Welcome back!
To all new and returning students, to our interdisciplinary faculty and to the wider IGSF community, we wish you an exciting and engaging year ahead! This fall brings many changes to IGSF. We say goodbye to our innovative and dedicated colleague Professor Mary Bunch, who is now an Assistant Professor In Cinema and Media Arts and affiliated with Theatre Studies, and Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) at York University. Mary brought so much to IGSF in her time here, including founding the Queer Research Colloquium, new courses such as “Social Justice and Activism” and “Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Politics of Marginalization”, bringing a community-engaged research approach to the Capstone class for GSFS majors, and sharing her research into “Ecstatic Freedom”, on collaborative critical disability, feminist, queer studies and critical theory between political imagination and its visual / sensory expressions. She will be sorely missed, and we congratulate her on this exciting new step in her career! We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Alex Ketchum as our new faculty lecturer. Alex is a familiar face at IGSF. A recent PhD in History and the Gender Option, Alex has regularly taught and organized outreach events at IGSF, such as last year’s hugely successful conference “Leavening the Conversation: Food, Fermentation, Feminism”. Alex brings new directions in teaching, including a winter term course in “Feminist Utopias”. We welcome all new and returning faculty, and we will be profiling them as well as featured researchers in newsletters to come.
Happy anniversary to IGSF! 2018-2019 marks 30 years of feminist research at IGSF, first as the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women and then as the Institute we are today. All year long we will be celebrating our accomplishments and looking ahead to our feminist futures. Three decades into our existence, the intersections of gender, feminist, sexuality and social justice studies that IGSF uniquely brings to the McGill and Montreal communities are more urgent and relevant than ever. Keep your eyes peeled for the full launch of our fall programming, new opportunities for research support at IGSF and for our featured researchers, projects and events. Below you can find information on our September events, a sneak preview of October’s action, and a call for papers for this year’s Queer Research Colloquium. We look forward to the new encounters this term will bring!
Alanna Thain,
IGSF Director