Profile
Professor Susan Rudy is an academic, writer and Professor Emerita of English at the University of Calgary. Born in Canada, based in London since 2011, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary since 2016, she contributes to the BA in Creative Writing Program at Birkbeck University of London and in 2024, holds a six-week Leighton Artist Studios Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Rudy’s research and writing focus on the productive interrelations between thinking about gender and writing experimentally. Recent publications and reprints include interviews with writer Caroline Bergvall (2023) and queer feminist theorist Clare Hemmings (2019) and essays in Feminist Theory (2020), Reading Experimental Writing (2020), and Moving Archives (2020). Early poetry and creative non-fiction may be found in Canadian Fiction Magazine, The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and Open Letter. Public-facing pieces on gender and sexuality may be found in The New Statesman, many-gendered mothers, and Politics/Live. Forthcoming work includes ‘Who cares if there are no women?’, a conversation about queer parenting co-authored with writer, Hannah Silva.
Work in progress includes Hand Over, an experimental life writing project begun in 2020 and the focus of her attention while at the Banff Centre in 2024. Published work that led to the project was described by Theresa Smalec in 2016 as 'offering glimpses into a story of profound transitions', but it took until 2024 for Rudy to find her method. Inspired by Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries (2024), she has been collecting hundreds of sentences from a decade's worth of research notes, morning pages, early published work, and aborted drafts. During the residency, she will be sifting through the sentences by searching on her keywords -- queer, woman, mother -- pasting the most resonant into spreadsheets, then sorting them alphabetically. She will shape the manuscript by cutting and refining what is left.
Find me on Instagram here.
Research
Research Interests:
My key research interests are:
- Experimental writing
- Contemporary writing by women
- Queer feminist and gender theory
Recent and On-Going Research
I have been writing, editing, and publishing at the intersection of experimental writing and queer feminist theory since the 1980s and am the author or editor of four books and many journal articles and book chapters. Recent publications include ‘A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall’s Hyphenated Practice’ in Reading Experimental Writing (2020) and ‘Gender’s Ontoformativity, or Refusing to be Spat out of Reality’ (2021) in Feminist Theory. Other recent publications include poetry at New York’s Politics/Letters Live, articles at The New Statesman, and ‘Writing What Exists’ at many gendered mothers. Current work includes an experimental memoir tentatively entitled Hand Over.
Hand Over is a story of profound transitions across sexualities, geographies, reading and writing. My scholarly interest in experimental writing arose out of my very early publications as a poet. While studying early modern literature for an MA at the University of New Brunswick, I attended a poetry summer school led by the Jewish-Canadian scholar and poet Eli Mandel, a Professor of English at Toronto’s York University. Mandel’s encouragement of my writing and enthusiasm about his home Department changed my life and I soon found myself studying for a PhD in contemporary Canadian literature amongst the lively community of writer-practitioners and feminist theorists that had formed in 1980s Toronto around the journals Open Letter and Tessera. The completion of my York PhD (1988) was preceded by the birth of my first daughter (Erin, 1986), at which point I turned my professional attention toward the establishment of a track record as a literary critic. My early interest in writing poetry led, however, to a lifelong desire to engage with poets and to think about poetry and literary criticism as aspects of my own writing practice.
I have been an active participant in dialogues around poetry and poetics and continue to engage in community-building work with other writers, academics, and critics. Since 2016, I have curated Conversations about Innovative Aesthetics, Feminism, Racism and the Future, a Facebook group with 350+ members. In 2019, I founded and and until the pandemic facilitated the Queer Poetics Research Network in the Centre for Poetry at Queen Mary. With Georgina Colby at the University of Westminster, I founded and ran S A L O N - LONDON, a site for reading and responding to the present through women's experimental writing in 2016-2023.
