here i begin my travels with a unicorn
Marian Engel, Notebooks

A Passion for Research
a passion for writing

Welcome to the portfolio website for
Dr. Sharon D. Engbrecht

Currently, I am the 2025-2026 Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI).

As a research institute, IICSI seeks to create positive social change through the confluence of improvised arts, innovative scholarship, and collaborative action. My work with the institute focuses on the intersections of story telling, gender, sexuality, and improvisation. I’m exploring how narrative creates social, political, and cultural worlds and what it means to build new worlds together through improvising with inherited traditions and expectations.

My postdoctoral project includes community engagement, working with organizations such as the Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis, Elora House, and many more to build and support activism to end gender-based violence. I’m also working with fellow postdoctoral researchers and students in the Improvisation PhD program to host a series of creative workshops called “Cacophonie: Improvising (with) Identities” that explore the many shapes and sides of identity.

When I’m not working with community, I’m editing my book project. This work focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century transnational feminist thought captured in British and Canadian women’s writing. By investigating the novels alongside their material production, I look at how authors critique socio-cultural narratives of romance. Part narrative analysis, cultural studies, and an exploration of feminist philosophy, the book investigates what gender and sexuality might look like if we had better stories of romance. You can find out more on my research projects page.


Notable Publications


“It’s not unusual to describe these gift economies in academia with the term service, or required labour and a necessary evil that supports our research, but service work in the context of a gift economy is an integral part of the intellectual project of knowledge production.”

Producing Canadian Literature

[Z]ombi(e) becomes a layered term in the writing, doubling as a whitewashed, appropriated term at the same time bodies are turned ashen through zombification and their labour is appropriated for white prosperity and imperialism.”

“the suitcase in the closet”: Talking Zombi(e)s with Junie Désil (an Interview)

“Let’s start with a thought experiment. It’s 6 a.m. in the dead of winter on the Canadian prairies. There’s no wind, and everything is frozen. The rivers have turned to ice, and the sun won’t be up for a few hours. Without wind, water, or solar energy, how can we imagine a just transition away from fossil fuels?”

Refined Language: How the oil industry rebranded itself

“I am drawn most to the moments of her history where she talks about tarot cards and witchy ways or references her experience in the backwoods of Ontario and Quebec, then off to graduate school and grungy apartments. My hope is that we will see another one of these collections from our literary grand aunt Peggy and that she will be as coy and surly as she has always been, defending what she believes in most.”

Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004–2021 by Margaret Atwood (review)

“The dystopian world of The Handmaid’s Tale becomes a vital tool for decoding The Testaments, as Atwood’s sequel sparingly includes descriptions of the oppressive society in which birth rates have decreased and perverted religious zeal, in support of white cis-patriarchy, has taken power.”

Secrets, Deception, Celebrity

“Her work has often had its finger on the pulse of power. Her prescience is part imaginative projection and part attention to history and political trends.”

The Handmaid’s Tale Reflects Margaret Atwood’s Eerie Talent for Reading the Palm of Power

“Figuratively, to abort is to expel or to miscarry. To abort becomes entangled with our perceptions of how we shape the future.”

Fiction about Abortion Confronts the Complicated History of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Rights

“After my first co-op placement, I had a renewed sense of my desire to pursue a career in the professoriate, knowing full well that I’m not an ideal candidate – yet. But, we need faculty, advisers, administrators, and deans to stress the importance of graduate students gaining diverse learning experiences, as we are pushed toward ever-narrower areas of expertise, in order to become better candidates for the future professoriate.”

Why It’s Worth Considering a PhD Co-op

I am currently taking on new projects and am available for speaking engagements.

about me

just a prairie kid

research projects

delving into the archives, discovering the queer

academic cv

my work in academia

marketing & communication

i need money to buy all those books

graphic design & layout

dabbling in the digital arts

photography & other projects

all that creative energy

Researcher
Educator
Activist

sharon d. engbrecht (they/them) comes from a background in visual arts and creative writing. They currently reside in Ontario with their family and enjoy researching, content creation, photography, and winter.

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