OH S01E02: A Conversation with Dr. John Vanderheide, Associate Professor and Acting Chair, English and Cultural Studies

To me it’s a really important era for us to study as people in the 21st century, because you know it was in the early 20th century that the society that we know and love and hate came to be, right. The society of mass reproduction of technologies, radio, television. All of these kinds of different technologies have profoundly impacted the nature of the arts and that’s really interesting to me. (John)

Hi I’m Madison, (Madison)

I’m Alex, (Alex)

and I’m Emilee, (Emilee)

and we’re your hosts of Office Hours. (All)

What’s Office Hours, Alex? (Emilee)

Good question, Emilee. Office Hours is a monthly podcast produced by us, your peer research coaches, and the Huron University Library, where research takes centre stage. (Alex)

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Office Hours. My name is Emilee, and I’m a fourth-year English and Cultural Studies student here at Huron. Today I’m joined by Dr. John Vanderheide, an associate professor of English and Cultural Studies here at Huron and the current acting Chair of the department. Dr. Vanderheide has published and contributed to many articles in his academic career, and if you’re in the English department or have ever taken an English course at Huron, chances are you’ve seen Dr. Vanderheide around. Hi professor, it’s nice to have you here. (Emilee)

Hi, Emilee, it’s so great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. (John)

Yeah, no problem, thank you. If you are ready, let’s go right into it. (Emilee)

Sounds great. (John)

So, let’s go back to the beginning. Can you give us maybe a brief overview of your some of your research interests throughout your academic career. Maybe a look into your interests starting from your student days to now? (Emilee)

Sure, I’d love to. So, I’m originally from Calgary, Alberta, and I went to the University of Calgary as an undergrad. My first under-so I actually have two undergrad degrees-my first attempt at schooling was in psychology. So, I basically went through the psychology program, but in my last year of that program I took a Psychology of Creativity course with a professor who was quite an eccentric fellow. Former member of the Winnipeg Royal Ballet and quite a performer in the classroom. His kind of enthusiasm for literature and for the creative arts really kind of propelled me into reading a lot more. So, when I started reading at the end of my psyche degree, I realized I actually really want to study literature. So, I went back and got a degree in English, and because of a professor there that I really liked, was a specialist in 19th century American fiction, he was a Henry James scholar. That really kind of got me interested in 19th century American fiction. I wrote an undergrad Honours Thesis on the author of Moby Dick called Herman Melville, and that also kind of led me into an interest in American literature and culture in general. But as my interests developed, I started really becoming more interested in how art changed in the 20th century with the development of all sorts of mass technologies. My undergrad professor knew about a grad program, actually here at Western, called the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism, and so I came here, and it brought my research into a new direction. Sort of since then, starting to teach at Huron, I really became really focused on modernist and post-modernist and late-modernist artistic schools of creation. (John)

That’s awesome. So, you said you went from an undergrad in psychology to a degree in English and then a master’s in theory and criticism. I was wondering how the process is of switching majors or disciplines and if you see any helpful overlap in the different subjects that you’ve studied and how that kind of comes through in your teaching? (Emilee)

I think there’s a great overlap between psychology and English in particular, but also history and English, and philosophy and English, and political science and English, which is one of the reasons why I am so in favour of undergraduate double-majors because it just kind of makes sense. English and psychology are quite a bit different because psychology is a science. So, when you write a paper in psychology everything has to be fact-based, backed by experiment and research and stuff like that. I actually, I am inordinately fond of the scientific method, but for me literature is in some sense-you know science can help us understand literature but it’s not the be all and end all of understanding what narrative is about. (John)

Yeah, definitely. And I’ve noticed even in some of the courses I’ve taken with you there is such an intersection of various disciplines, various elements of technology, capitalism, so many different intersections that I don’t think-English couldn’t exist, and literature couldn’t exist without those intersections and recognizing those intersections. So, I think that’s really important. So, you also mentioned that your professor was interested or specialized in 19th century literature, correct me if I am mistaken, but then you also became interested in modernist and post-modernist literature and 20th century American literature. So, I was wondering if you could speak a bit more to that and if your research interests have changed significantly from the point of your master’s maybe or your undergrad to now and how that kind of has shaped your teaching or your perspective throughout the years? (Emilee)

