Faculty Profile - Nick van Orden

Nick van Orden

Nick van Orden

Faculty

English

Master of Arts in English/Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (University of Victoria, 2010)

Subjects: English

Academic Interests:

English, History, Digital Humanities, Online Learning, Open Access textbooks

Nick van Orden graduated from Carihi Senior Secondary in Campbell River in 1999 and spent the next two years exploring a wide range of courses here at North Island College–everything from Physics and Math to Economics and Sociology.

Drawn particularly to English and History after his courses at NIC, Nick transferred to the University of Victoria where he spent four years completing a Bachelor of Arts, with a double major in English (Honours) and History.

His first teaching experience came in Taiwan after finishing the BA in 2007. Teaching English for a year at a small English school in Kaohsiung (southern Taiwan) put him in front of students aged three to thirteen and was a crash course in classroom management, student engagement, and not knowing the answer.

UVic pulled Nick back from Taiwan after a year: the English department’s Masters beckoning with its commitment to pedagogical training and its affiliation with the Cultural Social and Political Thought program. Two years in CSPT, including a two-hour defense of his Masters thesis, and then, sadly, farewell to the sunny shores of Victoria and on to the ragged frozen wasteland of… Edmonton.

After five years in the University of Alberta's English PhD program (unfinished...), Nick and his family returned to Vancouver Island: home at last.

Since 2015 Nick has taught a wide-range of courses in the NIC English department--from technical writing and business communication to narrative theory and Indigenous literature.

Master of Arts in English/Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (University of Victoria, 2010)

ENG-104 Foundations of Academic Writing

ENG-115 Essay Writing and Critical Analysis

ENG-117 Academic Writing

ENG-122 Reading Literature

ENG-127 Indigenous Literatures in Canada

ENG-159 Professional Writing

ENG-160 Effective Organizational Writing

ENG-230 Selected Topics in Literature

ENG-260 Advanced Communications And Professional Writing

Publications
2015: “Remediation and the Development of Modernist Forms in The Western Home Monthly,”
with Hannah McGregor; in Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave)

2014: “Scholarly Writing and Software Use” #Alt-Academic cluster, MediaCommons

2014: editor New Human Fictions, IDPress

2014: “The Experience and Expression of Telaffect in Virtual Spaces” in New Human Fictions, IDPress

2013: review of The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media, by Bryan
Alexander, Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature Issue 3.1 (March 2013)

2012: editor, Navigating Cybercultures, ebook; IDPress

2012: “The Experience and Expression of Telaffect in Virtual Spaces,” Navigating Cybercultures

2009-2010: copy-editor for CTheory journal (University of Victoria)

 

Conference Presentations
2017: Camosun College: S’Tenistolw 2017 (“Naming Here: the ‘Product’ and Process of an Indigenized
Pedagogy,” with Erin McConomy and Laura Johnston)

2015: University of Victoria: DHSI (“First Year English as a DH Course”)

2015: University of Ottawa: CSDH/SCHN (“Remediation and the Development of Modernist Forms in
The Western Home Monthly,” with Hannah McGregor)

2015: University of Ottawa: CSDH/SCHN (“First Year English as a DH Course”)

2015: University of Alberta: Digital Diversity Conference (“Visualizing the Racialization of Space and
Movement with CartoDb,” with Teresa Zackodnik)

2015: University of Alberta: Digital Diversity Conference (“Remediation and the Development
of Modernist Forms in The Western Home Monthly,” with Hannah McGregor)

2014: Chicago: MLA Convention (“Scholarly Writing and Software Use in Academic Composition”)

2013: UVic: CSDH/SCHN (“I Tweet Dead People: Tweeting the @Wilfred_Watson Archive”)

2012: Mansfield College (Oxford): Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace, and
Science Fiction (“The Experience and Expression of Telaffect in Virtual Spaces”)

2012: Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris): EMiC: Exile’s Return (“Mapping Sheila’s Paris”)

2012: University of Waterloo: SDH (“Telaffective Transmissions Across Virtual Space”)

  • 2017 - 2019: Organizer of North Island College English Department's Write Here Reader Series

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the featured faculty member. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of North Island College.