 2009-2012. Her latest collection, Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems was published in 2022.

Brand has also achieved great distinction and acclaim in fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent novel, Theory, won the 2019 Toronto Book Award and the BOCAS Fiction Prize. Her fiction includes Love Enough, nominated for the 2015 Trillium Book Award, and the critically acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, At the Full and Change of the Moon, and What We All Long For. Her non-fiction includes A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, which has been widely taken up by scholars of Black Diaspora.

Dionne Brand was a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph from 2004-2022 and holds several Honorary Doctorates. Previously Poetry Editor at McClelland & Stewart from 2014-2021, she is now Editorial Director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada. She is a member of the Order of Canada.

Min Hyoung Song

ACCUTE Plenary Speaker

Min Hyoung Song is the Chair of the English Department at Boston College. He is the author of three books, all published by Duke University Press: Climate Lyricism, The Children of 1965: On Writing and Not Writing as an Asian American, and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The Children of 1965 won numerous awards, including the Association for Asian American Studies Prize in Literary Criticism and the Alpha Sigma Nu Award in Literature and Fine Arts. He also co-edited (with Rajini Srikanth) The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature and co-edited (with Jean Wu) Asian American Studies: A Reader, as well as acted as the series co-editor (again with Rajini Srikanth) of the 4-volume Asian American Literature in Transition (published by Cambridge University Press)

Min Hyoung Song is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters in edited volumes, as well as in public-facing venues such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Public Books, and The Washington Post.

Lily Cho

Association for Canadian & Québec Literatures (ACQL) Plenary Speaker, co-sponsored by ACCUTE

Lily Cho’s research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and Asian North American and Canadian literature. Her book Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010) examines the relationship between Chinese restaurants and Canadian culture. Her SSHRC-funded monograph, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens (2021) focuses on Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as “C.I. 9s.” These certificates mark one of the first uses of identification photography in Canada. Drawing from this archive, her research explores the relationship between citizenship, photography, and anticipation as a mode of agency.

Elizabeth Hodgson

Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies (CSRS) Plenary Speaker, co-sponsored by ACCUTE

Elizabeth Hodgson is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her work examines gender in the cultural histories of early-modern English literatures. Her most recent monograph, The Masculinities of John Milton: Cultures and Constructs of Manhood in the Major Works (Cambridge, 2022), is the first monograph on Milton’s men. Other titles include Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Gender and the Sacred Self in John Donne (Delaware UP, 1999). She has published articles and book-chapters on Shakespeare, Wroth, Philips, Donne, and Herbert, as well as publications about funeral sermons, psalm-translations, early modern pedagogy, and early modern hospitality. She is currently co-editing a collection on Renaissance queens and English nationalism.