Ron Sweeney is an English teacher at UFV with a passion for literature. He came to UFV from the State University of New York in Buffalo when he was finishing up his Ph.D and has been a sessional instructor since 2008.
Sweeney brings a unique twist to many of the English courses he teaches at UFV, such as ENGL 170: Literature in Context, where he focused on understanding comics in the summer 2019 semester, and ENGL 270: Topics in Popular Fiction, where he focused on superheroes in graphic novels in the winter 2019 semester.
Sweeny is currently working on a collection of edited essays relating to the Riverdale series with two other UFV professors: Heather McAlpine, associate professor of English, and Jessica Wind, sessional faculty in communications.
Why did you decide to study English?
I was always interested in literature. As a child, I read a lot — classic literature to fantasy to sci-fi, which I’ve just recently come back to for teaching. So, then I went to university and I [got to be in] a couple of great classes. I started off as a history major and then gradually thought, ‘You know, the English part is a little bit more my interest.’ I got really into a couple of different areas of literature from innovated poetry and fiction to some of the dystopian future work and such. Then I went to grad school in Buffalo, which was poetry-focused but also had this interesting history of experimental or innovative literature.
Are there any projects you are currently working on?
The strange project that has come out of the last couple of years from the two conferences here [at UFV] is the Riverdale project. So with Jess Wind, who teaches communications here, and Heather McAlpine, who teaches English, we had two years of conferences on Riverdale from a variety of perspectives across the university and we now have an edited book proposed. Our call for papers [on Riverdale] is out there right now. I’m working on the comics part; I’m interested in the hit Archie comics to some of the Archie series and even the Archie Horror series, which are important for developing Riverdale.
We started to get proposals [for the book] coming in. We [even] have people talking about Sabrina or talking about the [Sabrina] television show. We are talking about cultural responses to [Riverdale], so it has been really fun.
In longer terms, I am trying to write about comics. The Canadian writer/artist Jeff Lemire has done a lot of projects that I am interested in. So, I’m trying to look at his dystopian stories such as Sweet Tooth and Descender. I am looking into his works as a whole — what all he has been able to do.
Any future ideas for classes?
I was thinking about an eventual course specifically on Canadian comics. I’m teaching Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer; they’re both Canadian writers. There is a good history of Canadian artists and some of them end up going to work with Marvel or DC, and some of them stick with independent comic publishing. But it’s sort of like whether there’s something uniquely Canadian [in the comics] or what’s going on in there, and some of these different comics’ history. I’m interested in seeing in a course what that would look like.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Image: Karen White/The Cascade
