Past Visitors

Every year, MISC is pleased to welcome scholars and special visitors who join us for periods ranging from a month to a full year. These visitors include professors from other universities, scholars, authors, artists, politicians, and government figures seeking a stimulating working environment and an institutional home to launch new projects. Below is a listing of just some of the remarkable scholars MISC has welcomed to McGill over the past few years.

Eakin Visiting Fellows in Canadian Studies

Fulbright Visiting Research Chair

Postdocs & Visiting Scholars

Seagram Scholars

Fall 2022

Kate Puddister’s broad area of research concerns primarily the judicial system and constitutional issues. She is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Guelph.

Winter 2023

Michael Orsini is a Professor cross-appointed to the School of Political and the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa.

Dr. Shannon Sampert (Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies - Winter 2022)

Dr. Sampert is currently runs her own communications firm, and continues to work both as a journalist and as an academic. She is interested in connecting academics and their research to the general public. Her work aims to demonstrate that it is not just possible, but vital, that public opinion on Canadian themes is informed by scholarly contributions. Her rare background as a combination of on-the-ground journalism and work as a professor, which includes anchoring TV newscasts and editing the opinion pages of a daily newspaper in addition to scholarly work, makes for an interesting contribution to MISC this semester.

Dr. Sampert's latest research has been focused on a SSHRC funded study called the Gendered Mediation Project (GMP) which analyzes the Globe and Mail's reporting about Canadian national political party leadership contests held between 1975 and 2018. Details of her upcoming talk at MISC are forthcoming.

Dr. Steve Hewitt (Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies - Fall 2021)

This coming semester, MISC has the great pleasure to welcome Steve Hewitt, who is a Senior Lecturer in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Dr. Stewart will be instructing a level 4 seminar, entitled Unpeaceable Kingdom: Domestic Political Violence and Terrorism in Canada, 1868-2018 and will also be delivering a public lecture.

Jessica Roda (Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies - Winter 2021)

Jessica Roda is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. She is currently an assistant professor of Jewish Civilization in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research interests include religion, performing arts, gender, international cultural politics, and transnationalism. She earned Ph.Ds from both Sorbonne University and the University of Montreal respectively, during which she studied the political implications of Sephardic and Arab-Jewish music as well as the Unesco Convention of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003). More recently, Dr. Roda began an ethnography of Orthodox Jewish life in Montreal and New York City, including both the normative and the underground scenes. She is working on her second book ''Beyond the Sheitl. Hasidicness, Women’s Agency and Performances in the Digital Age", where she investigates how the artistic performances of Hasidic women act as an agent of social, economic and cultural empowerment within the religious world and as a space challenging gender and religious identities in the context of decolonizing feminism.

Before joining the Center for Jewish Civilization, Dr. Roda was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University (Department of Jewish Studies), Concordia University (Department of History and Anthropology/Sociology), and University of Quebec in Montreal (Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage). Her research has been funded by several programs and institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture du Québec, the Berman Foundation Early Career Fellowships, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, the Fondation du Judaïsme Français, the French Society for Ethnomusicology and the Sara Marcos de Benveniste Fellowship. In 2014, she was selected by the Royal Society of Canada and the Science Council of Japan to participate in the WISET Program (Women in Science, Engineering, and Technology, http://src-rsc.com/en/events/wiset-exchange-programme). Additionally, Dr. Roda has been a visiting scholar at UCLA (Department of Ethnomusicology), Columbia University (Heyman Center) and Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil. Beyond her academic life, she is also trained as a pianist, flutist, and modern-jazz dancer (City of Paris Conservatory), and grew up in French Guiana.

MISC welcomes Dr. Roda as our Eakin Visiting Fellow.

Maureen Waters O'Neill (Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies - Winter 2020)

As a specialist in North American Studies, Dr. Maureen Waters O’Neill focuses on Québec and Canada through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. She has a diverse background in a number of academic fields, including International Relations and Diplomacy, Business Management, French and Francophone Studies, Comparative Literature, Modern Languages, Russian and Slavic Studies, Indigenous Studies, Educational Sciences and Information Systems. Her goal as both a researcher and teacher is to help make bridges between different fields of inquiry in order to encourage dynamic forms of knowledge creation. Dr. Waters O’Neill has conducted research and taught in various settings across Europe, North America and South America. Presently, she dedicates her work to the topic of Cultural and Commercial Diplomacy.

Melanee Thomas, University of Calgary

Melanee Thomas researches the causes and consequences of gender-based political inequality, with a particular focus on political attitudes and behaviour. Her current projects include an exploration of the effects of gender, socialization, and psychological orientations to politics (funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant), a project examining the role electoral districts play in voter turnout, party competition, and representational diversity (funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant), and an exploration of public and elite opinion about energy transition (funded through the University of Calgary Vice President Research).

