about

I am an Associate Professor in the English Department at York University, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Mennonite Studies. 

My primary research interest is in contemporary Canadian literature, with a focus on Mennonite writing. I am also interested in the institutionalization of literary studies in Canada, in race and ethnicity studies, and theories of diaspora and migration, as well as literary tourism and the role of spatiality in literature and literary criticism.

My most recent projects include a new book, Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism, from Penn State University Press (2022), and a SSHRC-funded (Insight Development Grant) exploration of literary tourism in English Canada. The first essay from the SSHRC project is entitled “‘Merely to see and touch it‘: On Service, McCrae, and Literary Tourism in Canada,” and was published in the Journal of Canadian Studies. 

I am also the author of Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature  (University of Manitoba Press, 2013), which considers Mennonite writing as a case study in how key migration narratives function in Canadian literary studies. I also co-edited, with Dr. Smaro Kamboureli, Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), a collection of essays about the changing assumptions of contemporary literary studies in Canada, and  edited the collection After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (Penn State University Press, 2015; University of Manitoba Press, 2016), which explores the shifting role of identity in minoritized literary studies. 

I can be reached at rzach@yorku.ca