Dr. David Coley, Associate Professor, English

David Coley’s most recent book, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Ohio State, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for best book in medieval studies by the Canadian Society of Medievalists. The book considers submerged discourses of plague in fourteenth-century English poetry, especially the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x. David’s earlier monograph, The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse, 2012), posits the representation of the spoken word within later medieval English poetry as a powerful and efficacious act that both critiqued and created social, political, and religious realities. David’s articles have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, Glossator, and Florilegium, and he is a contributor to several edited volumes, including Chaucer and Trauma (Penn State, 2025), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2020), Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto, 2019), and Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2018). In collaboration with Dr. Matthew Hussey, David is co-creator of The Canterbury Fails, a biweekly podcast dedicated to reading marginal, minor, and absolutely unread Old and Middle English literature (and pairing that literature with thematically appropriate cocktails).

Dr. Diana Solomon, Associate Professor, English

My research focuses on 17th- and 18th-century literature, particularly theatre, gender, comedy, and print culture. I also work on issues concerning contemporary comedy. Currently I’m at work on two books: I’m finishing a book on “troubling comedy” on the Restoration and 18th-century English stage, and I’m beginning a biography of Restoration actress Anne Bracegirdle. My work has been supported by fellowships from the Clark, Folger, Huntington, and Noel Libraries and the Harry Ransom Center, and by grants from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

I teach courses on 17th- and 18th-century literature, drama, comedy, and print culture; from time to time I also teach a role-playing games class using Reacting to the Past pedagogy. In 2014, I received the SFU Excellence in Teaching Award.

(William) Rex Davidson was born in Vancouver, B.C. to a Scottish father and an English mother. He was educated in Canada, Scotland and England. His eclectic working life included jobs such as:

• a history and archeology writer for a prominent English newspaper
• a researcher for a Scottish journalist in Vancouver
• a public affairs director for a Canadian energy company
• an owner/operator of two restaurants and an inn in B.C.
• a farmer with 4000 hogs in Ireland

Davidson has now retired to his home, gardens, dogs and wood/metal-working shop on the Sunshine Coast, and his second home in Tomatin, Scotland. He is a director and secretary of the St. Andrews Society of the City of Vancouver and a 40-year elected member of the Council of the Clan Chattan Association in Scotland, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland.

Dr. Kevin James is Scottish Studies Foundation Chair & Professor of History at the University of Guelph. Kevin studied for his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, working with Professor R. J. Morris in the Department of Economic and Social History.

He is the author of:

• Histories, Meanings and Representations of the Modern Hotel. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2018 
• Tourism, Land and Landscape in Ireland: The Commodification of Culture. New York & London: Routledge, 2014
• Handloom Weavers in Ulster’s Linen Industry, 1815-1914. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007.

His teaching and research focuses on Ireland and Britain during the long 19th century, and also encompasses trans-national themes, such as travel, tourism and the history of the modern hospitality sector. He focuses on the experiences of Scotland and Ireland, and interactions and comparisons between them.

His current research, drawing on old hotel books, explores the social and cultural history of the inn and hotel in Victorian Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England and the Isle of Man. It extends his previous research programme, which examined "tourist development" projects in 19th-century Ireland and the intersections of gendered, racial and class identities in Irish travel writing. He has longstanding interests in comparative modern Scottish and Irish social history and connections between them through tourism.