Derek C. Maus, SUNY: Potsdam

Derek C. Maus is Professor of English and Communication at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where he teaches numerous courses that examine contemporary literature from all over the world from a variety of interdisciplinary critical perspectives. He is the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire (South Carolina, 2019), Understanding Colson Whitehead (South Carolina, 2014), and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (South Carolina, 2011) He has also edited several scholarly collections, including Conversations with Colson Whitehead (Mississippi, 2019), Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights (Mississippi, 2014; co-edited with James J. Donahue) and Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley’s Fiction (Mississippi, 2008; co-edited with Owen E. Brady). He is currently researching a new book-length project that is directly related to the topic of his Winter 2019 CANS 405 course (Blackness and the Border: Comparing Contemporary African American and African Canadian Fiction in Terms of Racial Identity). This project seeks to examine whether or not a series of relatively recent conceptualizations of black identity – e.g., Trey Ellis’s “New Black Aesthetic,” the “post-black art” posited by Glenn Ligon and Thelma Golden, and the “post-soul aesthetic” espoused by Nelson George, Mark Anthony Neal, Bertram Ashe and others – are applicable to contemporary black Canadian literary art as well. The project does not presume that there is such an inherent overlap, but rather seeks to determine to what extent (and with what potential consequences) the essays and/or the literary art of such writers as Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dany Laferrière, George Eliott Clarke, André Alexis, Suzette Mayr, Lawrence Hill, Esi Edugyan, David Chariandy, and others illustrate similar generational shifts in regard to both individual and collective identification with blackness.

Robert Elias, University of San Francisco

Robert Elias was the Fall 2018 Eakin Visiting Fellow in Canadian Studies. He is a Professor of Politics and Chair of Legal Studies at the University of San Francisco. He received his B.A. in History & Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, his M.A. and PhD. in Political Science from Penn State University, and his Certificate in International Human Rights from the University of Strasbourg. He taught previously at the University of California-Berkeley, Tufts University, Penn State University, and the University of Maryland. He has received numerous awards and distinctions for his teaching, research, and service. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Peace Review: An International Journal of Social Justice, and the author of nine books, including The Politics of Victimization (Oxford), Victims Still (Sage), Rethinking Peace (Lynne Rienner), Baseball and the American Dream (M.E. Sharpe), The Deadly Tools of Ignorance (Rounder), The Empire Strikes Out (New Press), and the forthcoming Rebels of the Diamond (University of Nebraska Press). His research interests include political history, sports and society, film and politics, law and justice, crime and victimization, human rights, and political movements.

Michèle Mendelssohn, University of Oxford

michele.mendelssohn [at] mcgill.ca (Michèle Mendelssohn)'s research focuses on late 19th and early 20th century British and American literature, with a particular focus on Victorian literature, transatlantic studies, visual and material culture, race studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Victorian Literature and Culture, African American Review, and The Journal of American Studies. She is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Mansfield College. View her academic profile here.

George Colpitt, University of Calgary 

George Colpitts' research interests include the history of human relations around trade, exchange and cultural encounter, with related interests in human encounters within the wild world: how the meaning of wildlife has changed in time, and how humanity has interacted with, found inspiration in, and frequently commodified in trade the wild things around them. His SSHRC-funded research project examines treaty trade, and how relations between treaty Indians and newcomers were monetized with cash treaty bonuses and annuities. For the Fall 2017 term, Professor Colpitts was teaching CANS 405: Fur Metropolis - Montreal and Fur Industry, Past and Present, bringing to light an urban-centred history of Canada’s fur trade. View his academic profile at the University of Calgary here.

Allison Harell, UQÀM

Allison Harell is the Research Chair on the Political Psychology of Social Solidarity and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Université de Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). As a member of the Canadian Election Study team, the Laboratoire de communication politique et d’opinion publique (LACPOP), and the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, she is a specialist in political behaviour and public opinion in industrialized democracies. In particular, she is interested in the implications of ethnocultural diversity and gender for citizenship. Her research combines traditional survey techniques with experiments in order to capture the ways in which gendered and racial cues influence attitudes. During her time at MISC, she taught CANS 405: Diversity and Social Solidarity in Canada, a course for upper year undergraduates which investigated how diversity in Canada challenges and shapes social cohesion in Canada. Professor Harell’s research has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Studies.

Karen Bridget Murray, York University

Karen Bridget Murray is Associate Professor of Political Science at York University. She teaches courses on Canadian politics, urban governance, and women and politics, and is broadly focused on understanding how forms of inequality are institutionalized, normalized, challenged, and subverted. In her teaching and research, she draws upon community archives, ethnography, experiential knowledge, and narrative methods with the goal of bringing reciprocity and counter histories into analyses of contemporary politics and pedagogical practice. At MISC, she taught a seminar course on “Governing Urban Poverty,” sharing her ongoing research as it relates to gentrification and the political purposes of the residential school system. Previously, she has served as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies at Kennesaw State University (Atlanta) and was the Killam Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Bridgewater State University (Massachusetts). She currently sits on the editorial board of Global Discourse, and has contributed to Urban Geography (2015) and the Canadian Journal of Political Science (2017).

Craig Moyes, King's College London

Craig Moyes is a Senior Lecturer for the Department of French at King’s College London. He holds a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of British Columbia, a DEA in Littérature et Civilisation Françaises from the Université de Paris III, and a PhD in Littérature Comparée from the Université de Montréal. Previously, he was Director of Studies in French at Christ's College Cambridge. His research concentrates on 17th- and 18th-century literature, especially as it relates to political and economic thought; contemporary Québécois fiction, and film.

