CO-AUTHORED BOOK
Co-written with Sonja Boon, Laurie MacNeill, and Julie Rak. The Routledge Introduction to Auto/biography in Canada. 2023.
SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUES
Co-edited with Zachary Rondinelli. “The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Canadian Comics.” Special issue of Canadian Literature 249 (2022).
Co-edited with Nima Naghibi and Eleanor Ty. “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives.” Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. 35.2 (Spring 2020).
EDITED SCHOLARLY COLLECTIONS
Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage. Co-edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. 2020.
HONOURABLE MENTION, 2021 COMICS STUDIES SOCIETY PRIZE FOR EDITED COLLECTIONS
Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives. Co-Edited by Candida Rifkind and Linda Warley. Life Writing Series. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. May 2016.
WINNER OF THE 2016 GABRIELLE ROY PRIZE FOR THE BEST WORK IN ENGLISH CANADIAN LITERARY CRITICISM
A collection of scholarly essays on Canadian cartoonists and illustrators, including chapters on Chester Brown, Seth, Julie Doucet, Sarah Leavitt, Scott Chantler, Ho Che Anderson, David Alexander Robertson, John Lang, Willow Dawson, and Hervé Bouchard and Janice Nadeau.
“An essential resource for anyone interested in Canadian comics, life writing, and political issues. Beautifully produced with a useful introduction and fascinating essays about major and emerging cartoonists in Canada and Quebec, Canadian Graphic puts the study of Canadian autobiographical and biographical comics on the academic map and shows us ways to think about one of the most exciting developments in Canadian cultural expression today.”
– Julie Rak, University of Alberta
REVIEWS (hover for links)
Brenna Clarke Gray, “Candour, Comics, CanLit.” Canadian Literature 235 (Winter 2017): 179-80.
Davis, Rocío G. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 42.2 (2019): 436-38.
Nick Martinez, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Pub. Jan. 28 2017. Web.
MONOGRAPH
Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2009. 256 pages.
WINNER OF THE 2010 ANN SADDLEMYER PRIZE FOR THE BEST WORK IN CANADIAN THEATRE CRITICISM
While Canadian historians have studied socialism in the 1930s, and although there have been many studies of American and British literary leftists from this period, Comrades and Critics is the first full-length study of Canada's 1930s literary left. Challenging dominant perceptions that this decade was a lull between the more celebrated modernist enterprises of the 1920s and 1940s, Candida Rifkind argues that the events of the 1930s - from mass unemployment, to the dustbowl, to the Spanish Civil War - galvanized a generation of writers, leading them to unite artistic practice and political action in provocative and influential ways.
Analyzing and recovering much-neglected poems, plays, manifestoes, and documentaries, Rifkind demonstrates how leftist cultural production came to dominate English-Canadian literature by the end of the decade. She pays particular attention to the significant role that women writers played in this period and examines a diverse group of writers that included Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, and Toby Gordon Ryan. These writers negotiated the struggle to revolutionize both literature and politics, while being subject to the gender hierarchies of socialism and literary modernism that continued long after the thirties came to an end.
A groundbreaking study in Canadian history and literature, Comrades and Critics is a much-needed examination of an important and still influential literary period.
REVIEWS
Louise H. Forsythe, Canadian Literature 203
Susan Knutson, Theatre Research in Canada 32.1
Julia Smith, Left History 15.2