911³Ô¹Ï

911³Ô¹Ï’s Department of English congratulates its current Master of Arts students Hanako Teranishi and Odessa Twibill, as well as incoming MA student David Collings on their successful Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Research Scholarship – master’s program (CGRS-M) applications. All three students are working on exciting projects.

David Collings (coming from the University of British Columbia but is mentored by our own Professor Leith Davis) is focusing on Whose Poet, Whose Bard: Robert Burns and West Coast Oral Culture. He describes his work as follows:

In Vancouver’s first decades as a new colonial project, the Scottish Romantic poet Robert Burns was widely celebrated by immigrants who brought memories of Burns with them from Scotland, England, and Eastern Canada. Because Burns was ubiquitous, he was encountered by everyone living in and around the city, and variable remembrances of Burns as print poet or bardic orator produced different accounts of the value of Scottish identity and print media. By examining the orality of Burns and encounters with Scottish authorship that are not classically literary, I aim to restore a voice to the diverse literate and oratory communities, settler and Indigenous, with a stake in Vancouver’s position in Scottish, Canadian, and Coast Salish literary history. 

Hanako Teranishi is examining Japanese-Canadian internment literature. Their project, Intimacies of Sugar Beets: Logics of Race and Settler Capitalism Through Literary Representations of Incarcerated Japanese Canadian Labour, is described as follows:

My research analyzes how the literary representations of Japanese-Canadian sugar beet farming, displaced from B.C. and incarcerated in rural Alberta and Manitoba, acts as a microcosm for the complex logics of incarceration, race, and settler capitalism in Canada. Through literary analysis and poetry, I illuminate the connections between farm labour, plantations, and race through the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory, Marxism, and ecocritism. My intention is to further current discussions regarding Japanese internment literature, history, and its afterlives by re-orienting discourse away from narratives that uphold settler colonial constructions and projects, and toward anti-colonial frameworks of racial solidarity.

Odessa Twibill is exploring the intersections between Black and Indigenous literatures. Her project is entitled, Âniskwâcimopicikêwin: Witnessing Black-Indigenous Kinship Through Autobiography. She describes it as follows:

This project examines the relational resonances between Métis author Maria Campbell and Black radical thinker Malcolm X by foregrounding kinship-based epistemologies that exceed western comparative frameworks. The Cree concept of °Ââ³ó°ìô³Ù´Ç·É¾±²Ô (kinship) offers a framework attentive to the social, familial, and economic ties that shape Indigenous life, one I recognized through similarly flexible and elastic Black kinship formations. Reading these narratives through Ã‚²Ô¾±²õ°ì·É⳦¾±³¾´Ç±è¾±³¦¾±°ìê·É¾±²Ô&²Ô²ú²õ±è;(intertextuality), reveals shared landscapes of dispossession and survival. My methodology braids Cree narrative memory with African and African American orature as aesthetic and epistemic practice. Inspired by research-creation projects such as Jordan Abel’s NISHGA and Ruby Smith Díaz’s Searching for Serafim, I will produce a hybrid critical-creative work that interweaves personal narrative, archival engagement, and autobiography to illuminate relational threads between Black and Indigenous colonial experiences.