PA Demers, BA, MA McMaster, PhD Ottawa

About

Patricia Demers FRSC researches and teaches in the areas of early modern women's writing; Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; 17th-century poetry;18th-century novels; biblical literature; children's literature; and contemporary women's writing. She has published articles on these topics in Mosaic, English Studies in Canada, Semeia, Sixteenth Century Journal, Huntington Library Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation, Bunyan Studies, Literature and Theology, and Topia, among others. Her books include two edited anthologies of children's literature, From Instruction to Delight: Children's Literature to 1850 (second edition, 2004; third edition, 2008; fourth edition, 2015) and A Garland from the Golden Age, and these critical studies: Women as Interpreters of the Bible; Heaven Upon Earth: The Forms of Moral and Religious Children's Literature to 1850; P. L. Travers; Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine; The World of Hannah More; Women's Writing in English: Early Modern England and editor, Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife. She was awarded the University Cup in 2005 and the CAUT Sarah Shorten Award in 2008. She has served as Department Chair (1995-98) and Vice-President of SSHRC (1998-2002); she is the Past President of The Royal Society of Canada (2005-07). She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2016.

Research

Recent publications include The Beginning of Print Culture in Athabasca Country: A Facsimile Edition and Translation of a Prayer Book in Cree Syllabics (ed. and co-trans, 2010), Travels and Tales of Miriam Green Ellis: Pioneer Journalist of the Canadian West (ed., 2013), and an annotated edition of Lady Anne Cooke Bacon's Translation of Bishop John Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae: A Defence and Answer of the Church of England 1564 (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2016), along with essays on early modern writers Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, and An Collins, and Canadian novelists Patricia Blondal and Grace Irwin. She chaired the Royal Society expert panel and its subsequent report on the status and future of Canada’s libraries and archives, The Future Now: Canada's Libraries, Archives, and Public Memory (2014). Publications in 2019-2010 include Women's Writing in Canada (2019) and co-ed., Minds Alive: Libraries and Archives Now.

Teaching

Patricia Demers FRSC researches and teaches in the areas of early modern women's writing; Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; 17th-century poetry; 18th-century novels; biblical literature; children's literature; and contemporary women's writing.