The work of the Robarts Centre is based on one of the largest concentrations of Canadian specialists globally and draws from multiple faculties and disciplines including Arctic sciences, geography, visual and performing arts and cultural studies, political science, anthropology, and cultural and Indigenous studies.
Faculty Associates are tenure-stream, contract and retired members of York faculty.
Brief profiles can be viewed below. Associates are listed in alphabetical order.
Greg Albo
Politics, Faculty Associate
Greg Albo is an associate professor in the Department of Politics. Professor Albo’s research interests are the political economy of contemporary capitalism, labour market policies in Canada, and democratization. He teaches courses on the foundations of political economy, Canadian political economy, alternatives to capitalism, and democratic administration. He is currently co-editor of the Socialist Register.
Visit: www.yorku.ca/albo/
Email: albo@yorku.ca
Angele Alook
School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Faculty Associate
Dr. Angele Alook is a proud member of the Bigstone Cree Nation and is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She specializes in Indigenous feminism, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of family and work. She is a co-investigator on the SSHRC-funded (Partnership Grant) Corporate Mapping Project, where she is carrying out research with the Parkland Institute on Indigenous experiences in Alberta’s oil industry and its gendered impact on working families.
Angele is a member of the Just Powers research team, which is a SSHRC-funded Insight Grant. In this project she is researching traditional subsistence practices in her Indigenous community; simultaneously, she is investigating the practices of settler allies who are also stewards of the land in her traditional territory, all while exploring peoples’ relationships to industry in the area. Through the Just Powers project Angele has been able to produce a documentary called “Pikopaywin: It is broken” which features stories on the land with Indigenous traditional land users, environmental officers, and elders. She is interested in synergies and disjunctures between ways of being, knowing and doing on Bigstone lands. She is directing her research toward a just transition of Alberta’s economy and labour force and the impact climate change has on traditional Treaty Eight territory.
For more information on her research projects visit: the Corporate Mapping Project and Just Powers
Email: alook@yorku.ca
Kamelia Atefi
Civil Engineering, Faculty Associate
Dr. Kamelia Atefi is an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at York University. Prior to joining the Lassonde School of Engineering in August of 2020, she was an Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo (UB) for four years. She completed her Masters, PhD, and Postdoctoral studies at the University of Waterloo. Her main research area is computational geomechanics aimed at design of environmentally friendly operations for production or storage of energy and water, and resilient infrastructure against climate change. She holds multiple grants, including NSERC Discovery, and the New Frontiers Research Fund (Exploration). Her current research is centered on geomechanics of coupled processes in porous media for: enhancement of hydrocarbon, geothermal, and aquifer storage recovery operations; prediction of geo-environmental impacts of energy operations; tunneling in extreme geological settings; and bio-mediated stabilization. Dr. Atefi is an Editorial Board Member of the Canadian Geotechnical Journal. She is also a member of the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Rock Mechanics committee, and the ASCE Sustainability in Geotechnical Engineering.”
Email: catefi@yorku.ca
Steve Bailey
Humanities and Communication and Culture, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Steve Bailey is an associate professor for the Humanities Department and the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. His research interests are in the intersections of critical cultural theory, especially psychoanalysis and sociological theory, and contemporary media culture. His current research explores connections between the work of dramaturgical sociologists (especially Erving Goffman) and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, particularly in relationship to issues of social performance and technology. His wider interests are eclectic; he has published on psychoanalytic theory and media culture, aesthetics and post-punk musical culture, media fan culture, teen cinema, and the internet’s rhetorical ironies. He is generally interested in experimenting with unorthodox theoretical combinations and blending high/low culture, old/new theory, and sociological/philosophical perspectives. In terms of undergraduate education, he believes the fundamental task for educators is to free students from the banalities of everyday thinking and the tyranny of inherited circumstances and equip them for cultural and political participation in a public sphere.