Publications
BOOKS
Butling, Pauline and Susan Rudy. 2005. Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003). Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Butling, Pauline, and Susan Rudy. 2005. Poets Talk: Interviews with Marie Annharte Baker, Dionne Brand, Jeff Derksen, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Kroetsch, Erin Mouré, and Fred Wah. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Rudy, Susan, ed. 2005. Fluid Arguments. By Nicole Brossard. Trans. Nicole Brossard, Anne-Marie Wheeler, Alice Parker, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Patricia Claxton, and Marlene Wildeman. Toronto: Mercury Press.
Rudy Dorscht, Susan (aka Susan Rudy). 1991. Women, Reading, Kroetsch: Telling the Difference. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Forthcoming and Recent Publications
(2025) With Hannah Silva. ‘Who cares if there are no women? An intergenerational conversation about queer parenting.’ In Revolutionizing Motherlines, eds. Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green. Toronto: Demeter Press.
(2020) ‘Gender’s Ontoformativity, or Refusing to be Spat out of Reality: Reclaiming Queer Women’s Solidarity Through Experimental Writing.’ Feminist Theory 21(3): 351-365.
(2020) ‘A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall’s Hyphenated Practice: Toward an Interdependent Model of Reading.’ In Reading Experimental Writing. Ed. Georgina Colby. Edinburgh University Press. 163-184.
(2019) ‘I don’t know what gender is, but I do, and I can, and we all do’: An Interview with Clare Hemmings. European Journal of Women’s Studies. 26 (2): 211-222.
Articles
Rudy, Susan. 2020a. ‘Gender’s Ontoformativity, or Refusing to be Spat out of Reality: Reclaiming Queer Women’s Solidarity Through Experimental Writing.’ Feminist Theory 21(3): 351-365. DOI: 1177/1464700119881311.
Hemmings, Clare and Susan Rudy. 2019. ‘I don’t know what gender is, but I do, and I can, and we all do’: An Interview with Clare Hemmings, Head of the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics. European Journal of Women’s Studies. 26(2): 211-222. DOI: 10.1177/1350506819833240.
Fitzpatrick, Ryan and Susan Rudy. 2013. ‘`If everything is moving where is here?’ Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work on cities, space, and impermanence.’ British Journal of Canadian Studies 26(2): 173-189.
Rudy, Susan. 2011. A Conversation with Caroline Bergvall. Jacket2. University of Pennsylvania. [http://jacket2.org/interviews/conversation-caroline-bergvall.] Accessed 3 April 2012.
Fitzpatrick, Ryan and Susan Rudy. 2011. ‘`These marked spaces lie beneath the alphabet’: Readers, Citizens, and Borders in Erín Moure’s Recent Work.’ Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review 210/211: 60-74.
Book Chapters
Rudy, Susan and Hannah Silva. (Forthcoming 2025) ‘Who cares if there are no women? An alternatively intelligent, conversation about queer parenting and love.’ In Revolutionizing Motherlines, eds. Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green. Toronto: Demeter Press.
Rudy, Susan and Caroline Bergvall. 2023. Chapter 27: Interview with Susan Rudy (2010). In Caroline Bergvall's Medievalist Poetics : Migratory Texts and Transhistorical Methods. Eds. Joshua Davies and Caroline Bergvall. Amsterdam University Press. 203-208.
Rudy, Susan. 2022. ‘A reach for what we only hope is there’: Bronwen Wallace’s Writing at the Interval.’ In Bronwen Wallace: Collected Essays. Ed. Wanda Campbell. Quebec: Guernica. 72 – 94.
Rudy, Susan. 2020b. ‘A Queer Response to Caroline Bergvall’s Hyphenated Practice: Toward an Interdependent Model of Reading.’ In Reading Experimental Writing. Ed. Georgina Colby. Edinburgh University Press. 163-184.
Rudy, Susan. 2020c. ‘Reading for Queer Openings: Moving. Archives of the Self. Fred Wah.’ In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda M. Morra. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 169-190.
