Dr. Heather Cyr
BA (STU), MA (Queen's), PhD (Queen's)
Heather Cyr is a faculty member and current Chair of the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
I have been a faculty member at KPU since 2011, teaching composition and literature courses, including Children's Literature and Young Adult Literature. I have published on several children's fantasy novels and writers and am the co-editor of the Broadview edition of The Secret Garden. My research interests focus on spaces and places in literature for young people. From 2015 to 2022, I co-led the instructional team that created and continues to run the First-Year English Writing Labs for the English Department, welcoming hundreds of students a year for flexible supplemental instruction.
Courses taught
- ENGQ 1099 Writing Skills with Readings
- ENGL 1100 Introduction to University Writing
- ENGL 1104 Reading and Writing Skills for Educational Assistants
- ENGL 1202 Reading and Writing about Selected Topics: An Introduction to Literature
- ENGL 1204 Reading and Writing about Genre: An Introduction to Literature
- ENGL 2317 English Literature: 18th to 20th Centuries
- ENGL 2430 Children's Literature
- ENGL 3330 Studies in Children's Literature (themed "Fantasy')
- ENGL 3331 Young Adult Literature
- ENGL 3380 Popular Writing
- First-Year Writing Labs (co-creator and co-instructor)
Areas of Interest
My general research and teaching interests include mapping, literary tourism, fantasy, and nostalgia in the spaces and places of Children's and YA Literature. I am interested in how space and place intersects with childhood and nostalgia in both fictional and real world environments. I have most recently presented a conference paper on anger in girls' migrant novels (IRSCL, 2025) and am currently working on several projects, including a handbook for English majors.
Scholarly Work
- King, Shelley and Heather K. Cyr, Editors. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Broadview Press, 2024.
- “Confronting ‘Un-London’: Charlie Fletcher’s Stoneheart Trilogy and the Rejection of Nostalgic Landscapes in Children’s Fantasy,” Landscape in Children’s Literature, eds. Jennifer Miskec and Željka Flegar, Routledge, 2024.
- “Rick Riordan.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Young Adult Novelists First Series. Vol. 389. Ed. Anne Hiebert-Alton: Gale Publishing, 2022.
- “Children’s Literature and Imaginative Geography edited by Aïda Hudson (Review).” The Lion and the Unicorn. vol. 44, no. 3, 2021.
- "Pyramids in America: Rewriting the ‘Egypt of the West’ in Rick Riordan’s The Kane Chronicles Series." Mythopoeic Children’s Literature, special issue of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Donna White, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 133-158.