Yeah, so, the 20th century became really important to me because we have the development of all of these new technologies that art can sort of exploit. So, like radio and television and film. I should have put film before television. And now we have digital technologies and the internet. So, we have all of these new technologies that in some ways give art a new life. So I’m really interested in the way the developments of technology in the 20th century have influenced the arts, and because I am an Americanist-that is that I mainly study American literature and culture-in the 20th century there are a lot of different kinds of things that are important to me. There’s literary modernism and all of the kind of different branches of literary modernism, including you know we’ve studied together authors of the Harlem Renaissance, we’ve studied T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, [mhmm] you know so, I guess my sort of research journey has gone from strictly literature to cultural production in general. And that has taken some time because when I was an undergraduate studying English literature, the material I was studying came was written by people who looked like me, right. They were male, they were white, and so on. But coming to Western, going to grad school, meeting so many people from so many different places because grad school is a great place to go if you want to meet people from all over the world, you know. I started learning about different kinds of narrative traditions, and that has really developed actually after my grad school as I became a teacher as I kind of realized that it was important to, for me philosophically as a pluralist, it was important to kind of provide as great a diversity of types of storytelling as I could. (John)

Yeah, definitely, and I’ve even noticed that in the courses that you teach and the ways that I’ve learned in my undergrad at Huron through English courses versus, say my courses in high school, where it was a lot of the white, male, like you said, English, American, Canadian authors, and it kind of leads you to think why this canon exists and who gets to determine whose a part of that canon in the first place. So, with that, I was wondering in your experience and position as a settler scholar in English and cultural studies, you mentioned you often study and teach texts that may be outside of your own experiences and culture. And I know in our courses we have talked about positionality and privilege, so I was wondering how you check your own biases or privilege within this pursuit of knowledge from experiences outside of your own community? (Emilee)

Yeah, biases, you know tend to be unconscious so it’s a really difficult task to try to root out all your biases and so for me one of the most important ways to do that is to be continuously reading and researching and talking to people and listening to people. You know, Huron is situated on the traditional territory of, among other Nations, the Haudenosaunee, so you know if I want to introduce students to the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace, which is like a story cycle about how the confederacy came to exist, I have to do a lot of research because I’m not Haudenosaunee. So, on the one hand I am limited by my own being, right, you know by the accidents of my birth. But on the other hand I do have a kind of ethical and professional obligation, and political obligation, to help decolonize or Indigenize the university, you know, and those things can, you know, what does that mean exactly? To me, it means making sure that what I’m presenting are the voices of people who live in the tradition, born into the tradition, of what I happen to be talking about. I hope that kind of makes sense. (John)

Yeah, that definitely does, thank you so much. And I definitely agree, especially given where we are situated and our positionality as scholars and as academics, and in my own and your own position also as settlers, there’s that, of course that responsibility and I’m grateful and glad that it’s something that many professors, including yourself, take, not only into your personal life and personal responsibility but also your academic and professional responsibilities as well. So, turning to your life as an academic, can you give us a quick glimpse into the workday of professor Vanderheide? How do you tend to balance your research, courses, and other duties as well as your personal life? (Emilee)

Well that’s a great question. I don’t know if there is balance or anything like that or if it is just chaos. No, it’s not just chaos. It’s not chaos because, you know, I have the structure of the weekly courses where I have to be in a certain room at a certain time, and I’m teaching. So, I have-it’s sort of like-being an academic is a polyrhythmic kind of experience. You have the basic rhythm of your courses, that you know I gotta be at-here on Monday, here on Wednesday, and here on Friday. But then all of the other stuff is variable, right. As a Chair, I have to deal with things on the fly, you know, there are student request for special permissions and blah blah blah. So, when I say like academic life is polyrhythmic it’s like, there are regular things that happen every week and then there are things that come up. They say that academic life is part research, part teaching, and part service to the institution, but these things, happen on different time scales almost. I just finished revising a chapter article for a book that’s going to be published in spring 2026, and so, like, I had to do that last week during reading week. And so, things just happen at certain times, but then you have the regularity of your teaching. So, it’s a little bit chaos and a little bit of order and that’s kind of highly enjoyable. (John)

