I am an English professor in the Department of Humanities and Languages at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, where I study North American colonial literary cultures and my own ancestors, who were New England Planters and Loyalists who came to Waponahkik in the 18th century. Their promises to live in good relationship with Waponahki people inform my ongoing research program on non-Indigenous responsibilities under the Peace and Friendship Treaties.

I have published articles and chapters on the Puritan captive John Gyles, the English novelist Frances Brooke, the Virginia colonist John Smith, William Shakespeare, the Canadian/Australian author S. Douglass S. Huyghue, and others. My writings about colonial, settler colonial, and Wabanaki literary histories have been published in numerous journals, including AlterNative, NAIS, Settler Colonial Studies, Canadian Literature, University of Toronto Quarterly, English Studies in Canada, and others. My collaborations with Wabanaki artists have featured in regional academic and arts symposia, exhibitions, and in the Journal of New Brunswick Studies.

My first book, The Homing Place (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017), considered the contexts in which settler Canadians most often understand themselves and others — where those contexts come from and how they interfere with settlers’ ability to be transformed by information from or about Indigenous peoples. While there is much talk today in academic circles about the importance of listening to Indigenous peoples, I discussed the amount of work and self-reflection that settlers will need to do just to get to a place from which they will be able to listen or to be transformed. And I called that place the homing place — the place of listening across epistemological barriers and interruptions that were built into northeastern settler societies and worldviews across centuries.

The Homing Place was shortlisted for the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing and awarded the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick Award for Non-Fiction. This award transformed my understanding of my audiences and communities, resulting in the creation of this public website — a process that you can read more about, if you like, in this interview with The Miramichi Reader.

Selected Academic Articles:

• “On Treaty, Virtue, and Plots that Choose Death: Moses Perley’s Sporting Sketches” (Journal of New Brunswick Studies, 2024)
• “wikhikhotuwok and the Re-Storying of Menahkwesk: Telling History Through Treaty,” co-authored with Gina Brooks (Journal of New Brunswick Studies, 2024)
• “The Last of the Wabanakis: Absolution Writing in Atlantic Canada” (Settler Colonial Studies, 2020)
• “The Grammar of Inanimacy: Frances Brooke and the Production of North American Settler States” (Firsting in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 2019)
•  “Kinshipwrecking: John Smith’s Adoption and the Pocahontas Myth in Settler Ontologies” (AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 2018)
• “Honey from the Rock: John Gyles and the Northeastern North American Search for Anglo Indigeneity” (University of Toronto Quarterly, 2016)
• “Cartographic Dissonance: Between Geographies in Douglas Glover’s Elle” (Canadian Literature, 2014)
• “Imaginary Lines: Transcending the St. Croix Legacy in the Northeast Borderlands” (NAIS, 2014)
• “Toward the Desertion of Sycorax’s Island: Challenging the Colonial Contract” (English Studies in Canada, 2013)

Selected Other Work:

• “Artist Tara Francis tells the story of once forgotten Wolastoqey island in the Menahkwesk (Saint John) harbour” in UNB Newsroom
• “Saint John History Should Reflect More than a Colonial Space” on CBC’s Information Morning – Saint John with Julia Wright
• “The Frontier on Film” on Historia Nostra with Erin Isaac
• “Canadian Exceptionalism is about Land and Resources” in Borealia: Early Canadian History