Research in focus: John Culbert
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June 22, 2026
Name:
John Culbert
My pronouns:
He/him
Title:
Sessional lecturer (continuing status)
Faculty/Department/Unit:
Department of English Language and Literatures, Faculty of Arts
Location:
Vancouver
Year I started working at UBC:
2011
Provide an overview of your research in 75 words or less:
In my latest book, Proximities: Literature, Mobility, and the Politics of Displacement (Liverpool University Press, 2025), I examine portrayals of migration, exile, and forced displacement in modern and contemporary literature. The most recent research for this project involved an analysis of state practices of incarceration and deportation, and I am further developing this work for a forthcoming book on discourses of survival and endurance among migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.
What first motivated you (or motivates you) to conduct your research?
In my previous book, Paralyses: Literature, Travel, and Ethnography in French Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), I explored how empire and colonialism have influenced narrative templates of travel—in stories of exploration and settlement as well as in contemporary accounts of tourism and everyday mobility. My new work on refugee lives extends this scholarship by focusing on the shadow side of travel and trade under late globalization and a changing world order.
What do you hope will change as a result of this research?
We are currently seeing a dramatic escalation of attacks on migrants' rights across the Global North, notably in the mass deportations and incarcerations in the United States. While my work is not geared toward policy prescriptions, I hope it can contribute to a rethinking of citizenship, neighbourliness and belonging, and in so doing provide means to challenge populist nativism and narrow national identification.
What have you learned during your research that has surprised you the most?
As an immigrant to Canada from the United States, and as a longtime adjunct instructor at UBC, I have been interested in the way universities reinforce some of the social and economic disparities of society writ large. I have found the condition of academic precarity and marginalization (eg, in the relative lack of academic funding opportunities) to be highly generative of critical insight into systems of exploitation as well as practices of resistance and solidarity.
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