Kit Dobson, Mount Royal University

Kit Dobson is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Mount Royal University. He is the author of the monograph Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009); the editor of Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of Derek Beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013); and the co-editor of Transnationalism, Activism, Art (with Áine McGlynn; U of Toronto P, 2013). With Smaro Kamboureli, he has published a book of interviews with Canadian writers under the title Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013). He is a member of the Board of the non-profit Edmonton-based publisher NewWest Press and the Reviews Editor for the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. His research interests span Canadian literature, film, and art; cultural and critical theory; questions of social justice; and pedagogy and the university. Among his current research projects is a book-length study of malls, consumerism, and shopping as a practice of everyday life, an examination that encompasses Canadian literature, art, and film. He is also researching the impacts of neoliberal modes of governance upon cultural expression and understanding in Canada and beyond.

Michael Burgess, Professor of Federal Studies and Director of the Centre for Federal Studies, University of Kent

Professor Burgess is a professor of political science and the Director of the Centre for Federal Studies at the University of Kent. His original research and high-impact publications have earned him a national and international reputation as an expert on federalism, and a leading scholar in the area of comparative federalism and federal theory and practice. His most recent book, In Search of the Federal Spirit: New Theoretical and Empirical Perspective in Comparative Federalism, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press and has since become a key publication in the study of federalism. Please see Professor Burgess' homepage for further information.

Ruth Kircher, Department of English Language, Liverpool Hope University

Dr. Kircher is sociolinguist whose research interests centre on the social psychology of language. Her current research is in societal multilingualism in the Canadian and Quebec context and the related phenomena of language attitudes, social identities and language policy and planning. Dr. Kircher currently teaches at Liverpool Hope University. Please see Dr. Kircher's homepage for further information.

Sonia Cancian

Sonia Cancian is a Canadian historian with a scholarly focus on the history of Italian migration to Canada, and especially, migrant correspondence. Following the completion of a PhD in Humanities at Concordia University, Dr. Cancian has been actively involved in developing the award-winning digital history project, "Digitizing Immigrant Letters" with international migration expert Prof. Donna Gabaccia at the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center. Now in its fourth year, the project is expanding in exciting ways both geographically and thematically, including collaborations with archivists, librarians and scholars in North America and Europe.

Beginning with her MA in Italian Studies at McGill, followed by her doctoral and postdoctoral studies, Sonia Cancian has been a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. An ardent enthusiast of migrant correspondence and other narratives of migration, she has presented her work to scholarly and general audiences in Canada, the United States, Austria, and Italy. Sonia continues to work and publish articles in the fields of Italian migration to Canada, migrant correspondence, family history, gender and women's history, and recently, the history of emotions. She is the author of Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2010), and is currently working on a manuscript that features a large collection of love letters written in mid-20th century Italy and Canada. In addition to introducing the love letter and its research potentials in the study of international migration, this volume--to be published by McGill-Queen's University Press--represents a unique and powerful historical glance at understanding transnational separation for couples who wrote endless letters of passion and resilience at a time when few alternative communication devices existed for staying in touch. 

Cheryl Suzack, Department of English, University of Toronto

Cheryl Suzack is an assistant professor of English, and was educated at the University of Guelph and the University of Alberta. Her research explores the intersections between Indigenous law and literature with a focus on Indigenous women’s writing in the post-civil rights period. She is a co-editor and contributor to Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (UBC Press 2010), a co-editor of “Law, Literature, Postcoloniality,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, and a contributor to a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” which was voted best special issue of 2011 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. She is in the final stages of completing a book manuscript entitled Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law.

Cheryl is cross-appointed to the Aboriginal Studies Program and teaches courses for English and Aboriginal Studies on comparative Indigenous literatures, comparative Indigenous studies, and Indigenous decolonization with a focus on gender issues and Indigenous women. Her teaching and research interests include Indigenous literatures; studies in law and literature; postcolonial and feminist theory; and legal writing.

Claire Campbell, Associate Professor of History, Dalhousie University

Claire Campbell is an Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University, where she teaches in the Canadian Studies program and in the College of Sustainability. She first encountered Canadian Studies as a visiting professor with the Canadian Studies Centre at Aarhus University in Denmark in 2002, and has been passionate about the subject ever since.

Claire holds a BA (Hons) from King’s/Dalhousie, and an MA (in public history) and PhD from Western University. After Denmark – aware that to understand Canada she probably should try living further west than “Western” University! – she went to Edmonton as the Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta, before returning to the east coast and Dalhousie in 2005. From 2009 to2012, she was the Coordinator of the Canadian Studies Program at Dalhousie, where she has taught classes about the Canadian west, and Atlantic Canada; public history; and Canadian and North American environmental history. She also team-teaches the core classes in Canadian Studies and the introduction to Environment, Sustainability, and Society.

Her research is inspired by childhood summers when her father, a history teacher, drove the family around North America in a camper van, visiting all manner of historic landscapes. (No summers “off” for them!) Bringing together twin passions for Canadian history and environmental integrity, her current work – What Once Were You? Historic Landscapes in Canada – is a comparative study of five of Canada’s largest historic sites (L’Anse aux Meadows, Grand Pré, Fort William, the Forks, and the Bar U Ranch), showing how these can teach about environmental change as well as the national narrative. She is also the author of Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (2005), and has edited A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011 (2011) and Land and Sea: Environmental History in Atlantic Canada (forthcoming, 2012). 