Yeah, I agree, and I feel like with academia generally there’s this kind of routine you get into, especially once you get used to the schedule for the semester, you know what you are teaching or what courses you are taking. But there’s also that kind of uncertainty sometimes, there’s certain short periods to study, there’s time when you have to work, things like that. With that, and your kind of experience not only being a past student but now a professor, how would you recommend current undergrad students get a grip on this chaos but order, this kind of structure for university, how do you think people can get a grip on that early in the game? (Emilee)

Tough question. I’m not sure if I have, you know if I’m the person for a great answer to that, because I often find myself flying by the seat of my pants. For me, being in academia, it’s sort of like an athleticism. It kind of follows a season like sports seasons do, you know, like exam season is like your playoffs and so there’s like moments of great intensity during the year and then there’s moments where you can step back and relax a little bit. So how do you prepare for those moments of great intensity? With great foresight. So, sometimes I tell my students ‘Treat being a university student like a full time job.’ Say you are supposed to work 40 hours a week, you are taking five courses, that’s eight hours per course a week. So even if you have no assignments in your course but you still have eight hours that week to work on it, so start brainstorming for your next paper or make sure you are keeping up with the reading and stuff like that. Just kind of like time management is, you know, I don’t really have great advice on how to achieve time management, but I know that that’s the thing you need to do. (John)

Yeah, exactly. I feel like that’s something I’ve also learned throughout the last three and a half years of my undergrad. Just balancing your time, trying to beat procrastination, that’s a big thing for me. So, yeah, I agree, thank you so much. So, continuing on with undergraduate research, and talking about that specifically. One of the goals of this podcast, specifically, is to encourage, grow, and support a broad culture of research and inquiry here at Huron. So, I was wondering what are your thoughts on the value of student research, especially outside of the formal classroom, and how can we better support this kind of extracurricular research as students, and as faculty members, and as a community? (Emilee)

Well, another great question, thanks, and I feel like Huron is quite an incredible place for that specifically, for all of the undergraduate research opportunities that it provides for its students. When I was in undergrad, I did not have anything like the Center for Undergraduate Research Learning, CURL, there was no undergraduate literary, or I should say undergraduate academic journal like Liberated Arts. There were no opportunities for me to be a research assistant with professors. But at Huron, all of that is possible, and student research is invaluable however you look at it, from whatever perspective you look at it. From my perspective as a professor, a student researching is sort of like a junior colleague in the field of knowledge production. Although, I shouldn’t really say that knowledge, or the acquisition of knowledge isn’t really the main purpose of research, it’s a great side effect. But knowledge kind of comes and goes. In some ways, learning is sort of like, about taking flight, your soul taking flight is actually how Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, conceived of learning. But learning is about making connections with people, you know, people from the past. You are reading the words of people who have lived before and are no longer here. Making connections with other, living people who are working in your field. So, to me, in many respects, and even if you are not going into grad school or you’re not going into any kind of post-post secondary educational institution, learning the love of researching and reading is just an absolutely invaluable thing. I still kind of consider myself a student even though from the perspective of the society I’ve gone from being a student to being a professor. Learning is a life-long thing, and Huron being able to provide these sort of opportunities for students to be able develop their interests outside of the classroom is incredible. And because you know yourself from some of the things we’ve worked on together, that not every class is going to address everything that you want to talk about, that you want to read. So, CURL allows, on the one hand, an opportunity for students to work with professors on their research, so see what academic research is like. But on the other hand, it allows students to pursue their own research interests and to me that’s incredible. (John)

I agree, yeah, it can really bring community together, especially between professors and students, kind of bridging this gap between different positions-the position of being a student versus being a professor and, yeah, I think it can really help us work together which is awesome and I really appreciate that experience that I’ve had here. (Emilee)

It’s kind of like the difference between instruction and education. You know, in instruction it’s a kind of hierarchical thing where a professor says ‘you must know this’ and then students repeat it or something like that. Whereas education is sort of like, the job of the professor is to coax out the student’s research interests and support them on their own individual line of flight. (John)

