Paul Huebener (he/him) is an Associate Professor of English. Paul’s research asks how time functions culturally as a form of power, revealing how literature and other imaginative responses can help us develop a critical literacy of time. His latest book is Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis. Moving from circadian rhythms and ancient frozen bacteria to advertisements and oil pipelines, the book turns to literature to show how cultural narratives of time are connected to the problems of ecological collapse and what we might do to fix them. Nature's Broken Clocks was a finalist for the 2022 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize for the Environmental Humanities, the 2022 ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Creative Writing, and the 2021 Creative Saskatchewan Publishing Award.
Paul’s previous book, Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics of Time in Canadian Literary Culture, develops foundational principles of critical time studies, demonstrating how time functions broadly as a tool of power, privilege, and imagination within a multicultural and multi-temporal nation. Timing Canada was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize.
Paul has previously served as a Steering Committee member for the Time and Globalization Working Project based at McMaster University and as a co-editor for The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
Nature’s Broken Clocks: Reimagining Time in the Face of the Environmental Crisis. University of Regina Press, 2020. Nature’s Broken Clocks has been reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada and has been featured on CBC Radio in a dedicated review and as part of a pandemic reading list. The book was a finalist for the 2022 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize for the Environmental Humanities, the 2022 ASLE-UKI Book Prize for Ecological Creative Writing, and the 2021 Creative Saskatchewan Publishing Award.
Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics of Time in Canadian Literary Culture. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism.
Co-Edited Books
Time and Globalization: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Reprint of the special issue of Globalizations on “Time and Globalization.” Edited by Paul Huebener, Susie O’Brien, Tony Porter, Liam Stockdale, and Yanqiu Rachel Zhou, Routledge, 2017.
Time, Globalization and Human Experience. Edited by Paul Huebener, Susie O’Brien, Tony Porter, Liam Stockdale, and Yanqiu Rachel Zhou, Routledge, 2017.
Selected Talks and Interviews
“Sleep Through This Talk: Imagination and the Paradox of Sleep in a Restless World.” Public lecture for Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. Online, 26 Jan. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4AZzddnXYY
“The clock’s wound up’: Critical Reading Practices in the Time of Social Acceleration and Ecological Collapse.” On Active Grounds: Agency and Time in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Robert Boschman and Mario Trono, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019, pp. 33-55.
Selected Refereed Articles
“Stealing Sleep: Expanding the Conversation on the Literary Politics of Sleep and Insomnia.” English Studies in Canada, vol. 44, no. 3, 2018 [published in 2021], pp. 67-89, muse.jhu.edu/article/783656.
“Timely Ecocriticism: Reading Time Critically in the Environmental Humanities.” Environmental Literatures and Politics in Canada, special issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, edited by Catriona Sandilands, vol. 25, no. 2, 2018, pp. 327-44, academic.oup.com/isle/article/25/2/327/5052175.
Edited with, and introduction written with, Susie O’Brien, Tony Porter, Liam Stockdale, and Y. Rachel Zhou. “Reworking Resilience.” IGHC Working Paper Series, McMaster University, vol. 17, no. 1, 2017, socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/globalization/news/ighc-working-paper-series-17-1-reworking-resilience.
“Subjective Time and the Challenge of Social Synchronization: Gabrielle Roy’s The Road Past Altamont and Catherine Bush’s Minus Time.” Canadian Literature, no. 223, 2014, pp. 32-48, canlit.ca/article/subjective-time-and-the-challenge-of-social-synchronization-gabrielle-roys-the-road-past-alamont-and-catherine-bushs-minus-time/.
“Thoughts on Time-Based Readings of Canadian Literature and Culture.” English Studies in Canada, vol. 36, no. 2-3, 2010, pp. 141-64, journals.library.ualberta.ca/esc/index.php/ESC/article/view/11004.
“Metaphor and Madness as Postcolonial Sites in Novels by Jean Rhys and Tayeb Salih.” Mosaic, vol. 43, no. 4, 2010, pp. 19-34, wwwapps.cc.umanitoba.ca/publications/mosaic/common/issue/get/43/4.
“Dark Stories: Poet-Audience Relations and the Journey Underground in Margaret Atwood’s The Door and Other Works.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, 2009, pp. 106-33, journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/12704. Winner, Margaret Atwood Society Award for Best Article Published in a Scholarly Journal or Anthology, 2010.
Selected Journal Issue Introduction
With Amanda Di Battista. “Responding to a Racist Climate.” The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, vol. 16, no. 1, 2017, scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss1/36.