Karen Fricker, Department of Dramatic Arts, Brock University

Karen Fricker is a theatre critic and academic with a particular interest in the ways in which the processes of globalization affect and are reflected in contemporary theatre and performance. Supported by the British Academy, she is currently completing a monograph for Manchester University Press about the original stage work of the Québec director Robert Lepage, with whose work she has been engaged for over 20 years. She has published on Lepage's work in journals and volumes including Contemporary Theatre Review, Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises, L’Annuaire théâtral and The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare.

Karen is the co-founder and former editor-in-chief (from 1998 to2005) of Irish Theatre Magazine and has written and broadcast about theatre for Variety (US), The Guardian (UK), The Irish Times, The New York Times, the BBC, RTÉ, and the CBC, amongst others.

She holds a BA and MA in English from Stanford University and a PhD from the School of Drama, Trinity College, Dublin. From 2007 to2012 she was Lecturer in Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London; in January 2013 she took up an Assistant Professorship in Dramatic Arts at Brock University in Ontario.

Karen taught CANS 405: Performing Quebec in the Global Age for which she earned The Charles Bronfman and Rita Mayo Award for Excellence in Teaching in Canadian Studies.

Judy Rebick, journalist, author and former CAW-Sam Grindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University

A journalist by trade and activist by nature, Judy Rebick is leading the charge for social justice through print, broadcast and in person. From 2002 until 2010, Rebick held the CAW-Sam Grindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy, having been appointed to it upon its creation. She is the former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, and lends her considerable expertise to Fair Vote Canada and Alternatives, a Quebec-based NGO. In the 1990s, Rebick hosted two national TV shows on CBC and continues as a frequent commentator on the airwaves. She is also the founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada's most active independent online news and discussion site.

Rebick taught CANS 405: The Women’s Movement in Canada in January 2012. Topics included, among others: second wave feminism in the peace and labour movements; the women's movement as a cross class; the power of the pro-choice movement in Canada; anti-racist feminism; multi-national feminism, and the central role of the women's movement in Canadian politics.

Andrew C. Holman (Fall 2011), Department of History, Bridgewater State University

Andrew C. Holman is a member of the History Department and Canadian Studies Program at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he has taught a variety of courses about Canada and United States since 1996. Among his research interests are the immigrant, social class and gender identities in Victorian Canada. His more recent research focuses on sport and Canadian identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on the problem of hockey in Canadian culture. He is the author of three scholarly books on Canadian subjects, including A Sense of Their Duty: Middle-class Formation in Victorian Ontario Towns (McGill-Queen's 2000), Canada's Game: Hockey and Identity (McGill-Queen's 2009) and (with Robert Kristofferson) More of a Man: The Diaries of Andrew McIlwraith, Canada West and New York City, 1857-62 (Toronto, forthcoming). He has published scholarly articles in Canadian Historical Review, American Review of Canadian Studies, the Journal of Sport History, Acadiensis and others. A native of St Catharines, Ontario, he was educated at McGill, McMaster and York universities. His current research projects are two, including a book-length study of the images of Canada and Canadians in American juvenile sporting fiction, 1890-1940. And he continues to research and write (with Stephen Hardy) a comprehensive, scholarly history of ice hockey (University of Illinois Press).

Gerald Baier (Winter 2011), Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia

Gerald Baier (Ph.D, Dalhousie) joined the Political Science Department of the University of British Columbia in 2003. His teaching and research interests are in Canadian politics with a focus on the Constitution, federalism and public law. He is a regular commentator on federal politics in national and local media. His past research has explored the role of judicial decision-making in the shaping of federalism in Canada, Australia and the United States. He has recently completed a co-authored book on federalism and intergovernmental relations in Canada. He is presently conducting a comprehensive study of the Supreme Court of Canada's institutional character and processes.

Nancy Christie (Fall 2010), J.B. Smallman Chair at the Department of History, University of Western Ontario

Nancy Christie is a historian who has authored a number of prize-winning volumes in Canadian history, notably Engendering the State: Family, Work, and Welfare in Canada (2000) which won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for best book in Canadian history, and A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940 (1996), awarded the Harold Adams Innis Prize for best book in the social sciences in the English language. She has written widely on the history of religion, gender, family, and class relations in 19th and 20th century Canada. Her edited books include: Households of Faith: Family, Gender and Community in Canada (2002); Cultures of Citizenship in Post-war Canada (2003); Mapping the Margins: Families and Social Discipline in Canada (2004); Transatlantic Subjects (2008). Her most recent book is a social history of religion in Canada, Churches and their Peoples (2010), which will be published this fall by University of Toronto Press. She is currently engaged in two major research projects: a two-volume cultural and social history of Canada to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial; and a study of the emergence of modern social relations in late 18th century Canada. Nancy Christie has taught at the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg, Queen’s University, Trent University, and the University of Western Ontario.

James Bickerton (Winter 2010)

James Bickerton is Professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University. He also has taught at Carleton University (1981-83) and Simon Fraser University (1999) where he was a Visiting Professor in 1999. In 1991-92, he was a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University, and the University of Victoria in 2006.
After obtaining an Honours BA from Acadia University, he received both his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from Carleton University in Ottawa. His Ph.D. dissertation was on regional development policy in Canada. Since that time, his research has been in the areas of regional development, federalism, party and electoral politics, and Nova Scotia politics. He has recently begun to do research on Canadian nationalism. He is author of Nova Scotia, Ottawa and the Politics of Regional Development (1990), and co-author of Freedom, Equality, Community (2006), Canadian Politics (2004), The Savage Years (2000), The Almanac of Canadian Politics (1995) and Ties That Bind: Parties and Voters in Canada (1999).

