I'm an avid gardener, growing veggies, herbs, and berries in my community garden plot and on my small balcony. I've recently begun writing how-to gardening articles, focusing on growing food inexpensively, in urban settings with limited access to land outdoors.
At the 2019 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and in the September 2019 issue of Literary Review of Canada, I've shared my perspective on the need for bi-directional flows of information between scholars and off-campus sites of knowledge
I write a monthly advice column at UniversityAffairs.ca called "Ask Dr. Editor." Through this column, I respond to the writing questions of academics in Canada, relating the finer details of their queries to broader issues of academic communication and knowledge dissemination.
I am leading the development and evaluation of five-day writing retreats for graduate students at UBC, a project funded through UBC's Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund.
I drafted, coordinated, and won over $7,000 in funding for a project to build observational beehives--beehives with plexiglass walls--for my local community garden, the Downtown Intercultural Gardeners' Society (D.I.G.S.). I obtained funding from the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Foundation for this project.
In this paper, I look closely at one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s first pieces of writing from his Polynesian years, “The Song of Rahéro: A Legend of Tahiti” (1890), which was a translation of an Indigenous Tahitian legend. I argue that his adaptation into the ballad form brings into the poem a fatalistic, haunting undertone that runs counter to the bardic poetry of the peripheries of empire that had been produced by Scottish writers a hundred years before Stevenson.
As a Research Grants Facilitator in the UBC Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, I help researchers to articulate their goals to an audience of their peers. In my first 2.5 years in this role, I have coordinated 45 successful grants totaling ~$3M.
This paper examines the unrestrained license that Robert Louis Stevenson used while composing his ballad, “Song of Rahéro: A Legend of Tahiti,” which is a translation of a traditional Tahitian legend. Stevenson attempted to replicate Tahitian rhythms in his translation, thus bringing foreign forms and, in transliteration, foreign words, to a traditionally British genre.
This paper examines the metaphors used in Andrew Lang’s 1887 Longman’s Magazine article “Literary Plagiarism,” arguing that Lang repeatedly describes ideas as if they are objects in order to frame the late-nineteenth-century plagiarism debate as a discussion of the best use of materials.
My PhD research focused on a traditionally British verse form, the ballad. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, at a time of a rampant uptake in colonialism--and, this being a generation after Darwin's Origin, at a time when there was no pretense of missionary zeal to justify colonial violence--the traditionally British verse form of the ballad was increasingly peopled with non-British cultures, voices, stories, and words.