Modern Literature & Culture Research Centre & Gallery

Contact

cameron.macdonald@mlc.ryerson.ca

Cameron MacDonald is a long-time member of the MLC Research Centre, having served as the MLC Coordinator, Member of the Executive Team, and RA lead for the MLC’s SSHRC funded project Telling COVID-19 Stories (2022-2026). He holds a BA in English from Toronto Metropolitan University (2012-2016), and an MA from the University of Toronto English Department, where he is now a PhD student (2021-2026). Supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship (2022 - 2025), his doctoral research focuses on sonic phenomena in literature, such as echoes, silences, noise, and music, to explore alternative modes of being in the world. His work involves literary analysis, sound studies, and queer theory in relation to late 19th - mid 20th century American literature. Cameron is also a professional musician and creative writer. 

Scholarly Articles

Cecchetto, David and Cameron MacDonald. “Listening through a Pandemic: Silence, Noisemaking, and Music.” Creative Resilience and COVID-19: Figuring the Everyday in a Pandemic, edited by Irene Gammel and Jason Wang, Routledge, 2022, pp. 39-48.

Selected Conference Papers

MacDonald, Cameron. “Songs Along the Keyboard: Listening Around Frank O’Hara.” Modern Language Association (MLA), Washington, DC (online), 6-9 January 2022. Roundtable, Poetry and Sound: Beyond Voice, sponsored by GS Poetry and Poetics.

MacDonald, Cameron. “The Hum of Humor: Listening to Queer Laughter in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Modern Language Association (MLA), Toronto (online), 7-10 January 2021. Panel, Laughter & Feminist Critical Thought, sponsored by MS Screen Arts and Culture.

MacDonald, Cameron. “‘And Finished knowing — then —’: Queer Time-Spaces and Ecologies of Death in Emily Dickinson’s Poetics.” (De)Composing Death: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Dalhousie University, Halifax, 10-12 August 2018. Panel. 

The Great War in Literature and Visual Culture

MLC Themes

The Great War in Literature and Visual Culture

Amid the unprecedented social change of World War I, women renegotiated their identities by dramatically changing the way they engaged with the arts. But how did they do so? And how did everyday citizens engage with the war?

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

MLC Themes

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, considered by many to be the mother of Dada, was a daringly innovative poet and an early creator of junk sculpture. “The Baroness” was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances.

Modernism in the World

MLC Themes

Modernism in the World

Recent research has departed from the Euro-centric and national view of Modernism to include approaches and methods studying Modernism across national boundaries and across different art forms to include fashion, dance, performance, technology, and visual culture.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

MLC Themes

Lucy Maud Montgomery

L.M. Montgomery is perhaps Canada's most important literary export. She was prolific writer of over 500 short stories and poems, and twenty novels, including the beloved Anne of Green Gables.

Canadian Modernism

MLC Themes

Canadian Modernism

The works of numerous Canadian authors who lived during the modernist era may well constitute the most central and experimental articulation of Canadian modernism in prose, allowing authors to stage cross-cultural, controversial, and even conflicted identities.

Modernist Biography and Life Writing

MLC Themes

Modernist Biography and Life Writing

Life writing, including autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters and testimonials written or told by women and men whose political, literary or philosophical purposes are central to their lives, has become a standard tool for communication and the dissemination of information.