Elspeth Cameron (Fall 2009)

Elspeth Cameron, Canadian author and biographer, has written three biographies of Canadian literary giants: novelist Hugh MacLennan, poet Irving Layton, and poet Earle Birney. Her first biography, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life, University of Toronto Press, 1981, was hailed as the first full-length biography of a Canadian writer. It was short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award and won the U.B.C. Canadian Biography Award. She has also written three other books and numerous profiles of Canadian cultural figures such as Peter Newman, Jack McClelland, Veronica Tennant, Anne Murray, Howard Engel, Janette Turner Hospital, and Timothy Findlay, winning several journalism awards. Her work has appeared in such magazines as Saturday Night, Chatelaine, Maclean’s, Leisureways, and a number of academic journals. She has edited seven books.

Dr. Cameron has taught Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies at Concordia University, York University, The University of Toronto, and Brock University, where she is now an Adjunct Professor of English. She headed one of the first Canadian Studies programs in Canada at Loyola College (Concordia) in 1970.

Her latest book, And Beauty Answers, The Life of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, released November 18, 2007, is a major biography of two major Toronto sculptors: Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.

Ian McKay (2008/2009)

Ian McKay has taught Canadian History at Queen's since 1988. Ian McKay’s research interests lie in Canadian cultural history, in the economic and social history of the Atlantic Region of Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the history of Canada as a liberal order. For a Working-class Culture in Canada: A Selection of Colin McKay’s Writing on Sociology and Political Economy, 1897-1939 (St. John’s, 1996), The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Kingston & Montreal, 1994) and Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History (Toronto: BTL, 2005) are some of his recent publications. He is presently working on books about memory and the public past, the history of Canadian socialism, and the life and times of Maurice Spector, Canada’s pre-eminent Marxist thinker of the 1920s and 1930s.

Patrick Fournier (Winter 2008)

Patrick Fournier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. He holds a Ph.D from the University of British Columbia. His research interests include political behaviour, political psychology, citizen competence, attitude change, voting, public opinion, surveys, and methodology. He is co-investigator of the Canadian Election Study for the 2000, 2004 and upcoming elections. His work has been published in journals such as the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, and Public Opinion Quarterly.

Ceri Morgan (Fall 2007)

Ceri Morgan is a lecturer in French at Keele University, where she teaches courses on francophone Québécois fiction and society and French cinema. She is convenor of the research group, Le Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le Canada francophone (GRECF), which constitutes part of the activities of the British Association of Canadian Studies. Morgan is currently working on a monograph on the Montreal novel that looks at macro- and micro- mappings of the city, entitled Mindscapes of Montreal. A second project, entitled Heartlands/Pays de cœur, combines bilingual (English/French) travel writing, photographs, and theories of travel and photography, with analyses of literary heartlands in Québec and francophone Canada.

Fulbright Visiting Research Chair

Fall 2022

Virginia Haufler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. She was a awarded a PhD from Cornell’s Department of Government in 1991. Her expertise is in international political economy and international organizations, and her research examines the changing nature of private authority, the power of global corporations, the problems associated with global supply chains, and corporate social responsibility. She is currently working on a book manuscript looking at how corporations have been enlisted in conflict prevention and security governance.

Winter 2022

Robert Blair is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska

Dr. Blair holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has published many books and journal articles. His research interests lie in the area of public policy and public management, specifically city management. In addition to studying city management in the US, he has examined city managers in Norway with colleagues at Agder University. He is anxious to study Canadian city management and plans on networking with university researchers and practitioners in our country.

Margaret Moss, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, Yale University (Fall 2014)

MISC welcomed Dr. Margaret Moss in Fall 2014 as the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Aboriginal/Indigenous Life and Culture in the North American Context at McGill University. Dr. Moss received her PhD in Nursing from the University of Texas at Houston, Health Sciences Center in 2000 and subsequently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado’s Native Elder Research Center, a resource center for minority aging research. Concurrently, she entered and completed law school and received her Juris Doctorate from Hamline University School of Law in Minnesota. In 2008-2009, Dr. Moss was named a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, and staffed the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Also in 2008, she was inducted as a Fellow into the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. Moss is Hidatsa with equal lineage in the Fort Peck Sioux Tribe. In addition to her research on aging and health disparity, she currently teaches Nursing at Yale University.

During her tenure as the Fulbright Research Chair, Dr. Moss will examine how science, law and health policies collide in Canada's indigenous people with the aim of identifying where the most immediate challenges to health care provision and health status tracking can be mitigated and how it may be achieved with revision of care and related laws.

Michael Stamm (2012-2013)

Dr. Michael Stamm is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and School of Journalism at Michigan State University. He received his B.A. English from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation was awarded the Margaret A. Blanchard Doctoral Dissertation Prize for best dissertation in journalism and mass communication history by the American Journalism Historians Association in 2007. The book based on this research, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011. Broadly speaking, his research focuses on two areas: the political economy of news and journalism, and the consideration of “new media” in historical perspective. His articles on these subjects have appeared in, among other venues, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, American Journalism, and Religion and American Culture. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Metropolitan Newspaper in a Global Economy, which traces the history of the twentieth-century newspaper as a product of industrial capitalism. Publishers around the world developed large and sophisticated factories to print their newspapers, and, for many, the paper used to manufacture their “dead tree” newspapers was acquired in the global marketplace, most often from Canada.