Yeah, exactly, and I feel like breaking down these hierarchies and this, these structures that might be intimidating especially to newer students or people who are just fresh into undergrad is really important and I feel like it can create a much more welcoming environment and it can make learning more welcoming and more exciting maybe for students. So, with that, how would you approach or answer the question of how can students at Huron or in the broader community get involved with research with a professor, for example. I know in your experience you said you didn’t really have that chance to work one-on-one with a professor, or being a part of a bigger project like CURL. But how would you suggest a student, maybe a student in their first or second year who wants to get involved with research, how would you suggest them getting involved with that? (Emilee)

Well, I suggest that you should never be shy. And you should always just ask your professor about research opportunities. I feel like everyone knows about CURL and Liberated Arts and research assistantships, but them I’m constantly met with people who have never heard of those things before. Maybe from the perspective of the student it might be intimidating to go talk to your professor, but I feel like professors want students to come to talk to them about research opportunities. So, I guess my main piece of advice is don’t be shy. Go ask anybody, everybody, all of your professors, one of your professors, it doesn’t really matter. If you feel like one of your professors is really speaking to your own research interests, go talk to them and ask them about, you know, ‘is there anything I can-do you have, like, any research projects going on that you need an assistant for? Have you ever heard of CURL, or do you do CURL projects?’ You know, stuff like that, or ‘I have this paper and I’m really proud of it and I’d love to see it in print. What do you think about this paper if I submit it to Liberated Arts?’ Just don’t be shy, because it’s literally our job to help you. So, that’s the main piece of advice that I can give off the top of my head at this moment. (John)

Yeah, thank you so much. I feel like it really helps hearing that from a professor, someone whose in that position, to know that they really want students to come approach them and talk to them. And it’s not only often a professors, you know, passion, but it’s also their job, it’s what they do, and I think again breaking down those barriers of nervousness or intimidation is really important to help create a good student-to-professor relationships. Yeah, so thank you so much. So, I have a few general questions, some quick, kind of rapid-fire, some fun questions [Okay] for the end, if you’d like. So, my first one is, who is your current favourite theorist or author to read? I know that is a very broad question, and you have taught so many people that I’ve learned so much about, and I can’t even name my favourite, but if you can think of someone off the top of your head, who would you say? (Emilee)

You know, that’s an impossible question to answer. How about I’ll say, because I’m really interested in a current theoretical school called Afro-pessimism. I’m really interested in the writings of Frank B. Wilderson the third, who wrote a great book kind of on American cinema called ‘Red, White, and Black,’ but it’s also really sort of about the structure of American social being or ontology and it’s a very very interesting piece of work that I highly recommend. (John)

Yeah, perfect, thank you. Going on to just general interest. What would you say is your favourite film, or your current favourite film? (Emilee)

My current favourite film is from 1954 [haha]. No, I was thinking my current favourite film, what could that be? Well, I do absolutely love, and I feel like it is one of the most poetic, artistically complete things ever made on film, is a film called La Strada from an Italian director, Frederico Fellini. It’s just a really beautiful movie. (John)

Yeah, thank you. Another very random one, but what’s your favourite animal? (Emilee)

Well, my cats would have to force me to say cats. (John)

Perfect, mine probably would too, and then just a general question. What are your hobbies outside of academia, or how do you unwind after work? What are some things you like to do? (Emilee)

Well, I love playing video games. Kind of embarrassed I have like all the consoles, you know I love PlayStation and I love my Nintendo switch. And I play music to unwind. (John)

Perfect. And just to wrap it up with the music question. Who would you say is your favourite musical artist right now? (Emilee)

Well, right now, on repeat in my car drive to work everyday, I’ve just been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s GNX. [Yes], Great album. (John)

Amazing. Thank you so much, it was so nice having you here, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one who can say that I really appreciate your insight and your answers. So, thank you so much. (Emilee)

Thanks again for the invitation, Emilee, and to the production team. It’s been a real pleasure. (John)

Yeah, thank you guys so much, and thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. (Emilee)