Maria Cichosz
I am a novelist and scholar of literature, art, theory, drug cultures, and the history of ideas, currently appointed as an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. I earned my Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, where I wrote an interdisciplinary history of allegory after modernism. My fiction and scholarship have appeared in Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Puritan, Emotion, Space and Society, and on the CBC Literary Awards shortlist, among other places, with new research published in Routledge’s Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives (2021) and forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Allegory (2023). I was recently awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship.
My first novel, Cam & Beau, is an off-beat gonzo love story that was released in 2020 and featured in The Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, The Puritan, and The Rumpus. It was also a semifinalist for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Awards. Check it out at http://www.camandbeau.ca
I was a 2020-21 Stanford Humanities & Sciences Dean’s Fellow and have taught in the Professional Writing and Communication Program in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
I'm currently working on a new novel with the generous assistance of a Canada Council for the Arts grant.
Address: Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
My first novel, Cam & Beau, is an off-beat gonzo love story that was released in 2020 and featured in The Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, The Puritan, and The Rumpus. It was also a semifinalist for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Awards. Check it out at http://www.camandbeau.ca
I was a 2020-21 Stanford Humanities & Sciences Dean’s Fellow and have taught in the Professional Writing and Communication Program in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
I'm currently working on a new novel with the generous assistance of a Canada Council for the Arts grant.
Address: Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
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Check out www.camandbeau.ca for more information.
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Thesis Chapters by Maria Cichosz
This piece uses "tripping," broadly conceived, as a conceptual metaphor for methodology and research processes within the humanities and social sciences. It uses drug theory and theories of qualitative methods to read Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas as an allegory of methodological questions and processes. As such, it is also an original product of applied narrative methods, and an argument for the use of creative writing approaches in the humanities.
Lectures, Talks, Conferences by Maria Cichosz
What happened to Furthur? After a final trip to the Woodstock festival in 1969, the Merry Pranksters’ famous psychedelic school bus was abandoned in the swampy woods of Ken Kesey’s Oregon family farm, overtaken by growth and left to decay. The interior rotted, the frame rusted, and the once-beautiful exterior art flaked away. Like the counterculture and community it symbolized, the vehicle fell into disrepair. Now relocated to a covered garage, the bus is the subject of a restoration campaign aiming to put it back on the road as a travelling museum to educate and inspire future generations about its previous life and context.
The Pranksters understood ordinary material phenomena as manifestations of a higher, unified cosmic reality, and Furthur was no exception. At the center of their group’s action, the bus was a symbol of a complex matrix of social shifts, a West Coast brand of American freedom, radical communal living, and a fledgling drug culture. In its transformation from a mobile object that fused art and life, to a stationary ruin, to a historical restoration project, Furthur’s life cycle raises questions about the embeddedness of symbolic meaning in material artifacts, community memorialization, and tensions between historical value and art value. Using theories of allegory and material culture, my paper explores how a colorful bus became a vehicle for community building and a repository for a counterculture’s deferred dreams. In the retrieval of a rusting bus from a swamp, what else is salvaged? What is lost?
Check out www.camandbeau.ca for more information.
This piece uses "tripping," broadly conceived, as a conceptual metaphor for methodology and research processes within the humanities and social sciences. It uses drug theory and theories of qualitative methods to read Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas as an allegory of methodological questions and processes. As such, it is also an original product of applied narrative methods, and an argument for the use of creative writing approaches in the humanities.
What happened to Furthur? After a final trip to the Woodstock festival in 1969, the Merry Pranksters’ famous psychedelic school bus was abandoned in the swampy woods of Ken Kesey’s Oregon family farm, overtaken by growth and left to decay. The interior rotted, the frame rusted, and the once-beautiful exterior art flaked away. Like the counterculture and community it symbolized, the vehicle fell into disrepair. Now relocated to a covered garage, the bus is the subject of a restoration campaign aiming to put it back on the road as a travelling museum to educate and inspire future generations about its previous life and context.
The Pranksters understood ordinary material phenomena as manifestations of a higher, unified cosmic reality, and Furthur was no exception. At the center of their group’s action, the bus was a symbol of a complex matrix of social shifts, a West Coast brand of American freedom, radical communal living, and a fledgling drug culture. In its transformation from a mobile object that fused art and life, to a stationary ruin, to a historical restoration project, Furthur’s life cycle raises questions about the embeddedness of symbolic meaning in material artifacts, community memorialization, and tensions between historical value and art value. Using theories of allegory and material culture, my paper explores how a colorful bus became a vehicle for community building and a repository for a counterculture’s deferred dreams. In the retrieval of a rusting bus from a swamp, what else is salvaged? What is lost?