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In scholarly attention to the effeminate figure of “the fop,” critics largely read the archetype as vain and socially inept, at odds with an eighteenth-century landscape in which masculinity is increasingly codified in terms of homosocial rivalry or heterosexual opposition.

McKenna Boeckner’s research intervenes in this discourse highlighting moments wherein fop characters extend, alter, and reinvent what it means to grow close to others in the eighteenth century.

By uniting contemporary queer kinship theories with primary texts by authors such as William Congreve, David Garrick, and Alexander Pope, Boeckner refuses scorn and rather bespeaks the fops’ departure from decorum as a testing of new relations between men.

Boeckner also traces the fop’s afterlives in twenty-first-century art, where figures like Jo Kelly and Pablo Bronstein repurpose effeminate stylizations to imagine erased communities and joyful kinships with the censured past.

Eliza Ives’s research centres on the relations between philosophy and literature. Her PhD dissertation examines literary works in which the practices of fiction and nonfiction appear to merge - including lyric poetry, autobiographical novels, and memoirs - and considers how borderline or hybrid texts might illuminate the fiction/nonfiction distinction and contribute to developed philosophical understandings of both fiction and fictionality.

Meghan Kemp-Gee writes poetry, comics and scripts. Her academic interests include poetry, comics studies, composition pedagogy and creative writing pedagogy. Her creative dissertation is a collection of lyric poems about sports, athletes and injuries.

Jamie Kitts (she/her) is the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit, the Managing Editor of Qwerty Magazine, and a poet. Her research interests include transgender representations in contemporary literature, Atlantic Canadian literature, and American Transcendentalism.

Her dissertation, No Burn Order, is an archival project of gender-expansive poets and poetics from so-called Atlantic Canada. Conceived during former New Brunswick premier Blaine Higgs' attack on transgender rights in the province, this project endeavors to create a publicly accessible hub for gender-expansive poetry with selections from major works, brief analyses, and bibliographies.

Kitts' dissertation, as well as her Master's thesis Play/Fighting, both earned her funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Amber McMillan studies Canadian, American and Indigenous literatures.

Her dissertation will take up the literary and critical region of Atlantic Canada, in particular, the intersection between poetry and philosophies of place through metaphor, wilderness and the homing instinct.

Anastasios Mihalopoulos is interested in exploring ideas of home-seeking and nature through ethnomusicology, language, environmental studies and one’s sense of place. He is particularly interested in writing about the Greek and Italian diaspora, myth retellings and climate fiction.

His dissertation project, “Dancing in the Land of Sound,” will be a full-length poetry collection drawing heavily on the enduring myth of Orpheus and Eurydice from Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses - the project endeavors to echo the aural patterns in folk music hailing from Greece, Italy and Canada. By drawing parallels between the melodies of music and the verses of poetry, the project aims to showcase this fusion alongside narratives of the diaspora as it examines sound as a sense of home.

Fawn Parker is a novelist, poet, and PhD candidate in Creative Writing.

Fawn's research focus is Mad literature, specifically memoir and fiction writing by and about institutionalized women. Her dissertation project consists of a multi-genre trilogy with themes of medical trauma, misdiagnosis, and lack of access to care.

The three literary works and critical introduction will challenge the overwhelming dominance of the biomedical model in mental healthcare by "storying" the psych. institution experience, pushing back against the reduction of the service user/survivor to a series of symptoms and diagnoses.

Alex (she/they) is a PhD student studying Gender and Sexuality in Literature. Broadly speaking, they are interested in alternative world-building and interpersonal philosophy in contemporary queer fiction. Their PhD thesis examines the use of plotlessness in queer fiction as a way to circumvent hetero/homonormative temporal schemas.

Alex has been published in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, Intonations, and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction, and has forthcoming work in Native Studies in Canada. Their article "'And the Rain Won’t Make any Difference?’: Resistance to Homo/Chrono-Normativity in Jonny Appleseed and A History of My Brief Body” was recognized as an Honorable Mention for the 2025 F.E.L. Priestley Prize.

Alex is currently teaching courses in English and Gender & Women's Studies.

Hannah Rigg is a PhD student and studies British literature in the long nineteenth century and its philosophical and political contexts.

Her dissertation will engage with socialist feminist literature from the late nineteenth century and will explore debates about matriarchal utopias and practical socialism. This dissertation will focus upon the work of Margaret Harkness.