Kester Dyer
Assistant Professor
| Degrees: | PhD (Concordia University), MA (University College Dublin), BA (University of Portsmouth) |
| Phone: | 613-520-2600 x 2491 |
| Email: | kester.dyer@carleton.ca |
| Office: | 429 St. Patrick's Building |
Kester Dyer is interested in supervising graduate students and postdocs working on Québécois, Canadian and Indigenous film and media, as well as research deploying genre and postcolonial approaches to film and media.
Dyer’s current book project titled Otherworldly Incursions: The Supernatural in Québec Cinema is supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and comprises a broad exploration of the Québec film corpus since the 1990s. This project analyzes how supernatural tropes across genres reveal key information about the Québec social imaginary’s struggle to delineate relationships between historically dominant and more marginalized groups, including Indigenous peoples and immigrants. In parallel, Dyer was awarded the Film Studies Association of Canada’s Gerald Pratley Award for his research on Wapikoni Mobile, a unique transportable production initiative aimed at emerging Indigenous filmmakers. In his ensuing collaboration with Wapikoni, he co-founded (with Liz Miller, Communication Studies, Concordia University) the Circle Visions community-building project. This initiative, also supported by SSHRC, features an annual cross-platform media-making Summer Institute for Indigenous filmmakers. As part of this project, Dyer, who is a settler scholar, worked with artists from several Indigenous communities who participated in workshops focussing on animation, experimental video, podcasting, documentary, and other media, thereby generating short video artworks. This project has evolved more recently toward the mobilization and theorization of interactive, 360-degree and VR filmmaking as a tool for decolonization by Indigenous artists and for reconsidering ecological and other impacts of human mobility and transportation.
Publications:
“Anticipating the Colonial Apocalypse: Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum.” Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory. Edited by Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger and Philipp Keidl. Meson Press, 2020.
“Landscape, Trauma, and Identity: Simon Lavoie’s Le torrent.” A Cinema of Pain: Essays on Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen. Edited by Liz Czach and André Loiselle. Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2020.
“Léolo’s Fantasized Italy: Family Romance and Accented Cinema in Québec.” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. 5.1 (Jan 2017): 47-64.
“Indigenous Cinema, Hamlet, and Québécois Melancholia.” In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization. Edited by Helen Gilbert, J. D. Phillipson, and Michelle H. Raheja. Liverpool University Press, 2017. 105-122.
« Le ‘refus’ dans la télésérie Mohawk Girls de Tracey Deer. » Télé en séries. Edited by J-O Allard, E. Després, S. Harel, M.-C. Lambert-Perreault. Montreal: Éditions XYZ, 2017.
Guest Editor with Fulvia Massimi and Andrée Lafontaine of “Locating the Intimate Within the Global: Xavier Dolan, Queer Nations and Québec Cinema” for Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 4.2 (March 2016).
« Miracles, mythes, cinéma : La vraie nature de Bernadette et The Butcher Boy. » Le Québec et l’Irlande : Culture, histoire, identité. Edited by Simon Jolivet, Linda Cardinal, Isabelle Matte. Québec City: Éditions du Septentrion, 2014. 166-196.