Dr. Gemma Marr, a former doctoral candidate in the Department of English, defended her dissertation in the late summer of 2022. She is the recipient of a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship that will take her to the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick, where she will be working with Dr. Erin Morton on a project entitled “Histories of Sexuality in the Bifurcated Province: Discourses of Desire in New Brunswick, 1860-1960.”
In this project, Dr. Marr argues that the historical and cultural specificities of New Brunswick raise interesting questions about how sexualities discourse is tied to ideas of national belonging, communal connection, and rural lifestyles, and can differ depending on religious affiliation, racial and cultural identity, and involvement in subcultures rooted in extractive labour. To explore these tensions and intersections, her postdoctoral research will approach histories of sexuality in New Brunswick through cultural memory and archival material: she will use newspaper stories and editorials, advertisements, court records, religious tracts, photographs, cultural ephemera, and personal correspondence to explore how different communities throughout New Brunswick responded to, worked within, and altered developing understandings of sexuality.
