Areas of interest
Clint Burnham's research interests include cultural studies (especially film and popular culture), contemporary poetry, and theory (especially psychoanalysis and Marxism).
Education
- BA, MA (Victoria)
- PhD (York)
Biography
Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the unceded traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sahtloot) First Nation, centred historically on kwaniwsam. He lives and teaches on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations.
He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. He is also the author of numerous books of poetry and fiction; his novel Smoke Show was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2005, his most recent book of poetry, The Goldberg Variations, was published in 2024 by New Star, and his latest fiction collection, The Old Man: New Stories, was published as a chapbook by above/ground, also in 2024. He recently (fall 2025) guest-edited an issue of Some magazine, comprised of poetry criticism; visual poems appeared in the summer of 2025 in . He co-edited Digital Natives (Other Sights) with Lorna Brown, From Text to Txting (Indiana) with Paul Budra, and an issue of Canadian Literature on 21st century poetics with Christine Stewart; he is the author of The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Arsenal Pulp). Recent academic writing discusses psychoanalysis, Marxism, colonialism, climate disasterism, and the digital/internet/AI and includes essays in (eds. Sinan John-Richards and Thomas Waller, Bloomsbury Academic), (eds. Deanna Fong and Cole Mash), and (forthcoming) in CLCWeb, a Fredric Jameson festschrift from Duke press, and in various iterations of the Bloomsbury Academic “Theory and Criticism Across the Disciplines” series (including race theory, environmentalism, and psychoanalysis). His latest academic tome is Lacan and the Environment (Palgrave, 2021), co-edited with Paul Kingsbury (SFU GEOG). Does the Internet have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture appeared in 2018 from Bloomsbury Academic, which also published his Fredric Jameson and “The Wolf of Wall Street”, in 2016. Forthcoming in January 2026 is (Routledge). In April 2026 he is organizing (with Paul Kingsbury) a conference on “the University of Lacan?” at the Western Front, Vancouver.
Clint has been a member of the SFU English department since 2007; before that he taught at UBC, Capilano College, and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He has supervised doctoral students writing on photography and intimacy (Alison Dean) on sound archives (Deanna Fong), on theories of search (Alois Sieben), on poetry and humor (Scott Innis at UBC – co-supervised with Prof. Larissa Lai), on allegory and intoxication (Eva Graham – co-supervised with Prof. Carolyn Lesjak), and on post-humanism (Ziwei Yan); he is currently supervising dissertations on psychoanalysis and Palestine (Rawia Inaim – co-supervised with Prof. Jon Smith) and on digital mediation (Jake McDonald). Clint is coordinator of the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows in the Humanities and is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy.
Courses
Spring 2026
Future courses may be subject to change.