BA, PhD
Instructor, English
School of Humanities
English
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
604.986.1911 ext. 3438
Fir Building, room FR 442
andreaactis@capilanou.ca
Education
PhD, English, Brown University, 2017.
BA (Honours), English and Humanities, Simon Fraser University, 2007.
Bio
Andrea Actis (PhD, Brown University, 2017) joined the English Department in 2017. Her teaching, research, and creative interests emerge from her ongoing commitment to the study of how certain affects, especially those of seriousness and anger, are understood, represented, and activated in contemporary culture.
Most recently her literary and critical interests have focused on comparative mysticisms, on histories and theories of so-called "anomalous" or "paranormal" experience, and on the ideologies underpinning developments in both space colonization and AI technologies.
Actis received her BA in English and Humanities from Simon Fraser University and her PhD from Brown University, where she completed a dissertation on competing definitions, invocations, and performances of seriousness in the work of such writers as Laura (Riding) Jackson, Audre Lorde, David Foster Wallace, CAConrad, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Fred Moten.
From 2015–2017, Actis edited the literary and visual arts magazine The Capilano Review while overseeing its community programming. She remains an active member of The Capilano Review's Editorial Board and frequently attends conferences in her areas of creative and scholarly interest.
Actis' work has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her poetry, criticism, and art writing have been published in Fence, The Rumpus, World Picture Journal, Pelt, and elsewhere.
Her book Grey All Over, an experimental grief memoir, was published by Brick Books in 2021 and was longlisted for the 2022 ReLit Award.
My teaching interests include modern and contemporary literature, culture, and intellectual history; decolonial literatures and pedagogies; critical race studies; poetry and poetics; experimental memoir and autobiography; anomalous experience and the UFO/UAP phenomenon; and publishing and book design.
In literature and writing classes alike, I aim to teach a wide range of materials that require us to hold in mind and action both what we have in common with one another and what we might experience very differently.
I also encourage my students, regardless of the particular course or assignment, to honour and write through the value of their own experiences and to imagine new possibilities for how research might be undertaken and presented.