Brenda Beckman-Long, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
Faculty of Arts and Science
She has a doctorate in English from the University of Alberta and postdoctorate from McMaster University.
Areas of SpecializationShe teaches and researches in the areas of Canadian literature, Canadian women’s writing, autobiography theory, testimony and trauma studies.
Brenda Beckman-Long teaches English at Briercrest College and Seminary. She has a doctorate in English from the University of Alberta and postdoctorate from McMaster University. She teaches and researches in the areas of Canadian literature, Canadian women's writing, autobiography theory, testimony and trauma studies.
Published articles and essays on confession, autobiography, and women's writing appear in Studies in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, Literature and Theology, Tessera, Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence (ed. Christian Riegel, 1997), Dictionary of Literary Biography: 21st-century Canadian Writers (ed. Christian Riegel, 2007), West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature (ed. Sue Sorensen, 2009), and Mind the Gap: Saskatchewan Cultural Spaces (eds. Christine Ramsay and Randal Rogers, 2014). She belongs to the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), the Christianity and Literature Study Group and the CRC Symposium for Diversity in Canadian Literary Cultures, a community of scholars formed around the Canada Research Chair in Diversity in Canadian Literary Cultures at McMaster University.
Her forthcoming book, Carol Shields and The Writer-Critic (UTP), is a critical reappraisal of Shields's work and career as a novelist.
Her most recent work (in progress) explores how 21st-century Canadian novelists engage readers in historical and current crises through testimonial narratives. She examines texts that bear witness to far-reaching traumas on a world stage: Karen Connelly's The Lizard Cage, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes, Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo, and Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. Together these novels bridge gaps of space and time, covering Asia,Europe,Africa, the U.S. and Canada from 1800 to 2001. They inscribe the reader as a witness by employing autobiographical genres, crossing boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and blending first- and third-person or multiple perspectives. They thereby create ethical communities of readers and new international audiences.
- Dr. Beckman-Long received a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2005 for her work at the University of Alberta on Canadian author Carol Shields. She also received a SSHRC Post-doctoral Fellowship at McMaster University in 2010-2012 for her research on the testimonial narrative in contemporary Canadian novels.