Research

“Kathy Mac has what philosopher David Hume has called an ‘accurate knowledge of the internal fabric.’ 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.” 

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’s Award for poetry), The Hundefräulein Papers (Roseway, 2009) and Human Misunderstanding (Roseway 2017). She is the faculty supervisor for both the on-line Atlantic Canadian Poets’ 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 “Omar Khadr is not Harry Potter” (Disclosure 2009), “Flex and Stretch: The Inevitable Feminist Treatise on Catwoman" (Dalhousie Review 2012) and “The Twilight Quartet: Romance, Porn, Pain and Complicity.” 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 – 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