Degrees: BA (Toronto), MA (York), PhD (McGill)

Prof. Marcel DeCoste received his BA (Hons) in English and Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1991 and his MA in English Literature from York University in Toronto the following year. In 1997 he was awarded his PhD by McGill University, and after two years as Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, joined the English Department at the University of Regina in the summer of 2000, where he has lived and taught happily ever after. His area of teaching and research interest, if not of expertise, is literature of the first half or so of the twentieth century, and in particular British and American poetry and fiction of this period. Thus his time at U of R has seen him offer courses in Anglo-American modernist verse, modernist short fiction and the modernist novel, as well as in the works of the major women of transatlantic literary modernism. He has been fortunate enough to teach a single-author study of James Joyce, which allowed for an intensive exploration of the greatest novel in the English (?) language, 1922's Ulysses, as well as classes in British literature of the two World Wars, and of the 1930s. Further afield, he has mounted classes in African-American prose, literary theory, the Hollywood novel, and twentieth-century literary transvestism, when not busy striking the fear of God into his English 100 students.

From this protracted engagement with the twentieth century, Professor DeCoste has produced a number of articles which have appeared in such learned venues as Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, Contemporary Literature, and Style. These periodicals have published essays on such writers as Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, Ford Madox Ford, Graham Swift, Evelyn Waugh and Richard Wright. He is also author of the first chapter, dealing with the literature of World War II, of Blackwell's Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000 (2005), and has recently completed a book-length study of wartime British fiction, currently under consideration by McGill-Queen's University Press. Founding Member and Canadian Representative of the Evelyn Waugh society, Professor DeCoste has just begun work on a new project, a detailed study of Waugh's post-war fiction and its investment with the dual concepts of writerly and Christian vocation, the first-fruit of which will be appearing soon in the pages of Renascence.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Professor DeCoste is proud and bemused father to three wonderful daughters, Katy, Maggie and Elizabeth, and with Professor Susan Johnston, one-half of their complement of domestic servants and chauffeur staff. When not en route to or from Brownies, swimming lessons, dance or soccer, he can be found volunteering at Christ the King parish, canvassing for the Canadian Diabetes Society or involving himself, through active partisan politics, in matters which almost certainly do not concern him. In his much more plentiful, less civic-minded moments, he devotes himself to such weightier enterprises as cheering on the Ottawa Senators, tracking the records of America's Iron Chefs, and watching great stretches of time vanish into thin air, thanks to Sid Meier's Civilization IV. In addition to hoping yet to see the day in which dry, academic literary criticism takes its rightful place atop the nation's bestseller lists, Professor DeCoste aspires within his lifetime to see the Stanley Cup hoisted in Kanata, to meet Chef Bobby Flay and to conquer the world at Deity level, which last ambition won't surprise his past students one bit!