Gregory Betts
Assistant Professor
PhD York
Areas of Specialization:
Gregory Betts is a well published poet as well as a scholar of Canadian Literature. His doctoral dissertation was on modernism and mysticism in Bertram Brooker, Canada's first abstract painter and the winner of the first Governor-General's Award for Literature (Think of the Earth, 1936), and he is currently working on a study of the (uncollected) tradition of Canadian mystical modernist literature and its connection to the international avant-garde. He has been commissioned by the University of Ottawa Press to produce two critical editions of Brooker's unpublished writings. Gregory Betts is the Web Editor for The University of Ottawa Press's Canadian reprint series.
Selected recent publications:
Editor. In the Ward: The Urban Poetry and Painting of Lawren Harris. Toronto: Exile Editions 2008.
Editor and Introduction. After Exile: A Raymond Knister Poetry Reader. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2003.
Assistant Editor. W. W. E. Ross: Irrealities, Sonnets & Laconics. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2003. Editor Barry Callaghan.
"The Revolutionary Other: A Resistance Strategy in Lamming, Selvon, and Brand for the Carribean and its Diaspora." Diasporic Ruptures: Diasporic and Identity Discourses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. In press.
"Before Our Time: Radical English-Canadian Poetries Across the Post/Modern Divide." Canadian Poetry, forthcoming.
"Media, McLuhan, and the Dawn of the Electric Age in Sheila Watson's Deep Hollow Creek and The Double Hook." Essays in Canadian Writing 84 (December 2005). In press.
"A Philosophy of the Verb: Betram Brooker's Early Canadian Mystical-Modernist Verse." Studies in Canadian Writing 30.1 (September 2005).