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December Update December 24th, 2014

This month I spent many of my working days writing an article on John Buchan, the prolific British novelist who became Canada’s governor general in 1935.  Titled “John Buchan, Conservation, and the Democracy of Nature,” the essay examines Buchan’s passion for green spaces and his advocacy for the conservation of wildlife both in Britain and in Canada.  In addition to working on this new article, I’ve been reading a series of essays for Transatlantic Literary Ecologies, the book I’m co-editing with John Miller of the University of Sheffield.  The book is coming along nicely and will be submitted to Ashgate Publishing in February if all goes according to plan.  After re-reading Mansfield Park in preparation for the Jane Austen seminar I’ll be teaching at UNBC in January, I also started re-reading Mary Shelley’s remarkable novel Valperga, the topic of a thesis chapter one of my grad students is currently writing.  Today being Christmas Eve, though, I’m now closing my laptop for an eight-day holiday romp in the snow with my partner Lisa and our dog Luna.  Happy holidays!