UFV 2021-2026 Integrated Strategic Plan
UFV 2021-2026 Integrated Strategic Plan
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(She/her)
Department Head and Associate Professor
English
Abbotsford campus, B354
Phone: 604-504-7441 ext. 5144
email Heather WebsiteHeather McAlpine is an associate professor of English who is known as a great teacher and mentor and facilitator of student conferences. She notes that as an educator, her primary aim is to facilitate encounters that push people to re-examine and re-define our relationships to self and other. In pursuit of this aim, her teaching also seeks to foster the linked skills of intentional reading, critical thinking, and effective communication. Above all she wants her students to value literary studies as an integral part of their personal, intellectual, and academic growth, regardless of their disciplinary specializations or future goals.
Twitter: @hey_mcalpine
Throughout my post-secondary education, I have pursued interdisciplinary questions about relationships between literature, culture, and the visual arts. My honours project at McGill examined the influence of typological biblical interpretation on the poetry of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; during my MA I investigated the extent to which Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) volume might have been inspired by the English emblem tradition. My Ph.D. thesis applied similar questions to the work of the late Victorian Pre-Raphaelite movement more broadly.
My more recent research turns to the use made by late Victorian and early Modernist poets of Tarot card imagery and a eurocentric understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese written characters to uncover the colonial epistemologies that shaped Victorian and modernist poetics.
I am passionate about teaching and cultivating the next generation of readers and writers. Through the Young Authors' Conference, which I organize annually, I give UFV students the opportunity to lead Chilliwack middle students in a range of exciting creative writing workshops.
BA (Hons) English Literature, McGill University
MA English Literature, University of Western Ontario
Ph.D. English Literature, University of Ottawa
I believe in the shaping power of language and in literature's transformative ability to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. My academic work centers on the conviction that no art form exists in isolation, and that cherishing traditional generic and disciplinary boundaries can only weaken our understanding and appreciation of art. As an educator, therefore, my primary aim is to facilitate encounters that push us to re-examine and re-define our relationships to self and other. In pursuit of this aim, my teaching also seeks to foster the linked skills of intentional reading, critical thinking, and effective communication. Above all, I want my students to value literary studies as an integral part of their personal, intellectual, and academic growth, regardless of their disciplinary specializations or future goals.
Poetry, poetics, 19th-century British literature and culture, illustrated literature, writing and composition.
ENGL 105
ENGL 108
ENGL 170 (illustrated literature)
ENGL 202
ENGL 323
ENGL 325
ENGL 331
ENGL 335
The Pre-Raphaelite movement; poetry and poetics; the English emblem tradition; 19th-century British culture; digital humanities; digital pedagogy; film and television studies.
2010-2023 Research and Scholarly Activity Course Releases, University of the Fraser Valley
"Digital Meters: Using Text Encoding to Teach Literature in the Undergraduate Classroom." Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Conference, Pedagogy Special Interest Group, U Victoria, 8 June 2019.
"'Mark, printed on the opposing page / The unfortunate effects of rage': Satire and Self-Referentiality in Late-Victorian Satirical Emblems for Children." Accepted for presentation at Victorian Education, joint VSAWC/VISAWUS Conference, Vancouver, BC, 28-29 April 2017 (Unable to attend)
"Constructive Communication: Socialist Emblematics in William Morris's Design Work." Victorian Communities: VSAWC Conference, Banff, AB, 26-27 April 2014.
"Reading the Room: William Morris's Socialist Emblematics." ACCUTE Conference, Congress 2013: @ the Edge. University of Victoria, 1-4 June 2013.
"Christina Rossetti's Emblematic Poetics." Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics. Eds. Amy Huseby and Heather Bozant Witcher. New York: Palgrave, 2020.
"Digital Meters: Using Text Encoding to Teach Literature in the Undergraduate Classroom." Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture vol. 23, no.3 (Spring 2023).
"Thoughts Towards Nature: Pre-Raphaelite Emblematics in The Germ." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies vol. 20 (Fall 2011).
"'Would not open lip from lip': Grotesque and Sacred Orality in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market.'" Victorian Review vol. 36, no.1 (Spring 2010).
Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts edited by Daniel Tyler. Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies vol. 31 (Spring 2022).
Aurélie Pétiot, The Pre-Raphaelites. Victorian Review vol. 47, no.2 (Fall 2021).
Elizabeth Ludlow, Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints, and Serena Trowbridge, Christina Rossetti's Gothic. Journal of Victorian Culture 20.4 (Fall 2015).
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855-1875. The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 21 (Spring 2012).
Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing. University of Toronto Quarterly 80.2 (Spring 2011).
"Should You Watch Netflix's The Chair?" University Affairs, 7 January 2022.
Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), a Digital Scholarly Edition, 2020.
Co-developer (with Alex Wetmore), The WellSpring (open access online scholarly exhibition on the culture of public bathing in England, 1660-1900), 2019.