Jeffery Donaldson joined the English department at McMaster University in 1989. Hired as a specialist in American Literature, Donaldson has expanded his teaching and research into a variety of fields. His primary focus combines poetry and poetics, metaphor, metaphor theory, metaphor in the sciences, cognition, mythology, fictive worlds, and literary cosmology.
These interests bore fruit in 2015 with the publication of Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution. In the book Donaldson explores what he calls "the metaphoric initiative," a relational process that can be traced into the material sciences, physics, evolution, and cognition; the workings of metaphor in poetry and literature can provide us with unique insights into the modes and manners of the physical sciences, logic, and reason. These ideas will be expanded in Donaldson's next project, slated for completion in the next two years. His working title is Metaphor's And: Thought Experiments in Literature and Science.
Donaldson also has considerable experience and interest in inquiry-based learning models and has taught Inquiry in Humanities and in the IBH program (Integrated Business and Humanities).
Author of seven volumes of poetry, including most recently Granted: Poems of Metaphor (Porcupine’s Quill, 2022) and Fluke Print (Porcupine’s Quill, 2018), Donaldson teaches several courses in CWNA, McMaster's certificate in Creative Writing and Narrative Arts.
