Canadian poetry.
Elegy and memorialization; grief politics.
Canadian women's literature.
Canadian ecopoetics.
I received my PhD in English with a specialization in Canadian literature from the University of Victoria in 2005 and my MA in English from the University of Manitoba in 2000. I spent several years away from academia working as a support worker in at-risk communities, and as a freelance writer.
Prior to joining Laurier, I taught at the University of Winnipeg (2005-2006) and the University of Victoria (2003-2005), as well as at the Victoria School of Writing (2004-2005).
The main focus of my research is Canadian literature, with an emphasis on modernist and contemporary poetry. I have an ongoing research project concerning the gender and race politics of the elegy in Canadian literature, and am also working with intersections of the urban and wild in Canadian poetry, and with the philosophy of Simone Weil as it appears in Canadian literature. In addition to these research projects, I am also a working poet and my creative work appears frequently in literary journals in Canada and the U.K.
Finalist, Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian Literary Criticism for The Daughter's Way: Canadian Women's Paternal Elegies (2012).
Bliss Carman Award for Poetry for "Arise and Walk"(2003).
Winner: Mayor's Poetry City Challenge, Waterloo (2012).
Finalist: Don D. Walker Award for Best Essay in Western American Studies (2009).
I am willing to supervise graduate students in the areas of Canadian poetry or fiction, with an emphasis on projects concerning affect theory, elegy and memorialization, gender and/or class politics, and theories of nation and citizenship.
MacDonald, Tanis, ed. Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt. Wilfrid Laurier University Press (2006).
MacDonald, Tanis. Rue the Day. Turnstone Press (2008).
MacDonald, Tanis. The Daughter's Way: Canadian Women's Paternal Elegies. Wilfrid Laurier University Press (2012).
MacDonald, Tanis. "'Citizens of a human body of kind': Gender and Space in Dennis Lee's Civil Elegies and Other Poems." Canadian Poetry (2010).
MacDonald, Tanis. "Rhetorical Metatarsals: Bone Memory in Dionne Brand's Ossuaries." The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film. Eds. Eleanor Ty and Russell Kilbourn. Wilfrid Laurier University Press (2013).
MacDonald, Tanis. "The Counter/Public in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of Poetry in Canada." Public Poetics. Ed. Travis Mason, Bart Vautour, Erin Wunker, and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. (in press.)
E: tmacdonald@wlu.ca
Office location: DAWB 3-130
On sabbatical.