Since its inception, ACCUTE has operated out of Departments of English in many different Canadian universities. To promote effective regional representation, ACCUTE moves its executive office every two years, coinciding with each president’s term of office.
Members of the Board
President 2022-2024
Douglas Ivison (Lakehead University)
I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the traditional lands of Fort William First Nation, Signatory to the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850. At Lakehead, I teach Canadian literature, science fiction, popular fiction, and climate-crisis narratives, and served more than four years as Graduate Coordinator of the English MA program and eight years as Chair of the Department of English. I’m also a member of the graduate programs in Gender and Women’s Studies and Social Justice Studies. I’ve been Chair of multiple Senate committees at Lakehead and am currently Lakehead’s faculty representative on the Council of Ontario Universities (serving for two years as co-Chair of the Academic Colleagues), and a member of the executive of the Lakehead University Faculty Association. I’ve published peer-reviewed articles in a number of books and journals, including Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, and English Studies in Canada, and edited Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers (Gale, 2002) and, with Justin Edwards, co-edited Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities (Toronto, 2005), which began as a member-organized ACCUTE panel at Laval in 2001. My first ACCUTE conference was at Memorial in 1997, and I served as the Graduate Student Representative on the ACCUTE Executive in 1998-1999. I’ve also served on the executive of the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (2000-2003) and the Canadian Association of Chairs of English (2021-22), and am a member of the Advisory Board of Studies in Canadian Literature.
Vice President: 2022-2024
Cheryl Lousley (Lakehead University)
I am an Associate Professor cross-appointed to the departments of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University, Orillia campus, where I focus on contemporary Canadian and global environmental justice writing and cultural studies. I am also active in the graduate program in Social Justice Studies. My essays have appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, and Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, among other places. I have been a Research Chair in Environmental Humanities at Lakehead University (2019-2021); a Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2018); a Visiting Environmental Humanities Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2018); and a Carson Research Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich (2010). I am a past president of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada and the founding series editor for the Environmental Humanities book series published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Contract Academic Faculty Caucus Representative: 2022-2024
Carellin Brooks (University of British Columbia)
I am a Lecturer in Communications in the Department of Wood Science, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia. I have taught quazillions (to use a technical term) of first year academic writing courses at various institutions in Vancouver as adjunct professor, contract faculty, and sessional instructor. I have also taught communications, literature, and women’s studies courses. My publications include an academic monograph, Every Inch a Woman (UBC Press), a cultural history entitled Wreck Beach (New Star), a work of creative nonfiction, Fresh Hell (Demeter Press), and a novel, One Hundred Days of Rain (Book*hug), translated into French by Les Allusifs. One Hundred Days won the ReLit Award in Canada and the Edmund White Award for Debut LGBTQ Fiction from Pink Triangle Press in the U.S. I also edited Carnal Nation (with Brett Josef Grubisic) and Bad Jobs. My first book of poetry is entitled Learned (November 2022, Book*hug). I have a PhD from Oxford (2010) and an irascible cat named Spirals.
President, Graduate Student Caucus: 2022-2023
Krista Collier-Jarvis (Dalhousie University)
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. I received my MA from Dalhousie and my BA (Honours) from Mount Saint Vincent University. My PhD dissertation seeks to apply Indigenous approaches to knowledge to a variety of zombie narratives
with the explicit goal of expanding our understanding of contagion. My research interests include horror and the Gothic, the post-apocalyptic, critical approaches to museology and traumatic memory, popular culture, and critical theory. Currently, I am working with an international group of researchers on a project called Thinking through the Museum, which has taken me to Poland and will eventually lead me to Washington, D.C. to work with various curators and researchers responding to issues of social justice. I am delighted and honoured to be serving as the President for the Graduate Student Caucus this year.
Member-at-large (CPC Committee): 2021-2023
Kit Dobson (University of Calgary)

I am a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. My work focuses on literatures in Canada, Indigenous literatures, and, most recently, posthuman and ecocritical theory. My most recent books are the edited collections Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom (with Ada Jaarsma, 2020) and All the Feels: Affect and Writing in Canada / Tous les sens: L’affect dans l’écriture au Canada (with Marie Carrière and Ursula Moser, 2021), both with the University of Alberta Press, and I am the author of Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada (Wolsak & Wynn, 2017). Previous books are Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (WLUP, 2009); Transnationalism, Activism, Art (edited with Áine McGlynn; U Toronto P, 2013); Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (edited; WLUP, 2013); and Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (with Smaro Kamboureli; WLUP, 2013). I have been involved with the profession in many roles, including as a member of the editorial boards of NeWest Press, Canadian Literature, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literatures, as a member of the MLA’s Delegate Assembly, and as a member of ACCUTE’s Committee for Professional Concerns. I am committed to doing what I can to ensure that the profession is the best that it can be!
Member-at-large (Colleges): 2022-2024
Mark Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)
Mark Kaethler is Department Chair of Arts at Medicine Hat College and serves as Assistant Director of both the Map of Early Modern London and Linked Early Modern Drama Online at the University of Victoria. They are the author of Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama (De Gruyter, 2021) and a co-editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge, 2018) with Janelle Jenstad and Jennifer Roberts-Smith. Mark’s work has recently appeared in The London Journal, Early Theatre, and Literature Compass and is forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface. Their research interests include early theatre; textual editing; game studies; and ecological approaches to early modern literature, focusing on both cognition and the environment.
Member-at-large (Priestley Prize): 2021-23
Sarah Banting (Mount Royal University)
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where I teach first-year academic writing, Writing about Literature, editing, and senior English courses that invite students to think about this odd discipline, including the Honours Seminar. I research and publish on disciplinary rhetoric, tracking the styles, structures, and purposes or motives that characterize scholarly writing in English literary studies and inquiring into how we recognize and report each other’s research when we cite it. Recently I have become particularly interested in what is taught (besides texts), when English is taught: what methods, habits, and rhetorical strategies are the legacies of our undergraduate teaching, and what that says about our curriculum. As a scholar of disciplinary writing, I’ve done a lot of time on awards committees, and I’m delighted to be sustaining my service with ACCUTE in this role. I have also served two past terms on the Committee for Professional Concerns.

