Lucas Crawford
Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair, 2015-2016
Poet and Queer Humanities Scholar
Lucas was born in Halifax, raised in rural Nova Scotia, and attained BA Honours, MA, and PhD degrees in English from Saint Francis Xavier University, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Alberta respectively. In 2012, the University of Alberta awarded Lucas the Governor General’s Gold Medal as top doctoral graduate. Following this, Lucas took up a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at McGill, where the School of Architecture and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies were co-hosts. Lucas was thrilled to join GSWS in 2013 as the RWW Lecturer.
Lucas’s primary fields of research are: modernist literature, queer theory and transgender studies, urbanism and architecture, popular culture (especially with regards to food), and critical theory. Transgender Architectonics: the Shape of Change in Modernist Space is Lucas’s scholarly book, which will come out in November 2015 (Ashgate). Publications such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Mosaic, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Homosexuality, and English Studies in Canada have also published articles based on Lucas’s research. One such article was reprinted in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader and the second volume of The Transgender Studies Reader. Forthcoming book collections such as the exciting Queering the Countryside (NYU Press, 2015) and Trans Studies (Rutgers, 2016) will include work by Lucas as well.
As RWW Junior Chair 2015-2016, Lucas will be researching and organizing on the theme of “food matters” (with an emphasis on “food emotion” as it intersects with affect theory, food-stuffed novels, and queer theory). Lucas is excited to report that local and international food-writers alike are currently making plans to come speak with us on the lower mainland. In the Fall 2015 term, GSWS 333 (RWW Advanced Seminar) students will collaborate with the Thursday Writing Collective, a fabulous literary community based on the downtown eastside of Vancouver.
As a poet, Lucas will launch a book, Sideshow Concessions, in October 2015 (Invisible Publishing). This manuscript won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, while some of its poems also won the Atlantic Writing Competition from the Writers’ Federation of NS. Other venues where Lucas’s creative writing can be found include The Antigonish Review, The Nashwaak Review, Room, PRISM International, Other Voices, Rattle, Rampike, SubTerrain’s LineBreak project, The Literary Review of Canada and Best Canadian Poetry 2015. Lucas is the 2015 Critic-In-Residence of CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts).
Lucas is excited to continue collaborating with local change-makers and thinkers, and especially welcomes queries and conversations about food culture, urbanism, transgender aesthetics, and poetry.
Dr. Lucas Crawford is the winner of the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.
To read more please visit:
Matrix Magazine
Invisible Publishing