Rudy, Susan. 2014. ‘Women Who Invite Collaboration: Caroline Bergvall, Erín Moure et al.’ In Regenerations: Canadian Women’s Writing / Régénérations: écritures des femmes du Canada. Eds. Marie Carrière and Pat Demers. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Rudy, Susan and Lynette Hunter. 2014. ‘Labour Notes for “Bodies in Trouble”.’ In Disunified Aesthetics: Situated Textuality, Performativity, Collaboration (2014). Ed. Lynette Hunter. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 115-146.
Rudy, Susan. 2010. ‘Why Postmodernism Now? Toward a Poetry of Enactment.: In Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism. Ed. Robert David Stacey. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press: 341-358. Published 2009 in translation as Por Que Pós-modernismo Agora? Com Vistas à Poesia de Enactment. Trans. Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins. A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 56: 73-92.
Rudy, Susan. 2003. ‘`& how else can I be here?’: Reading Cross-Wise through Some Poetries of Canada.’ Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Ed. Romana Huk. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. 284-298.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Books
Rudy, Susan. (Awarded Leighton Artist Studios Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity) Hand Over: Queer, Woman, Mother. A work of experimental life writing. A brief excerpt -- ‘Am I Their Mother?’ – was accepted for publication in Queer Life, Queer Love: The Second Anthology, edited by Julia Bell and Matt Bates (London: Muswell Press, 2023); withdrawn for personal reasons. 40,000 words.
Rudy, Susan. (In progress.) Queer Openings: Reading, Gender, Experimental Writing. 60,000 words. Academic monograph based on articles recently published in Feminist Theory (Rudy 2020a) and the European Journal of Women’s Studies (Hemmings and Rudy 2020) and on book chapters on gender and experimental writing (Rudy 2022, 2020b, Rudy 2020c).
Public Engagement
Emma Glass & Margarita García Robayo in conversation with Professor Susan Rudy on 'Novel(la) Ideas'.
BookBound 2020 is a from-home literary festival happening during the Covid-19 lockdown, 27th April 2020 - 3rd May 2020. We’re partnered with Wasafiri literary magazine to champion diverse international authors.
On Seamus Heaney: Roy Foster and Ruth Padel in conversation, London, 24 September 2020.
To launch and celebrate the publication of his book 'On Seamus Heaney' (Princeton University Press, 2020), the leading historian and biographer, Roy Foster, appeared in conversation with award-winning British poet, Ruth Padel. With opening words from Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, and Susan Rudy, Director, Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary University of London.
Queer Poetics Research Network To provide a framework for collaboration across generations, institutions and practices; races, genders, and sexualities, in 2019 I founded the Queer Poetics Research Network within the Centre for Poetry at Queen Mary and ran it until 2021.
S A L O N - LONDON With Dr Georgina Colby of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture (IMCC) at the University of Westminster, I founded and direct S A L O N - LONDON, a site for reading and responding to the present through women's experimental writing. S A L O N - LONDON is hosted jointly by QMUL's Centre for Poetry and Westminster's IMCC.
Contributions to The New Statesman
Rudy, Susan. 2016. Can we celebrate all who identify as women on International Women’s Day? The New Statesman. 8 March. [Accessed 19 May 2016.]
Rudy, Susan. 2017. ‘How can feminists reach conservative white women? The New Statesman. 13 February. [Accessed 8 October 2024.]
Rudy, Susan. 2016. What does Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign tell us about gender equality today? The New Statesman. 16 February. [Accessed 19 May 2016.]
Debate at the Oxford Union
Rudy, Susan, Amanda Poole, Josh Levs. 2015. Member, winning team arguing against the proposition that feminism needs to be rebranded. Featured event at the Power Shift: Women in the World Economy. Said Business School, University of Oxford. [Accessed 23 May 2016]
Other Contributions to Digital Culture / Engagement with Artists and Writers
Rudy, Susan. 2010. Editor, compiler, webmaster. The Fred Wah Digital Archive. Accessed 8 April 2011. [http://www.fredwah.ca, accessed 08 April 2011.] This site has been rebuilt as http://fredwah.ca/ [Accessed 21 September 2016.]
