Research
鈥淜athy Mac has what philosopher David Hume has called an 鈥榓ccurate knowledge of the internal fabric.鈥� We misread, hurt, and destroy one another at every turn. Her spare, sharp poetic pierces the heart of what matters, what it might mean if we were both human and humane.鈥�
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Former Poet Laureate, Halifax
Writing as Kathy Mac, Dr. Kathleen McConnell has published Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth (Roseway, 2002, a finalist for the Governor General鈥檚 Award for poetry), The Hundefr盲ulein Papers (Roseway, 2009) and Human Misunderstanding (Roseway 2017). She is the faculty supervisor for both the on-line Atlantic Canadian Poets鈥� Archive (www.stu.ca/acpa/), and the app Poetic Places Fredericton, which notifies users when they are in a location that inspired a poem, and lets them read the poem as well as learn a bit of background about the place.
In her post-graduate scholarship, Dr. McConnell researched intersections between popular texts and lived life, which led to articles like 鈥淥mar Khadr is not Harry Potter鈥� (Disclosure 2009), 鈥淔lex and Stretch: The Inevitable Feminist Treatise on Catwoman" (Dalhousie Review 2012) and 鈥淭he Twilight Quartet: Romance, Porn, Pain and Complicity.鈥� Her articles look at gothic elements in popular texts, often focusing on the disempowerment of protagonists. Much of this work resulted from a 2006 SSHRC Research/Creation grant to create lyric scholarship 鈥� that is, scholarly analyses in the form of poetry and/or poems with a large research component. Five of her essays have been collected in an anthology called Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight (Wolsack & Wynn, 2012).
Dr. Kathleen McConnell's PhD thesis Textile Tropes in Literary Language around the Industrial Revolution (Dalhousie 2001) concerned the influences of technological change on language and vice versa.
Kathleen McConnell Curriculum Vitae