Biography

Elizabeth McKim was born and raised in Saint John, New Brunswick, and completed her BA in English at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. She then went to Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, for an MA in English, and wrote her master’s thesis on post-romantic qualities in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. This led to a strong interest in the Romantic Period, itself, so she continued her education at York University in Toronto, Ontario, where she studied Romantic poetry and poetics, and eventually wrote a PhD dissertation on the poetry and poetics of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

After several years teaching at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Dr. McKim came to St. Thomas, where she has happily taught and researched for many years. A project on women writers of the Romantic Period led her to the newly developing area of study known as “Literature and Medicine,” and that, in turn, led her into the study of narrative as a constitutive process, as well as a medium of expression. From there, it was a natural leap into the associated fields of “Literature and Aging” and narrative gerontology, and much of her work in the last decade has been in these areas, often in collaboration with Bill Randall (Department of Gerontology).

In 2008, as one of a team of colleagues from various disciplines, Dr. McKim became a founding member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative (CIRN) at St. Thomas, and served as its Associate Director from 2008-2012. In its first few years, CIRN organized reading groups and annual public lectures, and in 2010 sponsored an international conference, Narrative Matters. One of CIRN’s major long-term initiatives was to develop an open-access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal, Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations, & Interventions, the first issue of which was published in 2011. Dr. McKim serves as co-editor, along with Bill Randall. They produce two issues each year.