Meet Our 2025/2026 Keynote
Merilyn Simonds
Merilyn Simonds is the internationally published author of three e-born works of fiction and 20 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and continuously in print for 30 years. Among her best-selling nonfiction is A New Leaf, the story of her gardens north of Kingston, and Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, a meditation on reading, writing, and the future of the printed book. Her innovative memoir/biography, Woman, Watching, won the 2022 Foreword Indies Nonfiction Award. Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend, published in September, 2025, became an instant bestseller.
Featured Panels (2024/25)
01
The Body and the Self
Featured Speakers:
Olivia Lanc, Ava Salo, Anna Wodzicki, Abagail McIntyre Tsiang
​
Featured Papers:
To Survive is to Split: How the Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Critiques the Repressive Nature of Victorian Society;
The Human Body and Classical Tragedy:
A Critical Humanist Reading of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and
King Lear; And From Dust He Shall
Return; Necropolitics and Resistance in Frankenstein in Baghdad; The Body as
a Portrayal of Loss of Agency in
“The Husband Stitch"
03
Life, Death, and the Art of
Making Meaning
Featured Speakers:
Siya Marwaha, Victoria Chung,
Elloïse Bastien, Emily Lackie
​
Featured Papers:
Inside Interiors: Proust, Cocteau, & the Modernist Bedroom; Making the Present Anew Despite Pain Unanswered: Faith
During Crisis in the Modernist Era; From
God to Nature: Romantic Revolution in
Blake and Coleridge; Life, Death, and Legacy in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “There
Will Come Soft Rains”
02
Imagining Individual and
Collective Futures
Featured Speakers:
Lauryn Tran, Maddy Bennett,
Zoe Compson, Mehavi Jeyabalan
​
Featured Papers:
​The World As We Know It: A Comparative Analysis of “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” and “The World Is Too Much With Us”; As The Bombs Draw Closer: Static to Dynamic Characterization in Burning Vision; The Pursuit of Knowledge as Simulacrum: A Baudrillardian Analysis of Dionne Brand's Theory; Bartleby: Alienation, Dehumanization and Death in Capitalism
04
Challenging Archetypal
Narratives and Paratexts
Featured Speakers:
Madeleine Vigneron, Avery Collins,
Rys Zhu, Marta Dorschner
​
Featured Papers:
​“The Slave Woman Ought Not to Be Judged”: Bad Motherhood in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Beloved; A Nineteenth Century ‘Awakening’: Jane Austen’s Catherine, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Cecelia, and Their Struggle in a Sleeping World; Paratextual Harm in “The History of Mary Prince”; Preserving the Home: The Keeping of Tradition in Cranford and “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”
