Lorraine York
Professor, English & Cultural Studies

My research contributes to the fields of literatures in Canada and celebrity culture. In the first of those fields, I have become increasingly concerned with the way in which various relations of power have formed, and continue to animate, the institution of “CanLit”; in the field of celebrity studies, I brings the insights of feminist media studies and cultural theories of affect to bear on the question of celebrity’s political implications.

I am currently not taking on new PhD supervisions, but I am available to supervise MA candidates in the fields of literatures in Canada, celebrity studies, cultural studies, theories of affect, gender studies, and popular culture.

My earlier books addressed the subjects of photography and postmodernism in Canadian fiction; Timothy Findley’s fiction and discourses of war; and women’s collaborative writing in England, the U.S., Canada, France and Italy. My book Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007), was the first study of celebrity’s impact on Canadian literary culture. It was nominated for the Raymond Klibansky Prize for the best English-language book in the humanities published that year. I followed it up with Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity (2013) which was shortlisted for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. In 2018, I published Reluctant Celebrity: Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom, which theorizes reluctance as a product of privilege: the power “to publicly avow one’s mixed feelings, one’s treasonous disinclination to ‘lean in’” under neoliberalism.” My forthcoming book, which addresses reluctance’s abjected other—eagerness—is entitled Unseemly: Affect, Gender, New Media, and the Denunciation of Fame Hunger.


I am a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a two-time winner of the President’s Award for Graduate Supervision.
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