Jody Mason
Professor (she/her)
- B.A. Honours, M.A. (University of Western Ontario), Ph.D. (University of Toronto)
- Email Jody Mason
Research Interests
• literatures and cultures in Canada
• twentieth- and twenty-first-century anglophone literatures
• sociology of literature; print culture studies (reading and reception; publishing; uses of books and book cultures)
• settler-colonial studies and decolonization
I’m a settler scholar originally from the territory of the Haldimand Treaty, signed in 1784. My research examines how the book and associated ideas about literacy and self-improvement have helped to elaborate settler colonial logic in Canada. I’m also interested in how the ideologies of the book and literacy dominant in Europe and North America from the late nineteenth century to the present have been contested and revised by Indigenous Peoples.
In Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), I argue that ideas about literacy and literature played key roles in the emergence of settler-defined, liberal citizenship in Canada. My most recent book, Books for Development: Canada in the Late Twentieth-Century World (published in the Rethinking Canada In the World series with McGill-Queen’s UP in 2026) tracks the ways the book, which came to function as a key representative of settler exceptionalism, was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations; to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order; and to consolidate settler liberal rule at home.
My current research considers what sociologist John Thompson calls “polarization” in the contemporary field of literary publishing as this has played out in Canada––the simultaneous consolidation of conglomerate publishing and the emergence of largely state-funded small-press publishing (including Indigenous-owned and -operated publishing) in Canada after 1965.
I’m cross-appointed to the School of Canadian Studies; I serve as the Chair of the editorial board of the Carleton Library Series (published by McGill-Queen’s University Press); and I’m interested in University governance. I welcome inquiries about potential supervision from students working in any of the fields I identify under “research interests.”
Recent Honours and Awards
2020 Winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize (for Home Feelings)
2020-2024 SSHRC Insight Grant
2018-19 SSHRC Explore Development Grant (CORIS)
2017 FASS Research Achievement Award
2013 Shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize (for Writing Unemployment)
2013 FASS Junior Faculty Research Award
Books
Books for Development: Canada in the Late Twentieth-Century World. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026.
Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
Writing Unemployment: Worklessness, Mobility, and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century Canadian Literatures. University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Recent Articles / Chapters in Books (Since 2015)
“Against Immediacy: Allegoresis and Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience.” Contemporary Literature (forthcoming in 2026 in vol. 67, no. 3).
“The Margaret Wrong Memorial Fund, Late Colonial Development, and the Prizing of
African Literatures, 1950-1962.” Research In African Literatures. vol. 54, no. 4, Winter 2024, pp. 26–55.
(with Sarah Pelletier.) “‘Singular Plurality’: Settler Colonial Transcendence and Canada’s
2021 Guest-of-Honour Campaign at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” Book History, vol. 26, no. 2, fall 2023, pp. 467-96.
“Canadian Postwar Book Diplomacy and Settler Contradiction.” Canadian Literature,
no. 240, 2020, pp. 107-28.
“‘Capital Intraconversion’ and Canadian Literary Prize Culture.” Book History, vol.20,
2017, pp. 424-46.
“Creating a ‘Home Feeling’: The Canadian Reading Camp Association and the Uses of Fiction, 1900-1905.” Labour / Le Travail, vol. 76, Fall 2015, pp. 109-32.
Recent Professional Concerns Publications and Journalism
“How ‘books for development’ campaigns reveal an unjust global order.” The Conversation (Canada Edition), 14 April 2026.
“Against Lament: Developmentalism and Fourth-World Perspectives.” Active History: History Matters, 9 June 2025.
“Decolonizing Pedagogies: Pipelines and Publishers.” Canadian Literature, vol. 253, 2023, pp. 137-44.
“The ‘Creative Crusade’: Settler Colonial Antinomies and Books for Development in the
Age of Three Worlds.” Canadian Network on Humanitarian History, 21 Jan.
2022.
“A Fair Exchange? Off to Frankfurt We Go.” Literary Review of Canada, October 2021.
“New CanLit ‘Indie’ Book Imprint is Anything But.” The Conversation (Canada Edition), 10 Sept. 2019.
(with Dessa Bayrock). “Ondaatje’s Win of the Golden Man Booker Prize Is Complicated.” The Conversation (Canada Edition), 23 July 2018.
Recent Presentations (Since 2020)
“Against Lament: Developmentalism and Fourth-World Perspectives.” American Comparative Literature Association. 26 Feb.-1 March 2026.
“Books for Development: Fourth-World Challenges to Settler-Canadian Exceptionalism.” Indigenous Literary Studies Association, George Brown College. 2-4 June 2025.
“Developing Africa and Late Twentieth-Century Anglophone Settler Nationalisms.” Canadian Historical Association, York University. 29-31 May 2023.
(with Sarah Pelletier) “‘Singular Plurality’: Settler Colonial Transcendence and Canada’s 2021 Guest-of-Honour Campaign at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” Society for the History of Reading, Authorship, and Publishing, Amsterdam / Online. 11-15 July 2022.
“‘The Creative Crusade: Settler Colonial Antinomies and Books for Development in the Age of Three Worlds.” Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta, Invited Lecture. 5 November 2021.
Ph.D. Supervisions
Dessa Bayrock, “Prizing Dominance: Disruption, Capital, and the Power and Practices of Literary Prize Culture in Canada,” 2023.
Bridgette Brown, “The South African War (1899-1901) and the Transperipheral Production of Canadian Literatures,” 2019.
Christopher Doody, “A Union of the Inkpot: The Canadian Authors Association, 1921-1960,” 2016.
Sarah Dorward, “Erased by Posterity: Popular Literature, Nineteenth-Century Canadian Authorship, and the Transatlantic Print Network,” ongoing.
Sarah Pelletier, “‘Neither boy nor man’: Transnational Trade Identity in Canada’s Typographical Trade Press, 1860-1900,” 2026.
Samantha Stevens, “The Language of Power: Examining Settler Colonial Discourses in Canadian Newspaper Coverage of Restoule v. Canada (2021),” ongoing.