Karen Kedrowski (Winter 2010)

Dr. Karen Kedrowski has been a member of the Department of Political Science at Winthrop University since 1994, and Chair since 2001. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Carl Albert Congressional Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma in 1992, and her BA in Political Science, French and History from the University of Minnesota in 1986. She conducts research primarily in the fields of congressional communication and public policy. Her interest in health policy specifically stems from her two years as a Health Policy Analyst for Families USA in Washington, DC.

Dr. Kedrowski advises Political Science students who wish to earn Secondary Education Certification. She is also the faculty advisor for the College Democrats and she was the driving force in re-establishing Winthrop University's chapter of Pi Gamma Mu, the international Social Science Honors Society, in 2005.

Dr. Kedrowski has received a number of honors and awards, including being named Winthrop University's Outstanding Junior Professor (1999) and the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Advisor (2007).
View the Fulbright Lecture: Human Rights and Breastfeeding: Applications of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes

Michael Dorsher (2008-2009)

Michael Dorsher is the 2008-09 Fulbright Visiting Chair in Media at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Professor Dorsher comes to McGill from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he has been a journalism professor since 2000. He is the co-author of Controversies in Media Ethics and author of several entries in the Encyclopedia of Journalism; both books are due out in 2009. Professor Dorsher earned a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Maryland in 1999. Before that he was a U.S. journalist for 20 years, ending up as one of the founding editors of washingtonpost.com. He normally lives with his wife, a newspaper editor, in St. Paul, MN, and at their summer home on North Dakota-Manitoba border.

View the Fulbright Lecture: The Wal-Marting of Canada's Media: How Convenience Gores the Truth

Raymond Cox (Fall 2007)

Raymond W. Cox III is a Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies at the University of Akron. He received his Ph.D. in Public Administration and Policy from Virginia Tech. Dr. Cox is the author of nearly fifty academic and professional publications, including two books (an introductory text and a book on grievance procedures and labour relations) and ten reports for government agencies, as well as more than thirty-five professional papers. His articles have appeared in the leading journals in the field of public management, including Public Administration Review, Public Administration Quarterly, Public Integrity, The International Journal of Public Administration and the American Review of Public Administration have been on discretionary judgment and performance measurement. He recently completed two articles on ethics and is working on a new introductory public management text and a book on discretionary judgment and public decision-making.

Stephen J. Farnsworth (2006-2007)

Dr. Stephen Farnsworth is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication at George Mason University. He received his B.S. in Government from Dartmouth College, B.S. in History from University of Missouri, M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. He is currently working on a Media Project that focuses on how the U.S. government is being represented in domestic and foreign media. He has also written several books which include Spinner in Chief: How Presidents Sell Their Policies and Themselves and The Nightly News Nightmare: Television’s Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988-2004 and The Mediated Presidency: Television News and Presidential Governance which he co-wrote with current George Mason Professor S. Robert Lichter. Dr. Farnsworth has received several awards in his field which include the Alumni Association Outstanding Young Faculty Member Award (Mary Washington College 2001), Outstanding Professor Award in Political Science and International Affairs (University of Mary Washington 2005), and President’s Faculty Achievement Award (University of Mary Washington 2006). Due to his expertise in Politics, Dr. Farnsworth has been interviewed on U.S. and Virginia politics and government by several meda which include CBS News, C-Span, Associated Press, The Washington Times and the Sydney Morning Herald.

W. Bartley Hildreth (Fall 2005)

Joined faculty in 1994, with joint tenure in the W. Frank Barton School of Business; expert on municipal securities, public budgeting, and state and local finance; Ph. D., University of Georgia, 1979; M.P.A., Auburn University at Montgomery, 1974; B.A., University of Alabama, 1971. In August 2007, Dr. Hildreth was appointed Interim Dean of the W. Frank Barton School of Business. In June, 2007, Dr. Hildreth presented invited lectures at Fudan University (Shanghai) and at the School of Public Finance in the Central University of Finance and Economics (Beijing). During Fall 2005, Dr. Hildreth was a Fulbright scholar at McGill University in Montreal, where he held the Visiting Research Chair of Public Policy. In 2003, he received the WSU Excellence in Research Award. In 2002, he was the only academic on a delegation advising China on a municipal bond market that was organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Committee for U.S.-China Relations. In 1995, he received the Donato J. Pugliese Award from the Southeastern Conference for Public Administration.

Special Visitors

Graham Fraser

Graham Fraser served as the sixth Commissioner of Official Languages from 2006 to 2016, becoming the longest-serving Commissioner in this post. During his mandate, he actively promoted English and French as Canada’s two official languages and ensured that federal institutions conformed to the standards of the Official Languages Act. Fraser advocated for the rights of linguistic minority communities, intervening before the courts, writing newspaper commentaries, and speaking in public forums across Canada and internationally.

