ABOUT ME                                                                                                                                                                     home                                                                    

My parents grew up in East Saint John and ended up "goin' down the road" to Toronto where I was born. My Dad was transferred to Regina and that is where I grew up. I followed my Dad to Winnipeg for my last few years of high school and I graduated from Daniel McIntyre Collegiate.

I attended the University of Regina for my undergraduate degree. I began in pre-Social Work, majored in education and film before settling into Sociology. My honours thesis was a critical analysis of post-secondary education in Canada.

In the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department at Dalhousie, I continued my research on post-secondary education. My MA thesis was a study of women in the academy.

My PhD studies brought me to McMaster University. While at MAC I got very involved in labour politics on campus and provincially. I also spent four years as a residence hall director, of Brandon Hall,  in the McMaster residence system. My PhD dissertation was a study of class, gender and television viewership. I successfully defended my dissertation in November 2004.

While completing my PhD dissertation I held numerous short-term teaching contracts. I taught Sociology at Mount A, Acadia, UNBSJ and Nipissing University. I also taught in the Gender Equality and Social Justice Program at Nipissing. Finally, I have settled in Saint John in the Information and Communication Studies Program (housed within the Social Sciences Dept) since July, 2006. I was awarded tenure in July 2013. There is information about current teaching on the courses page. 

My current research is concerned with the reception and fandom around comic books and Manga (Japanese comic books). I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in 2007 in Yokohama, Japan & connected with manga fans in Japan. This lead to a separate research project on Worldcon which I have set aside recently, but expect to return to in the future. If you are interested,  please check out my Worldcon research page HERE.

Click HERE to view my Manga and Anime Research Page. I presented a paper on manga texts at the Popular Culture Association (of America) conference in San Francisco in 2008. That paper is published inThe Journal of Popular Culture  Vol. 45, No. 4, 2012 pp789-806.   I also conducted a series of interviews with manga readers in the spring of 2009 and I presented a paper, Girly Girls and Pretty Boys: Gender and Audience Reception of English-translated Manga,  based on that data at the Queen City Comics conference in Regina, SK on May 2, 2009 which was published in the conference proceedings online at http://hdl.handle.net/10294/3092. I presented more research based on this data at the Comic Arts Conference which was part of WonderCon in San Francisco in April, 2010. Subsequently, I was interviewed by Charles Webb at  MangaLife about my research on manga readers. I've been looking at relations between publishers and scanlators (amateur translators of manga) and have presented at recent conferences on this topic including The Association Asian Studies Annual Conference in March 2012 and the Comic Arts Conference at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2012. I presented a paper on this topic at the Asian Conference on Cultural Studies May 25, 2013 in Osaka, Japan. While in Japan I also participated on a panel organized by the Kyoto Seika University International Manga Research Center (IMRC) hosted by the International Manga Museum, Kyoto, Japan. I continue to present research an publish in this area. Selected publications are posted on the Anime and Manga Research page linked above.

I co-authored a paper, The mouse is dead, long live the ogre: Shrek and the boundaries of transgression,  with Dann Downes that is published in Investigating Shrek  - published in 2011. We have another paper published in The Rolling Stones - Sociologcial Perspectives. Helmut Staubmann Ed.  USA: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield Books -published in July 2013.    We have recently completed a third collaboration about Elvis and copyright for a volume on Death and the Rock Star that was published in 2015