Email: bailey@yorku.ca
Alison Bain
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Alison Bain is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. She is a feminist urban social geographer who studies contemporary urban and suburban culture. Her research examines the complex relationships of cultural workers and LGBTQ2S populations to cities and suburbs in Canada and Germany with particular attention to questions of identity formation, place-making, spatial politics, and neighbourhood change. Much of her writing has focused on the (sub)urban geographies of artistic labour, creative practice, and cultural production and has involved the development of critiques of creative city theory and cultural planning in their application to small- and mid-sized cities and suburbs. She is especially interested in contested processes of social inclusion and social exclusion in neighbourhoods as triggered by both bottom-up and top-down arts-led urban redevelopment initiatives as well as queer place-making practices. She teaches urban geography at the undergraduate and graduate level, and has developed courses on public space contestations and interventions, the cultures of cities, and the spatial politics of urban place-making.
Research Interests: Arts and Culture, Gender Issues, Urban geography, Arts-led urban redevelopment, Geographies of artistic labour and creative practice, Geographies of sexualities, Feminist pedagogies.
Email: abain@yorku.ca
Michael Barutciski
Multidisciplinary Studies, Glendon, Faculty Associate and member Robarts Executive Committee
Michael Barutciski is a lawyer by training and an associate professor in the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies and the Canadian Studies Programme at Glendon College.
Research Interests: Canadian public affairs, Canadian human rights, international law and diplomacy, migration, conflict.
Email: mbarutciski@gl.yorku.ca
Dawn Bazely
Biology, Faculty Associate
Dawn Bazely is a University Professor of Biology in the Faculty of Science at York University in Toronto, where she has taught since 1990. She was Director of IRIS, the university-wide Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability (2006-11 and 2012-14). At IRIS, Dawn’s mission was to develop, lead and support interdisciplinary research on diverse fronts. The Globe and Mail’s 2013 Canadian University Report singled her out as York University’s HotShot Professor. Dawn trained as an ecologist in the field of plant-herbivore interactions, and has carried out extensive field research in grasslands and forests, from temperate to Arctic regions.
She is a leader in using social media for science communication, and serves on many government committees and NGO boards relating to the environment.
Research Interests: Herbivory, Plant-Animal Interactions, Restoration Ecology, Forest Management, Invasive Species, Non-indigenous Plants, Prescribed Burning, Fungal Endophytes, Plant Defences, Science Policy, Climate Change Impacts on Ecosystems, Sustainability, Human-Wildlife Interactions, Urban Ecology.
Visit: The Bazely Lab and York University’s Experts Guide
Email: dbazely@yorku.ca
Bianca Beauchemin
School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Faculty Associate
Bianca Beauchemin is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. She recently was the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies.
She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and has a forthcoming article entitled “Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities” for the Journal of Canadian Studies’ special issue on Black Studies in Canada. She is also working on her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, where she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.
Email: biancab4@yorku.ca
Richard Bello
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Richard Bello is a associate professor emeritus and senior ccholar in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. His undergraduate courses link climate science with physical hydrology and plant biology, with a particular emphasis on northern environments. For the past three decades, graduate students have driven his northern field research program, which focuses on the water balance and greenhouse gas exchange from the peatlands and ponds in the Hudson Bay Lowlands based out of the Churchill Northern Studies Centre in Churchill Manitoba. In collaboration with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, Professor Bello and graduate students maintain four flux stations within the City of Toronto where climate change effects on evaporation and the potential for wind derived electrical energy production are examined.
Research Interests: Global/Climate Change , Geography , Climate Science, Northern Environments, Carbon Dynamics
Email: bello@yorku.ca
Benjamin Berger
Professor & York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law, Osgoode Hall Law School
Professor Benjamin L. Berger is professor and York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at Osgoode Hall Law School. In 2020 he was elected as a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence. He is the author of Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), is a general editor of the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World, and served as Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society from 2014-2018. He is also co-editor of multiple edited collections, including Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority (Hart, 2016) and The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (UBC Press, 2008). Professor Berger is active in judicial, professional, and public education, is involved in public interest advocacy, and has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada. Professor Berger convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought.