In the Fall 2018 semester, he taught CANS 301: Quebec Elections, Present and Past and in the Winter 2019 semester, he taught CANS 303: Language rights and language policies in Canada. He also hosted a lecture on September 27, 2018 titled "The long echo of Quebec student politics: the Union Générale des Étudiants du Québec (1964-1969) and its legacy and impact on public life".

Tim Raybould

tim.raybould [at] mcgill.ca (Tim Raybould) was educated at the University of Cambridge, receiving his Ph.D. in 1993 in social anthropology. For over 25 years, Tim has provided professional advice to First Nations and Indigenous organizations in Canada and has been directly involved in a number of Indigenous–led sectoral and comprehensive governance initiatives. For example, Tim was Westbank First Nation’s self-government chief negotiator and remains active in title and rights issues for Westbank including participating in reconciliation negotiations with the Crown as part of the Okanagan Nation. He has also been a senior advisor to the BC Assembly of First Nations, and co-authored the BCAFN Governance Toolkit: A Guide to Nation Building.

Moreover, Tim is also the senior policy advisor to the First Nations Finance Authority and is a part of the Tsawwassen First Nation’s treaty implementation team in respect of fiscal relations. In addition, he has worked with the First Nations Tax Commission, the First Nations Land Management Board and the former National Centre for First Nations Governance. He is also a faculty member for the Banff Centre’s Aboriginal Leadership and Management program; establishing institutions of good governance.

Valerie Korinek (Visiting Professor)

Valerie J. Korinek is Professor of Modern Canadian History at the University of Saskatchewan. A graduate of the University of Toronto, Dr. Korinek is an expert in the history of sexualities and Canadian cultural and gender history. She has written extensively about Canadian popular culture, feminist periodicals, food history, Prairie histories of sexuality and contemporary Prairie history. This fall at MISC, she has focused on two research projects. In the first instance, Dr. Korinek is finalizing a substantive monograph entitled Prairie Fairies. Drawn from extensive oral histories and archival research, Prairie Fairies historicizes the lives and communities of queer people in the urban and rural prairie west from the 1930s to 1985.

Secondly, she has launching a new research study on the international implications of Canada’s decision to legalize queer marriages in 2005. The product of over 30 years of activist demands for such recognition from the state, this decision thrust Canada into a leadership position internationally. Canada was the fourth country in the world to provide legal access to lesbian and gay marriages. Lesbian and gay couples, many of them elderly, came from around the world to have their long-term partnerships legally recognized. Canadian entrepreneurs recognized the potential of a queer marriage industry, perhaps incongruously, turned Canada into a queer “destination wedding” locale. Thousands of marriages were solemnized and celebrated. While all were significant to those involved, a handful of these nuptials would become historic. Upon returning to a diverse number of countries, including South Africa, England, Ireland, France, Italy and, perhaps most famously, the United States, couples married in Canada demanded that their nation states recognize their marriages as legally valid. And in those six countries, they would be, after many years, successful in those legal challenges. Gay marriage has attracted much contemporary and scholarly interest in the United States, but its long history (dating to the 1970s) and Canada’s role as an “exporter” of queer marriage activism has not. 

Guillaume Ethier (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Winner of the 2013 Jean-Pierre Collin Prize for the best thesis in urban studies, Guillaume Ethier is an urbanologist. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and an associate researcher at the Canada Research Chair in Urban Heritage. Recently, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. After studying sociology, he completed a doctoral thesis in urban studies at the Université de Québec à Montréal, which earned him, among other things, the 2014 Phyllis Lambert Award from the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada and the 2014 Jean-Pierre Collin Award from the Villes Régions Monde network.

Alexia Moyer (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Alexia Moyer was an FQRSC Postdoctoral Fellow with McGill’s Institute for the Study of Canada and McGill’s Department of English from June 2013 to October 2016. Advised by Dr. Nathalie Cooke, Alexia's research centred on food writing anthologies, literary cookbooks, foodoirs, and recipe novels. As managing editor of CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures / revue des études culinaires au Canada, she produced two issues: “Overlooked: uncovering, assessing, and inventing the everyday / Sous-estimé : révélation, évaluation, et invention du quotidien”, and “Cookbook narratives from within the covers and between the lines / lire des livres de recettes, d’une page à l’autre et entre les lignes.” Her work also appears in the recently released Oxford Companion to Sweets (2015) edited by Darra Goldstein, as well as the Canadian Literary Fare website, for which she is principal contributor to The Tableaux Blog. Alexia holds a Ph.D. in études anglaises from Université de Montréal, an MA and BA (honours) in English with French from Western University.

The Honourable Kenneth Dryden (Professor of Practice (2011 - 2016))

Ken Dryden was first elected to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for York Centre in 2004 and was re-elected in 2006 and 2008. Mr. Dryden is the author of four best-selling books: The Game, Home Game, The Moved and the Shaken, and In School. In 1984, he was appointed Ontario’s first Youth Commissioner. Before entering federal politics, Mr. Dryden served as President of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Mr. Dryden has been involved with several community and charitable groups with a particular focus on children, youth and education. In 1996, he created the Ken Dryden Scholarship, awarded to young people currently or formerly in the care of the Canadian child welfare system who demonstrate great achievement and promise. Each scholarship covers up to $3,000 of the cost of tuition and fees related to completing an undergraduate degree in a Canadian university or college. Mr. Dryden is well-known for his achievements as goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens hockey team from 1971 to 1979, during which time the team went on to win six Stanley cups. Mr. Dryden is a proud member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame and the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame. Mr. Dryden holds a degree in history from Cornell University and a degree in Law from McGill University. He has also received honorary doctoral degrees from the universities of Ottawa, Windsor, York, McMaster, St. Mary’s, Niagara and British Columbia. Currently, Mr. Dryden is the National Outreach Advisor, Working Families and Poverty. Mr. Dryden and his wife, Lynda, have two grown children, Sarah and Michael. He also has two grandchildren.

