[email protected]
705-949-2301, ext. 4347
Office: SH 416

Educational Background

• ‌PhD (Dalhousie University)
• MA (Dalhousie University)
• Honours BA, First Class (Brock University)

Michael studies literature and philosophy of the long nineteenth century (1789 to 1914). He reads the novel as criticism, especially the ways in which the works of Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence revalue, combat, and extend the art and thought of their intellectual and literary predecessors including George Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others.

Michael is the author of Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), which is the co-winner of the 2012 Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. He was the co-editor of The New Compass: A Critical Review. He has contributed articles to The Dalhousie Review, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and The Cambridge Quarterly. With Brian Crick, he edited a selection of D.H. Lawrence’s criticism, the third volume in a series that includes collections of essays by Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, all published by Edgeways Books at www.edgewaysbooks.com.

Currently, he is working on a new collection of the critical essays of George Whalley (1915-83), the eminent and accomplished Canadian man of letters. The Complete Poems of George Whalley was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (2016). He co-edited Selected Poems of George Whalley: A Digital Edition and Awake to Love and Beauty: Proceedings from a Conference in Honour of George Whalley. His work is funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Internship grants from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation. In addition, he will publish a collection of Whalley’s letters home from war (1939-45) and a biography. Michael was a Co-Applicant in Editing Modernism in Canada.

He teaches courses entitled: Reading for Life; The Novel – The Bright Book of Life; Poetics, Politics and Revolution; Reading Darwin and His Contemporaries; Modern Ideas, Words, Styles; Contesting Modernity – Joseph Conrad and Friedrich Nietzsche; Politics and Literature; Crime and Punishment; Criticism, Aesthetics, Literature; and Four Quartets – The Quadraphonic Novel.

Teaching Philosophy

I encourage students to engage in critical conversations that include the works we read and the culture in which we live. Through ongoing concurrent dialogues involving works of literature, critical texts, students’ essays, and class discussions, I ask students to become increasingly aware of their own use of language and the writing and speaking of others. I challenge students to become alert to the implications of different ideas for our thinking and living as individuals and in a culture as a whole. The importance of recognizing and understanding the relationships among conflicting and competing perspectives, individual, political, cultural, disciplinary, and otherwise, is a major consideration in my teaching. To improve our critical judgement we must understand the ideas and values that inform different arguments in order to understand the value of our own. I hope my students will understand that criticism is not only practiced on written works, but also directed at our fundamental assumptions and the relationship between our values and those of other individuals and cultures. Rather than simply educate students to read poems and novels, I want to help them learn how to exercise their critical judgement in their life outside of the classroom in response to the many competing demands their life will make upon them. In short, I emphasize the continuities between the thinking that occurs when reading and discussing literature in the classroom and in our living as a whole.

[email protected]
705-949-2301, ext. 4324
Office: SH 405

Educational Background

• PhD (McGill University)
• MA (Dalhousie University)
• BA Honours (Dalhousie University)
• BA (University of Toronto)

Dr. Linda Burnett, who completed her Ph.D at McGill University in 1999, has been teaching at Algoma University since 2004, where she has taught medieval and early modern drama, Shakespeare, the poetry and thought of John Donne, early modern
women’s writing, literary criticism, modern and contemporary drama, Canadian drama, tragedy, Detective Fiction, Science Fiction and the Environment: Climate Fiction, the literature of India and postcolonialism, and Creative Nonfiction. Her research interests include the theatre of Atlantic Canada, feminism and tragedy, contemporary feminist and post-colonial adaptations of the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare, scepticism and Renaissance tragedy, and the work of Margaret Cavendish. Dr. Burnett edited Theatre of Atlantic Canada, volume 16, in the Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English series published by Playwrights Canada Press, and Canadian Theatre Review 128: Theatre in Atlantic Canada. Essays she has published include “Re-Reading John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Re-Writing Tragedy: Margaret Cavendish’s The Unnatural Tragedy”; “‘Re-describing a World’: Towards a Theory of Shakespearean Adaptation in Canada”; and “Margaret Clarke’s Gertrude &; Ophelia: Writing Revisionist Culture, Writing a Feminist ‘New Poetics.’” Papers presented include “‘But Not for Joy, Not Joy’: A Spinozan Reading of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale” and “Colonization Can Only Disfigure the Colonizer”: Wendy Lill’s Analysis of Colonialism in Sisters.”

