Jody Mason

• Associate Professor, Department of English, Carleton University

A Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Jody Mason specializes in Canadian literatures, print culture studies, settler colonial studies, and decolonization.

Her recent research examines how the book and associated ideas about literacy and self-improvement have helped to elaborate settler colonial logic in Canada.

In Home Feelings: Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019), Mason argues that ideas about literacy and literature played key roles in the emergence of settler-defined, liberal citizenship in Canada. Mason's most recent book, Books for Development: Canada in the Late Twentieth-Century World (published in the Rethinking Canada In the World series with McGill-Queen's UP in 2026) tracks the ways the book, which came to function as a key representative of settler exceptionalism, was used within the context of the development paradigm to express solidarity with newly decolonized nations; to argue for the importance of Canadian leadership in the new international order; and to consolidate settler liberal rule at home.

Mason's current research considers what sociologist John Thompson calls“polarization” in the late-twentieth-century field of anglophone literary production. Focusing on Canada, this work examines how the concomitant rise of foreign-owned conglomerate publishing and the emergence of largely state-funded small-press publishing in Canada after 1965 (including Indigenous-owned publishing) have shaped the contemporary field of literary production.

• 2023–present Professor, Department of English, Carleton University

• 2007 University of Toronto, PhD (English)

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