Brandon  Carroll is especially interested in the ways in which gays and  women use fiction to write their own stories in order to serve a particular purpose - a practice known as autofiction. He has also been helping to research the archived papers of a homosexual who lived in France over 100 years ago and recorded the experiences of his own gay community. Brandon provides some insight into his  literary and historical interests below:

As a member of the LGBT community, my interest in this area began in 2011 when I first explored the field in an independent research course. My research considered the manifestation of the master/slave dynamic in works by contemporary French gay novelists and its relationship to the literary notion of autofiction. Moreover, in another course on contemporary French women’s writing I examined the relationship between writings by women and gay men in contemporary France and why autofiction is a privileged form of expression of these groups. In particular, the tenet of autofiction that telling one’s story must also serve a purpose seemed common to the authors I studied, which corresponds with the current literature on gay and women’s writing and suggests they have a subversive and even educational thrust.

My research in contemporary French literature examines the figure of the father in gay writing. Specifically, I have considered the notion of filiation as demonstrated in works of autofiction by the authors Hervé Guibert and Mathieu Lindon. Each author was greatly influenced by their romantic relationship with the philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault. The paternalistic nature of this relationship greatly affected each author and the relationships portrayed in their novels.

My Master’s research will continue to focus on writings by homosexual men at the beginning of the Third Republic in France (ca. 1880-1900). The literature I will investigate has not been the subject of much scholarly research and in many cases has only been republished recently by smaller publishing companies in France (Quintes-feuilles and GayKitschCamp).  

Andrea Routley was born in New Westminister and grew up in Pitt Meadows, Fort Langley, and Richmond. She is the editor of Walk Myself Home: An Anthology to End Violence Against Women (Caitlin Press, 2010). Her writing has appeared in journals and magazines such as The Malahat Review and Monday Magazine. In 2008 she was shortlisted for the Rona Murray Prize for Literature for her poem "For Helen M. Winslow and her Love of Finer Things", which is forthcoming in Island Writer. Andrea is currently completing her degree in writing from the University of Victoria.

Nadine Boulay is an undergraduate student in her final year of a BA-double honors in Women's and Gender Studies and Religion. Nadine has been actively involved with the Women's and Gender Studies program, co-organizing the first annual program colloquium where she presented a paper. Nadine is an editorial member of the Feminist and Queer (FAQ) Collective which publishes an annual undergraduate review of student work pertaining to feminist and queer concerns.

Nadine was the recipient of three other awards this year: the Faculty of Arts Special Award for student activism (May 2010); the Marguerite Clara Germaine Jerome Scholarship in Religion (July 2010); and the UMSU Scholarship (July 2010).