Teaching Philosophy
Whatever she is teaching, Dr. Burnett approaches her subject from a feminist perspective. A writing class, for example, would include a section on language and gender, with essays such as Emily Martin’s “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has
Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” and Carol Cohn’s “War, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War” at the centre of discussion. In a Science Fiction class, both not-so-feminist works, such as Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and feminist works, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, would be read side-by-side. And in a seminar on tragedy, a genre in which aesthetics and sexual politics have long been linked, students would consider how theoretical constructions of tragedy have focused on the male hero and marginalized woman, deemed an “inferior” being by Aristotle, limiting our reading of tragic drama.

While Dr. Burnett’s approach to her subject is feminist, her approach to teaching is best summed up by the words of Alice Walker’s Meridian: “I imagine good teaching as a circle of earnest people sitting down to ask each other meaningful questions. I don’t see it as a handing down of answers.” In other words, Dr. Burnett believes that learning is a two-way street, and that students learn the most when they learn to ask good questions. When a class is really working, therefore, the questions flow in both directions, with students coming to appreciate how the best questions work to spawn further such questions, coming to appreciate, as e.e. cummings puts it, that it is “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”

[email protected]
705-949-2301, ext. 4390
Office: SH 409

Educational Background

• ‌Post-doctoral Fellowship in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Leeds Metropolitan University)
• PhD (University of Toronto)
• MA (Durham University)
• BA with First Class Honours (Durham University)

Alice Ridout teaches courses in Contemporary, Canadian, Children’s and Popular Literature. Her upper year seminars have included “Contemporary Women’s Historical Fiction,” “Re-reading the Canadian Postmodern: In Memoriam, Robert Kroetsch,” “Dear Diary: Fictional Diaries,” and “Twice Upon a Time: Contemporary Retellings of Folk and Fairy Tales.”

Alice was born and brought up in Japan and is a dual British and Canadian citizen. These transnational life experiences have resulted in her interest in working across national borders in her research and teaching. She is the author of Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (Continuum, 2011), and co-editor of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty (Palgrave, 2015) and Doris Lessing: Border Crossings(Continuum, 2009). Her work has appeared in the journalsAdaptation, Margaret Atwood Studies, Doris Lessing Studies, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. She is Website Editor for the Doris Lessing Society and was President from 2012-2015. She also serves on the Editorial Board for Doris Lessing Studies and was Book Reviews Co-editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing from 2009-2011.

Teaching Philosophy

My first teaching experiences were as a tennis instructor so I came to academic teaching with a model of teaching and learning that was focused on skills acquisition. I have carried this model from the tennis court into the classroom as I continue to see a key aspect of my role as a university professor to be to enable students to acquire and practice their own critical thinking, reading and writing skills. Therefore, my classroom is a very interactive space, to which each student is encouraged to contribute, and in which all students are encouraged to feel safe to practice and develop their thinking and communication skills. I encourage students to place the texts and cultural products we are studying in their socio-historical context and I hope that the material we cover in class transforms their approach to the world around them. For example, in studying class-based cultural theories in the “Introduction to Popular Literature and Culture” course, I gave students an open-ended assignment inviting them to respond critically, creatively or actively to our module on class. As we were studying this topic at the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement we looked at some of the cultural products coming out of that movement and one group of students created a YouTube video along the lines of the 99% campaign while other students designed posters and artwork for their assignment. Studying cultural theories of class enabled students to see the Occupy Wall Street movement differently and vice versa.

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Nathan Murray teaches writing courses on the Brampton campus. These courses include “Academic Writing: Fundamentals”, “Writing for Digital and Social Media”, “Videogames as Literature”, and “Writing for the Workplace.” 

