Michael O'Driscoll, Phd (Western, 1996), MA (Waterloo, 1991), BAHonours (Waterloo, 1989)

Area of Study / Keywords

Poetry poetics sound listening literature cultural studies critical theory.

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About

I am a Professor Emeritus (Phased Post-Retirement) in the Department of English and Film Studies in the Faculty of Arts, and the Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.

I'm sorry to say that I am no longer accepting requests for graduate supervision.

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Research

Michael O’Driscoll is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and Film Studies and Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Alberta, where he joined the faculty in 1997. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories and his interest in material culture studies has focused on poetry and poetics, archive theory, book history, writing technologies, petrocultures, and most recently the study of sound, listening, and literary audiotexts. His landmark edition of Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Light Poems was published in 2015 and his edition of Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems, an early and important experiment in human-computer interaction, was published by MIT Press in 2025. He is co-editor, with Tilottama Rajan, of After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory. He has co-edited special journal issues on the subjects of The Event of the Archive, Resource Aesthetics, and Transitions. His early work includes A Bibliography of the Black Sparrow Press and First Impressions: The Fledgling Years of the Black Sparrow Press, 1966-1970 (winner of the ALA’s 2004 Leab Award for Best Exhibition Catalogue). O’Driscoll has held multiple portfolios at the decanal level and served for ten years as Editor of ESC: English Studies in Canada. He is currently a Research Fellow of the Sound Studies Institute and is a past member of the Governing Board Member for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Group.

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Teaching

A sample of some recently taught courses:

English 694: Listening to Literature

English 483: Literary Sound Studies

English 569: Ethical Listening

English 206: How Poems Work                                    

English 430: The Literary Freud

English 586: In the American Archive

English 694: Archive Pedagogy

English 356: American Technologies

English 208: Reading Histories: Making Books

English 357: Reading American Ideologies

English 679: Derrida Engaged

ENGL 800 - PhD Colloquium

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Browse more courses taught by Michael O'Driscoll

Jackson Mac Low, Foreword by Anne Tardos, Edited by Michael O'Driscoll

Cambridge, MA, USA. 2025 August;

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Michael O'Driscoll and Mark Simpson

ESC: English Studies in Canada. 2017 June; 43 (2-3):245pp

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Brent Bellamy, Michael O'Driscoll, and Mark Simpson

Postmodern Culture. 2016 June; 26 (2)

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Petrocultures Research Group

West Virginia UP. 2016 April;

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Edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll

2015 January;

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Michael O'Driscoll, Edward Bishop

ESC: English Studies in Canada. 2014 January; 30 (1)

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Michael O'Driscoll, et al.

2003 January;

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Michael O'Driscoll, Tilottama Rajan

2002 January;