Miguel Mota

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English. I received my B.A from Wilfrid Laurier University and my M.A. and PhD from Queen’s University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UBC, I worked at Simon Fraser University until 2001, when I moved back to UBC.

I teach and publish in the following areas: post-1945 British literature and culture, with emphasis on the Thatcher years; the relationship between film and print cultures, and image and text more generally, with my focus at the moment being on the status and function of screenplays as print texts; and the life and work of Malcolm Lowry, whose great 1947 novel, Under the Volcano, was written while he lived with his wife in a squatter’s shack in Dollarton in North Vancouver. In 2014, I was the recipient of a Killam Teaching Prize.

As an instructor in the Arts One module “Seeing and Knowing,” I am particularly interested in how the many and varied relationships between image and text affect the nature of representation – in other words, how the ways in which image and text speak to each other reinforce, undermine, or complicate our knowledge of the world. I look forward to engaging with these issues across a broad section of texts: the poetry and engravings of William Blake; the films of Peter Greenaway; the fairy tale adaptations of Angela Carter; the digital poems of Stephanie Strickland; the postcolonial parodies of David Dabydeen; the poignant exploration of memory, representation and the Holocaust of W.G. Sebald.

As a member of Arts One, I feel I have a wonderful opportunity to engage with some of the smartest and most intellectually curious students coming into UBC. This is indeed a privilege. Though my usual areas of teaching and research are in the field of literary and cultural studies, Arts One provides me with the chance to share with students and colleagues an interest in interdisciplinary connections among various areas in the humanities, including history, philosophy, and sociology. This is an exciting and enriching program and I’m very happy to be a part of it.