Modern Literature & Culture Research Centre & Gallery

Dr. Laura Cameron holds a PhD in English from McGill University (2015), where she specialized in Canadian modernist poetry and literary history. Laura’s SSHRC-funded dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr. Brian Trehearne, focused on the prolonged periods of poetic silence that divide the creative careers of several prominent mid-twentieth-century Canadian writers, including P.K. Page, Phyllis Webb, and Leonard Cohen. She has published portions of this research in Canadian Literature and Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. Laura also taught in Canadian, American, and British literature at McGill and at Bishop’s University, where she was an Assistant Professor (limited-term) in 2016-17. At Bishop’s, she designed courses such as Introduction to Indigenous Literatures in Canada, English Writers of Quebec, and The Gothic Tradition. As a Visiting Research Fellow at the MLC Research Centre, Laura is completing a book manuscript entitled “Poetic Silence and the Modern Canadian Creative Career,” which considers the fertile creative state of poetic “silence” among a diverse group of late modernist poets in Canada. She is also involved in the preparations for the Toronto 2019 Modernist Studies Association conference.

 

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Cameron, Laura, ed. "'So often I look up at you and tell you things, and you listen!': The Correspondence of Louise Morey Bowman and Amy Lowell." Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews (Fall 2018). Forthcoming issue.

Cameron, Laura. “P.K. Page’s Poetic Silence.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 75 (Fall/Winter 2014): 42-60.

Cameron, Laura. “‘The Great Dreams Pass On’: Phyllis Webb’s ‘Struggles of Silence.’” Canadian Literature 217 (Summer 2013): 72-86. Read the abstract here.

 

Selected Peer-Reviewed Conference Papers

Cameron, Laura, and Claudine Gelinas-Faucher. "Leonard Cohen, Critic of '50s Hipsterism." NeMLA Conference, 21-24 March 2019, Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, Washington, DC.

Cameron, Laura. “‘So often I look up at you and tell you things, and you listen!’: The Correspondence of Louise Morey Bowman and Amy Lowell.” British Association for Canadian Studies Conference, 22–23 April 2016, British Library, London, England.

Cameron, Laura. “‘My unexpected entry / into the door of my mind’: P.K. Page’s Encounters with Modernism Abroad.” Space Between Society Conference, 17–19 July 2014, Institute of English Studies, University of London, London, England.

Cameron, Laura. “The Mysterious and the Mundane: Accounting for Poetic Silence.” ACCUTE Conference, 24–27 May 2014, Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON.

Cameron, Laura. “The ‘Sense of an Audience’: Phyllis Webb Promoting Poetry in the 1950s.” Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics Conference, 20–23 September 2012, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB.

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