Dr Murray’s recent research is focused on the emergence of generative AI programs such as ChatGPT, especially the influence of large language models on university pedagogy. With Dr Elisa Tersigni, Dr Murray is the co-principal investigator of the Pedagogy AI Research (PAIR) Group. He has recently published work on assignment design and critical thinking when using generative AI. He has presented his research at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, as well as the Digital Pedagogy Institute.

He has published articles on British and Canadian Literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently at work on a book-length study of J.R.R. Tolkien, Agatha Christie and other popular mid-century British novelists who resisted the attention of critics who wanted to analyze hidden meanings in their work. The book examines the ways in which these authors attempted to direct the reader’s attention exclusively to the ‘surface’ of the work.

Teaching Philosophy

In his classroom, he positions critical thinking, composition and academic writing as tools for advocacy – crucially, both self-advocacy and advocacy for others. Grappling with complex ideas and learning to express one’s own ideas equips students with the basic tools for persuading others. Dr Murray relies heavily on contextualizing rhetorical skills within workplace scenarios. In his Academic Writing course, he assigns a mixture of business reports and personal essays as readings, mixing so-called ‘practical’ readings with readings that encourage empathetic connection to others and to the perceived and lived experiences of others. He seeks to empower my students with the ability to speak their minds in professional and academic contexts, as well as confidence in their own ideas. Most crucially, Dr Murray encourages students to use this ability to advocate for others that have not yet had the privileges of those in the classroom. His hope is that the learning that happens in my classroom is shared outside of the purview of the course, to have a positive influence on the lives of my students and of those around them.

[email protected]
tel. (705) 908-2301, ext. 4142
Office: SH 410

A new faculty member at Algoma U, Tony Robinson-Smith has spent much of the last twenty years teaching English language and English literature to college students at four universities in three different countries. He spent two years teaching eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature at the Royal University of Bhutan in the Himalayas, three years teaching English for Academic Purposes to international learners at Nottingham Trent University in England, and fourteen years teaching writing (academic, technical, and creative) at the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University here in Canada. Tony also spent six years teaching general and business English to adult learners in Japan. Tony’s research relates to non-fiction travel writing.

He is the author of three travel memoirs. Back in 6 Years (Goose Lane Editions, 2008) tells of his journey in the 1990s around the earth without using aircraft. The Dragon Run (University of Alberta Press, 2017) describes the month-long ultramarathon across the Kingdom of Bhutan he, his wife, and ten college students undertook to raise money to send local village kids to school. Of Canoes & Crocodiles (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is a view of life from the dug-out canoes he and his wife paddled down the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.

Tony has written travel sketches for The Globe and Mail and is a regular contributor of articles to the American online travel magazine Perceptive Travel. Tony has also published short fiction in The Fiddlehead and The Nashwaak Review.

Teaching Philosophy
As Dr. Diana Austin, Professor Emerita of English at the University of New Brunswick and winner of a 3M National Teaching Fellowship, rightly observes, “the role of the teacher is to create the conditions that help the students succeed” (“The Power of Joyful Teaching,” 2011). This the teacher achieves by selecting stimulating materials for study and encouraging the students to respond to them. In an ideal classroom, there is a ready exchange of ideas between the professor and his/her students and also between the students themselves.

I also believe that the college professor has a responsibility to nurture in learners a strong work ethic. Students should get used to being on time for class and taking notes, writing their assignments carefully and submitting them on time, and preparing themselves thoroughly for quizzes and exams. Lastly, the college classroom is in twenty-first century Canada a diverse place. White settlers rub shoulders with Indigenous students and those from Brazil, Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Africa. This I believe is a great opportunity for students to become more culturally aware and tolerant of otherness both on campus and beyond.

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Professor Robert Cooper has been teaching a variety of subjects, from theatre, scuba, theatre history, literature, ESL,  education in a variety of venues, from summer camps for kids, through high school, to university courses in Michigan, China and South Korea. He is an Honorary Member of Algoma University, where he has been awarded teaching excellence recognition. He has written and performed in his own plays, and is a published poet, short story writer, and playwright. He has been performing theatre and solo work since 1958.