Convocation Speaker Christopher Keep Friday, October 25, 2024, 3:00 p.m.
Among his many awards and honors, he counts those he has received for teaching most highly. They include the Bank of Nova Scotia, Western Alumni Association, and University Students’ Council Award of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2002-03) and the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching (2010-11). Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Keep’s family moved to London when he was in elementary school; he recalls driving through the Western campus as a boy and marvelling at the gothic spire of University College, wondering what kind of strange magic they practiced there. He pursued his undergraduate studies, first in Theatre Arts and then English and History, at York University. Having developed a passion for the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, he completed an MA degree in Victorian Studies before beginning his PhD at Queen’s University. His doctoral dissertation received the A.C. Hamilton Prize for a dissertation of distinguished merit. After receiving his doctorate, Keep taught courses in English and Film Studies at Queen’s before moving to the University of Alberta as an Izaak Walton Killam and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow. Following a three-year period teaching at the University of Victoria, Keep returned to London in 2000. At Western, he has served in a number of leadership roles, including Acting Chair and Chair for Undergraduate Studies for the Department of English & Writing Studies, and Acting Director and Graduate Director for the Centre for Theory & Criticism. As Director of the Program in Film Studies for the past six years, he has helped develop the program’s academic internship opportunities, strengthen its connections with the local film community, and diversify its curriculum. Keep is proud to call London his home once again. His faculty office is in the same gothic edifice he once marvelled at through the windows of the family car those many years ago.
Christopher Keep is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Writing Studies and Director of the Program in Film Studies. His main areas of research are 19th-Century British Literature and Culture and Literary Theory. He has published nearly 40 articles in academic journals and books on topics ranging from the role of the typewriter in the emergent information culture of Victorian Britain, to the scientific investigation of the occult in the literature of the 1890s. His most recent research project, a scholarly edition of The Savoy , has just been published as part of the Yellow Nineties 2.0 . He has also served as the Editor of the Victorian Review (2017-24), and as a member of the executive committee for the North American Victorian Studies Association and the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada.
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