The Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) is pleased to announce that Marcelle Kosman, a doctoral candidate in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, has been nominated for the BSC-SbC’s inaugural Congress Graduate Merit Award. Her paper, “Taking Out the Trash: The Ethics of Recovering White Feminist Fiction,” will be presented at the BSC’s annual conference in June 2020.
This paper emerges from Ms Kosman’s doctoral research on early Canadian women’s science fiction and fantasy writing, which examines the circulation of early Canadian women’s sf between 1896 and 1946, and in so doing draws connections between white feminist nationalism, genre, and canonicity. In her presentation, Ms Kosman will consider how early Canadian women’s genre writing documents the desire of first wave feminists to build a racially and socially “pure” Anglo-Saxon Canada, and will ask how and why scholars might un-archive and interrogate these texts. However limited their original circulation and current canonicity may be, she argues that these texts warrant further investigation for how they shed light on both the history of white supremacy and the ongoing complicity of progressive and liberal white women in the oppression of marginalized peoples.
The Congress Graduate Merit Award includes a prize of $500. Ms Kosman will also be invited to publish a revised, article-length version of the paper in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, subject to peer review.
The Congress Graduate Merit Award was announced for Congress 2020 as part of a new award program facilitating the participation of graduate students in Congress activities. As a merit-based award, it serves to recognize and celebrate the academic excellence of deserving graduate students who present their work at Congress.