Lead Coordinator, Creative Writing Collective 2022-2024
Shazia Hafiz Ramji (University of Calgary)
I am the author of Port of Being, which received the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes, and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. My writing recently won the 2021 Poetry and Prose prize presented by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, was a finalist for the 2021 National Magazine Awards, and a finalist for the 2021 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. I’m a PhD student in English at the University of Calgary, where I’m studying kinship and aurality in Canadian literature. I have previously taught postcolonial literature and creative writing at the undergraduate level, and crafted a course on “Poetry as Listening” for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. In my spare time I enjoy researching military history, making ambient music and deejaying, and writing criticism, which has appeared in venues such as the Chicago Review of Books and Quill & Quire. I’m the arts editor for This magazine, an assistant editor for Metatron Press, a columnist for Open Book, and I work as a freelance poetry and fiction editor. I’m at work on a novel and a second book of poems.
Member-at-large (Past-President): 2022-2023
Gregory Betts (Brock University)
I am a Professor at Brock University in the Department of English Language & Literature, where I teach Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature. My history with ACCUTE goes back to 2001, when I served as a Grad Student Campus Rep for York University and inaugurated the Annual Survey of English Departments (that, I’m delighted to note, still carries on today). My research and scholarly activities intersect with my creative work in many ways. As a scholar, I’ve spent the past decade and a half researching and recovering the history of eruptive and disruptive writing in and against Canada. As a poet, I’ve been exploring the boundaries of textual collaboration (including plagiarism), experimentation, and performativity. I’ve organized literary festivals, academic conferences, and hundreds of poetry readings in many cities, and constantly seek new ways to draw disparate and marginalized communities into dialogue with each other. I have been the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (2018-2019), the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University (2014-2017), and the Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Brock University (2010-2016).
Editor, English Studies in Canada (ex-officio)
Allan Pero (Western University)

I’m a specialist in modernist literature, drama, psychoanalysis, and contemporary theory. Although I have a continuing interest in the work of figures like Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, Leonora Carrington, and Ronald Firbank (the Samuel Beckett of Camp), I am co-editor and contributor (with Gyllie Phillips) to a collection called The Many Façades of Edith Sitwell (2017), and am working on a book-length project on Camp and Modernism. In addition to trying to paint and write poetry, I also write programme notes and give talks at the Stratford Festival. I am honoured to be taking on the role of editor of ESC.
President, Canadian Association of Chairs of English (ex-officio): 2022-2023
Susie O’Brien (McMaster University)
I live in Ohròn:wakon/Hamilton and I’m a Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. I regularly teach a 2nd-year introduction to the environmental humanities, as well as graduate courses on cultural studies and critical theory, resilience, and the cultural politics of risk. My publications, on subjects including postcolonial literatures, slow and local food movements, scenario planning, environmental futurity, resilience and the temporality of globalization, have appeared in journals such as Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Globalizations, Cultural Critique, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Text, Modern Fiction Studies and South Atlantic Quarterly. I am also co-author, with Imre Szeman, of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (4th edition, 2016). I am currently completing a monograph tentatively titled “Reckoning With Resilience: Survival Stories in the Shadows of Settler Colonialism” and collaborating on a SSHRC funded research project, “Racialized Ecologies in and Beyond Settler-Colonial Canada: Documentary, Speculative, and Poetic Texts and Contexts,” with Cheryl Lousley (PI), Tania Aguilar-Way, Anita Girvan, Renae Watchman, Nandini Thiyagarajan and Joanne Leow.
ACCUTE Co-ordinator (non-voting Executive member)
Erin Knight
I am a writer living in St. Catharines. My most recent publication, Chaser (House of Anansi Press), is a book of poetry that uses the social history of tuberculosis to examine the individual and communal effects of disease. I have taught English, Communications, and Creative Writing at Niagara College, and worked as an editor for academic, commercial and trade publications.