Mathieu Aubin, photo taken by Alex Drake
Ph.D. student from FCCS chosen to attend prestigious summer program at Cornell University
Mathieu Aubin, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, is one of a select group of advanced graduate students chosen to attend the prestigious School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University for six weeks this summer.
Aubin came to UBC Okanagan after attending TeMIC, held in the summer of 2013 and 2014 on this campus, and notes that the smaller campus feel, the top notch research at this university, and the idea of working with Dr. Karis Shearer, compelled him to apply for the Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies, starting in 2014.
The summer institute at Cornell University is a six-week intensive program in which faculty members and graduate students from around the world, working in literature and related social sciences, will explore recent developments in critical theory. Aubin will be working alongside leading scholars and theorists, such as Homi Bhabha, Marjorie Levinson, and Timothy Murray.
“This is an important stepping stone in my career and an amazing opportunity to work with some of the leading scholars in this field who have inspired some of my work.” says Aubin.
Top institutions in the U.S. have internal competitions to choose a student to put forward for the program at Cornell. In Aubin’s case, he applied directly, producing a proposal demonstrating why he wanted to be there, his research areas, and what he would bring to the School. Aubin is one of only a few scholars attending from Canada.
Dr. Margaret Reeves, IGS Program Coordinator for FCCS, says that “we are enormously proud of Mathieu Aubin’s accomplishments this year. He will no doubt do us proud at Cornell.”
photo by Darren Hull
Aubin has been a very active and engaged student over the past two years that he has been at UBC Okanagan. He was recently a recipient of the Provost’s Teaching Award; won a Kent Haworth Archival Research Fellowship from York University; assisted in the teaching of a Canadian Literature course with Dr. Shearer; worked as a graduate writing assistant in the Centre for Scholarly Communications; was part of the organizing committee of the 2015 Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on this campus; was the graduate student representative on the FCCS Graduate Programs and Planning Committee for 2016; hosted the Wonderment of bill bissett in October of 2015; and participated in the Human Library event this past winter.
Aubin’s research focusses on the intersection between Vancouver avant-garde poetry from the 1960s to 1980s, by poets such as bill bissett and Daphne Marlatt, and Vancouver’s lesbian and gay liberation movement. He is looking at the development of queer “counterpublics” (adapting Michael Warner’s term) through the production and circulation of texts that depict non-normative forms of sexuality.
Aubin will be participating in Renata Salecl’s seminar “The Right to Ignorance: Psychoanalysis and Secrets in Times of Surveillance,” which will help him to develop the theoretical framework for his dissertation.
For more information on the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, visit: blogs.cornell.edu/sctcu/files/2013/08/SCT_Brochure2016.e-view-1c22jsl.pdf