Department of English Welcomes two New Faculty Members: Jessica Copley and Dana Lew
The Department of English welcomes two new colleagues this semester: Jessica Copley (Contemporary Literature) and Dana Lew (Eighteenth Century).
Jessica Copley has been appointed to a tenure-track position in contemporary literature. She is teaching our first year course (English 1900) this semester and will be teaching courses in her research specialty this Winter.
Copley received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto and was awarded the Charles Bernheimer Dissertation Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association in 2024. Her research examines the representation of war in French, Japanese, and American literatures since 1945, with an emphasis on how literature and visual culture can both critique and reproduce militarized perspectives.
Dana Lew joins us for a three-year position in eighteenth-century literature. He is currently teaching a fourth year seminar, Violent Voyages: Fiction and Travel before 1800.
Lew is finishing a PhD in English with a Collaborative Specialization in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching span the long eighteenth century, with particular attention to questions of culture, politics, and literary form. During his programme he has won several prizes, including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Award (2022–25), a Lilly Offenbach Strauss Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University (2025), and the Maclaren Gold Medal in English, University of Toronto (2019).