[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. 4334
Office: SH 411

Educational Background

• ‌PhD, University of Cambridge
• MA, University of Saskatchewan
• BA, University of Saskatchewan

Biographical Background

I was born and raised in Saskatchewan, and from an early age remember having a fascination for history.  Growing up, I would spend hours in the local public library scouring the shelves for books that interested me.  At that time, my first area of interest was World War II, especially military aviation; I think it was from this topic that my fascination with British history and culture started.  I later began to read historical fiction and was drawn to the period of political, social, and religious crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That attraction has remained with me until today.

After completing my undergraduate and initial postgraduate education at the University of Saskatchewan, I enrolled in a PhD programme at the University of Cambridge in England.  I completed my doctorate in early modern British history at Cambridge in 2000, and then returned to the University of Saskatchewan where I taught as a sessional lecturer in the History Department for seven years.  In 2007, I was offered a permanent position in the Department of History and Philosophy at Algoma University. I quickly discovered the warm, friendly, and encouraging academic atmosphere that exists in the classrooms at Algoma, and I enjoy my teaching here very much.

Areas of Teaching and Research Interest

I am very much interested in the relationship between the prominent ideas in a society and the way they interacted with, and influenced, political, cultural, and social developments. My past research looked at beliefs about the end of the world and the impact they had on later seventeenth-century Britain.  My current project examines the ideas that were being spread from church pulpits in Britain from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, analyzing how these views contributed to the development of British identity during this period.

I teach a wide range of courses on British, European, and world history.  I have recently created and taught courses on the portrayal of historical events and periods on film and television; I have also developed a course on the history of witches and the witch-hunts in early modern Europe.  I regularly teach courses on the advance of scientific ideas in Europe, as well as on the political enlightenment that takes place from the early 1500s to the end of the 1700s. I also love teaching first-year surveys on the history of western civilization, where I am fortunate to be able to interact with and learn from students entering into the early years of their university education.  I find it particularly rewarding to be able to learn from and encourage students’ interests in history and, hopefully, inspire in them a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and historical curiosity.

Teaching Philosophy

The majority of people enrolled in my courses will not become professional historians.  So, while I am committed to teaching history as an important discipline in its own right, I also recognize its value in developing students’ abilities and proficiencies that are trans-disciplinary and can be employed in whatever studies and careers they might choose to undertake.  This is best achieved by exposing students to primary sources (documents, writings, artifacts, images, and oral histories from the past, for example), along with more recent historical analyses, which plunge them into a historian’s work at the same time as honing certain fundamental and transferable skills.

I structure classes around the need to develop the tools of critical reading, effective analysis, and strong communication of ideas both orally and in writing.  Instead of me simply declaring why certain information is important and how it should be understood, it is essential that students be given the opportunity to apply their own interpretations to events and ideas from history.  For me, the study of History is not about the memorization of dates and names: its focus should not just be learning about details of the past, but also understanding why things exist the way they do today. This prompts students to ask “Why?” and “How?”, which are the central questions of all academic inquiry and of human minds.  In short, I believe that everyone – teachers, lawyers, social workers, accountants, and scientists, to name only a few – can benefit from studying History.

Algoma University is a wonderful place to implement these approaches in the classroom.  All classes are of a manageable size so that not only do I get to know my students’ names, but also learn about them as people in more meaningful and important ways: their extra-curricular activities, their career aspirations, and the academic work that they are doing in other classes as well as mine.  This allows me to be a better professor because I am able to concentrate on the individual needs and interests of each student in a way that would not be possible at other universities, where class sizes expand into the hundreds. The quality of student work I see at Algoma is also very good, with many of my students advancing to pursue their careers or further academic studies at a very high level.  It is an honour to be able to get to know my students and to see them accomplish their goals and dreams in this way.

Academic Publications and Presentations

In my experience, the best teachers I have had are those who have been active and interested in their particular fields of research, and so I remain committed to my academic research as a way to enliven and benefit student engagement in the classroom.  Below are a few of my publications and conference presentations from recent years.

Books

Revelation Restored:  the Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Boydell & Brewer, 2011)

http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=13535

Peer-reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

“Prophecy on the Margins: a Case Study of the Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England,” in Sarah Harvey and Suzanne Newcombe (eds.), Prophecy in the New Millennium:  When Prophecies Persist (Ashgate, 2013), 43-55

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409449959

“Preaching, National Salvation, Victories, and Thanksgivings: 1689-1800,” in Keith Francis and William Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689-1901 (Oxford University Press, 2012), 261-274

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199583591.do

“Radical Revelation?  Apocalyptic Ideas in Late Seventeenth-Century England,” in Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (eds.),Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context (Ashgate, 2011), 183-204

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754669050

“Prophecy, Patriarchy, and Violence in the Early Modern Household:  the Revelations of Anne Wentworth,” Journal of Family History, 34, #4 (October 2009), 344-368

http://jfh.sagepub.com/content/34/4/344.abstract

“Thomas Beverley and the ‘Late Great Revolution’:  English Apocalyptic Expectation in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Nicholas Keene and Ariel Hessayon (eds.), Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England(Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 158-175

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754638933

“Revelation and the Revolution of 1688-1689,” The Historical Journal, 48 (2005), pp. 351-389

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X05004437

“The Anglican Apocalypse in Restoration England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 55 (2004), pp. 467-501

http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022046904009984

“The patience of the saints, the Apocalypse, and moderate nonconformity in Restoration England,” Canadian Journal of History, 38 (2003), pp. 505-520

http://utpjournalsreview.com/index.php/CJOH/article/view/11396

Selected Conference Presentations

• “‘Are we there yet?’:  mapping apocalyptic time and locating the End in England, c. 1660-1760,” Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, April 2013
• “Thanksgivings and ideas of Britishness in the long eighteenth century,” Midwest Conference on British Studies, Terre Haute, Indiana, November 2011
• “Commemoration, Crisis, and the Thanksgiving Sermons of the 1680s:  1689,” The Bangor Conference on the Restoration: Politics, Religion & Culture in the 1680s, Bangor University, Wales, July 2009
• “Prophecy, Plots, and Exclusion:  The Apocalypse and the Politics of Crisis in Later Seventeenth Century England,” North American Conference on British Studies, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 2008
• “Patriarchy, the Apocalypse, and the Power of Prophecy in Later Seventeenth-Century England,” History Department Colloquia Series, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, November 2007
• “In the Right Place at the Wrong Time:  the Apocalypse in England in the 1690s,” Midwest Conference on British Studies, Dayton, Ohio, September 2007
• “Thomas Beverley, Apocalypse, and Reformation:  the Case for the Long Seventeenth Century in England,” Faculty Workshop, Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, December 2006
• “Revelation, radicalism, and the nature of apocalyptic ideas in late seventeenth-century England,” Rediscovering Radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland c.1550-c.1700, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, England, June 2006

[email protected]
705-949-2301
Office: WW 106

Credentials: BMus (University of Western Ontario), BEd (University of Western Ontario), MA (Queen’s University), PhD (York University)

[email protected]
705-949-2301, ext. 4228
Office: WW 106

Credentials: BA Hons (University of Ottawa), MA (University of Ottawa), PhD (University of Ottawa)

For More Information: Please view my academic website or my personal blog.

[email protected]
705-949-2301
Office: WW 106

Credentials: BA Hons (University of Windsor), BEd (University of Windsor), MA (University of Windsor)