Sandria P. Bouliane (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Sandria P. Bouliane was a postdoctoral fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) under the supervision of Will Straw. She received her Ph.D in musicology from l’Université Laval where she specialized in the history of popular music of Quebec and Canada. Her research is primarily on the history of recording, sheet music publishing and French-Canadian songs of the first half of the twentieth century. She focuses on multidisciplinary approaches to study songs, actors and medias in their cultural context. Since 2003, she has worked on various projects of the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoise (CRILCQ).

She co-authored the interactive online module "Chanson populaire francophone au Canada" (2009) in the Encyclopedia of French Cultural Heritage in North America and has published articles and book chapters including "Goodbye Broadway, Hello Montreal!" in Territoires musicaux mis en scène (Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2011). She co-directed with Serge Lacasse a special issue of Studies in Music (Journal of the University of Western Ontario), entitled History, genre and fandom: popular music studies at the turn of the century (2011) and co-directed with Michel Lacroix the collective book Dialogue et choc des muses. Représentations croisées des pratiques artistiques to be published in the winter 2014 by Editions Nota Bene.

Lourdes Morales (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Lourdes Morales is a postdoctoral fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada (MISC) under the supervision of Prof. William Straw. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She has accompanied her work in the academia with an intense practice as a curator and as an artist. As a founding member of the curatorial collective Laboratorio 060 (www.lab060.org), she won the First Prize of the Best Art Practices Award granted by the Italian government in 2007 for the curatorial project: Frontera: A sketch for the creation of a future society. The project became later a documentary film of the same name co-directed by Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano and Iván Lomelí (released in 2014).

Based on a specific approach to critical theory and on different issues on the technologies of subjectivity, her field of research has focused on the notion of media, its constructive modularity and its discursive formations, within Modern and Contemporary Art. Her research takes into account the notion of medium as a field in which experience and tools for social communication are negotiated and structured as knowledge.

For her current research, she has translated the problem of medium to the direct cinema and the cine testimonio, pinning down specific concepts and the way they function as an ensemble of experimentations and operations for documentary cinema. Specifically, she works on the historical, political and conceptual consequences of a singular exchange established between the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada and Cine Difusión/ Secretaria de Educación Pública (CD-SEP) in Mexico during the mid-seventies.

Ian Robinson (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Ian Robinson is a postdoctoral fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. His current research focuses on urban film cultures and the role of film festivals as exhibition spaces in Montreal, Toronto, Berlin and Rotterdam. He received his PhD from York University with a dissertation on the multiple figurations of place in contemporary world cinema. He has published book chapters and articles including “Searching for the City: Cinema and the Critique of Urban Space” in The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), “The Political Aesthetics of the Urban Periphery and Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth” in PUBLIC (2011), “Cinematic Border Spaces: Translocality and the Moving Image” in Cartographies of Place (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2104), and “Towards a Critical Cinematic Cartography of Place” in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies (forthcoming 2014). He is working on a monograph entitled World Cinema and Place in the Age of Globalization.

Sarah Henzi

Sarah Henzi (Ph.D., Université de Montréal, 2012) is currently a Visiting Scholar at McGill's Institute for the Study of Canada as well as the Co-Organizer of and Lecturer for the International Graduate Summer School on Indigenous Literature and Film at Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM). Prior to that, she was a FQRSC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia and taught as a Sessional Instructor at Simon Fraser University for over a year in the Department of First Nations Studies.

Her research focuses on genres that are redefining and expanding upon what we have considered thus far as “literature” in the field of Indigenous Literary Studies: comic books, graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, film script, and erotica. Also, the prevalence of new media and of the audio-visual and digital worlds are providing exceptional entry points to the land and territories (whether spatial, discursive, aesthetic) that many artists and writers may no longer have access to. Her work also seeks to promote the Francophone literary and artistic works of Indigenous peoples in Quebec. Taken together, her research seeks to offer new ways of thinking about such interventions, without them being constrained to or by fictitious frontiers – national, generic, linguistic or institutional.

Her critical monograph Inventing Interventions: Strategies of Reappropriation in North American Indigenous Literatures – Contemporary Works beyond National and Linguistic Divides is under contract with University of Manitoba Press. She has publications in Quebec Studies, Studies for Canadian Literature, the London Journal of Canadian Studies and Recherches amérindiennes du Québec (forthcoming) and is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook on Indigenous American Literatures (2014) and the Routledge Companion to Native American Literature (2015).

Ersin Erkan

Visiting Professor

Dr. Marcus Boon

http://marcusboon.com/

Professor Robert Englebert

http://artsandscience.usask.ca/profile/REnglebert

Professor Yanwen Ding

Visiting Scholar (2015)