Kasia Van Schaik holds a PhD in literature from McGill University and is currently a FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University and Dalhousie University. She is currently working with our own Dr. Erin Wunker.

Kasia is the author of the linked story collection "We Have Never Lived on Earth", which was nominated for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2022 Concordia University First Book Prize, and the ReLit Prize for short fiction.

Kasia’s writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, CBC Books, Maisonneuve Magazine, Senses of Cinema, Best Canadian Poetry, Electric Literature, The Rumpus and more. Her next book, a work of cultural criticism and memoir entitled "Women Among Monuments", explores 20th century histories of female genius, asking what, beyond a room of one’s own, are the necessary conditions for artmaking. Kasia is also currently at work on a collection of eco-poetry and is co-editing an essay collection, Shelter in Text, which investigates the relationship between shelter and narrative.

Publications:

• "We Have Never Lived on Earth", University of Alberta Press, 2022. Excerpt: https://maisonneuve.org/article/2022/04/8/we-have-never-lived-earth/
• “Museum Piece” in Maisonneuve Magazine: https://maisonneuve.org/article/2020/06/23/museum-piece/
• “Too Soon, Too Late: The Temporality of Ecological Grief in Cinema” in Senses of Cinema: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2021/feature-articles/too-soon-too-late-the-temporality-of-ecological-grief-in-cinema/
• “A Life in Transit: Spatial Biographies of. Alice Munro's Artist Figures”: English Studies in Canada (Vol. 45, Issue 1-2) https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/issue/download/1332/238

Find Kasia on Instagram at @kasia_writes

or on twitter at @kasiajuno

or Linktree: https://linktr.ee/kasia.van.schaik

Sheheryar Sheikh  (Shero) has published two novels: "The Still Point of the Turning World ", (HarperCollins India 2017) and "Call Me Al: The Hero’s Ha-Ha Journey", (HarperCollins India 2019). For his PhD at the University of Saskatchewan, he researched the white American trauma and Islamophobia in the post-9/11 renewal of the so-called “Great American Novel”.

As a Donald Hill Family Postdoctoral Fellow at Dalhousie University, working along side Dr. Heather Jessup,  he is creating a series of vignettes, short stories, and novellas set in a world-city or ecumenopolis that the Earth will become, in 2500-2555 CE.

Kevin Chabot received a PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. His research concerns the relationship between media and the supernatural, with a particular interest in the ghost as a transmedial figure. His forthcoming book Poetics of the Paranormal is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press and he is currently at work on a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral project concerning queer spectrality in gothic film and literature. His writing has been published in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Discourse, Film International, and the anthology Horror in Space. His research and teaching interests include film theory, horror film, film history and historiography, television studies, queer theory, and media archaeology.  

Publications:

• “Tape: Videographic Ruin and the Lure of the Tangible.” Chabot, Kevin. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, no. 2 (2022): 442-463.

• “Queer Spectralities and Untimely Subjects: Queer Ghost Hunters and Paranormal Reality Television.” Chabot, Kevin. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 2 (2019): 1-22.

• “Leprechaun 4 and Jason X: Camp, Paracinema", and the Postmodern Sequel.” In Horror in Space: Critical Essays on a Film Subgenre", edited by Michele Brittany, 217-232. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2017.