Dr. Monique Tschofen
Advisory Editor:
Interfaces: Image/Texte/Langage (A bilingual journal housed at Université de Bourgogne-Dijon, Paris-Diderot)
Brief list of topics/specializations:
Literary and cultural theory; word-image studies; visual culture; interarts studies; art and/as theory; digital humanities; research creation; critical making; critique
Biography:
Professor Tschofen joined TMU’s Department of English in 1999 after teaching at Athabasca University and the University of Alberta. Her publications in the areas of new media, visual culture, Canadian studies, and globalization include textbooks on film and literature, literature and multimedia, and literary hypertext as well as edited collections of essays on Canadian writers and filmmaker Atom Egoyan.
Her current research has two branches. One theorizes the relationship between art and philosophy. Asking about the conditions under which an artwork can be an “act of theory,” she writes on Gertrude Stein, digital installation art, experimental cinema, and ekphrastic poetry.
Her current work with the Decameron Collective (external link, opens in new window) , a group of nine interdisciplinary scholar-creators from across Canada including Kari Maaren from English and Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof from Image Arts at TMU, emerges from a practice of collaborative research co-creation anchored in care ethics. Investigations of past and present moments experiment with creative digital humanities and research creation methodologies. Two projects that can be understood as both i-docs and e-lit, one web-based and one designed for VR, have been exhibited to date.
Her feminist creative practice is richly archival, and fuses poetry, algorithmic generation, digital photography, animation, sound art, with the histories of manuscript culture and book making.
Selected Publications:
Tschofen, Monique. “Becoming M/other: Materialities in Ali Abbasi’s Border.” Imaginations: A Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 14.1 (2023).
Tschofen, Monique, Lai-Tze Fan, Nataleah Hunter-Young, and Dan Browne. “Reforming Critique: Critical Making as Method and Practice.” Reviewing Comparative Literature in Canada: Issues of Scholarship, Pedagogy and Publishing in the Contemporary Conjuncture. Eds. Susan Ingram and Irene Sywenky. Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press.135-157.
Tschofen, Monique. “Exile, Media, Capital: Calendar’s Systems of Exchange.” Comparative Literature in Canada. Ed. Giulia De Gasperi and Joseph Pivato. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018.
Tschofen, Monique. “The Digital Denkbild: Caitlin Fisher’s New Media Art as Philosophy.” Theory, Culture and Society 33.5 (2016): 139-157
Tschofen, Monique. “Drawing Out a New Image of Thought: Anne Carson’s Radical Ekphrasis.” Word and Image 29.2 (2013): 233-243.
Exhibitions:
The Decameron Collective. Decameron 2.0. ICIDS: International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Kobe, Japan. (Juried) November 11-17th, 2023.
The Decameron Collective. Memory Eternal Вічная Пам'ять: Book of Mourning. Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival, Coimbra, Portugal. VR storyworld designed for Oculus. July 12-15, 2023. (Juried)
The Decameron Collective. Decameron 2.0. Electronic Literature Association Media Arts Festival, Como Italy, May 30-June 1, 2022. Web XR storyworld. (Juried). *Winner of Honorable Mention - The Robert Coover Prize for a Work of Electronic Literature.
The Decameron Collective. Decameron 2.0. RUBIX Catalyst, X University. Jan 27, 2022.