Email: bberger@osgoode.yorku.ca
Jody Berland
Humanities, Senior Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Jody Berland is a professor emerita in the Department of Humanities. She has published widely on cultural studies, Canadian culture and communication history, music and media, environmental humanities, media theory and animals. Her book North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (2009) was awarded the GJ Robinson book award by the Canadian Communication Association. Her book Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures is being published by MIT Press (March 2019). She is principle investigator of the multi-researcher SSHRC research project, “Digital Animalities: Representations of Nonhuman Life in the Age of Risk.” This project addresses the widespread appearance of animals in contemporary visual and digital culture, and its implication for humanist and posthumanist thought in the Anthropocene.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Animal Studies, Contemporary Environmental and Posthumanist Theory, Music and Technological Mediations, Canadian media theory
Email: jberland@yorku.ca
Kym Bird
Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty Associate
Kym Bird is an professor in the Department of Humanities and Graduate Program Director of the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies. She teaches courses in English, Theatre and Women’s Studies and is the recipient of the Parents’ Association University-Wide Teaching Award, the Graduate Studies Dissertation Prize, Division of Humanities, “Excellence in Teaching” Award, all awarded in 1997. That same year, her dissertation was nominated for the Canada-wide dissertation prize and the Governor General’s Gold medal. The Association of Canadian Theatre Research presented the 2004 Ann Saddlemyer Award to Professor Bird for her book, Redressing the Past: The Politics of Early, English-Canadian Women’s Drama, 1880-1920, published in 2004 by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Research Interests: History, Canadian, English, feminism, theatre particularly women’s theatre
Email: kbird@yorku.ca
Myra Bloom
English, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Myra Bloom is an associate professor in the Department of English at Glendon College. She studies modern and contemporary Canadian literature in English and French. Her current research examines the relationship between anglophones and francophones as represented in fictions dealing with historical clashes between these two groups. She is also working on a book about women’s confessional writing in Canada.
Email: mbloom@yorku.ca
Yvonne Bohr
Clinical Developmental Psychology, Health, Faculty Associate
Yvonne Bohr is an associate professor of Clinical Developmental Psychology, and past director of the LaMarsh Centre for Child and Youth Research. Together with community partners and her students, she is committed to identifying innovative, culturally embedded ways to engage Inuit youth in mental health research. Her current CIHR-funded projects focus on the development of accessible mental wellness e-interventions for Inuit youth at risk for depression, for example an intergenerational initiative to design psycho-educational computer games. A “by the community for the community” intervention in partnership with five Nunavut communities, I-SPARX, aims to support resilience that is grounded in culture. For more information see
https://www.isparxnunavut.com/
Email: bohry@yorku.ca
Jennifer Bonnell
History, Faculty Associate
Jennifer Bonnell is an associate professor and historian of public memory and environmental change in nineteenth and twentieth-century Canada. She is the author of Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and the editor, with Marcel Fortin, of Historical GIS Research in Canada (University of Calgary Press, 2014). She is an executive member of the Network in Canadian History & Environment and a co-editor of their newly launched Papers in Canadian History & Environment. She is currently working on a new book project Foragers of a Modern Countryside: Honeybees, Agricultural Modernization and Environmental Change in the Great Lakes Region.
Research Interests: History of Environment and Biodiversity, Water and Urban Environments, Public History and Collective Memory
Visit: Primary Website and Secondary Website
Projects: Don Valley Historical Mapping Project www.maps.library.utoronto.ca/dvhmp/
Email: bonnellj@yorku.ca
Lina Brand Correa
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Dr. Lina Brand Correa is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University. After completing her undergraduate degree in economics at the National University of Colombia, Lina was left unsatisfied with mainstream economics’ understanding of the relationship between the economy and the environment. This led her to pursue her masters and PhD in ecological economics at the University of Edinburgh and University of Leeds respectively. Since then, Lina has published in a variety of academic journals, and her current research interests revolve around energy as it intersects with climate change, economies, and societies. More specifically on the impact of energy systems on climate change, energy return on investment, energy (service) requirements for the satisfaction of human needs, energy poverty and the impact of provisioning systems on wellbeing.
Email: brand@yorku.ca
Linda Briskin
Social Science and Women’s Studies, Faculty Associate
Linda Briskin is a senior scholar in the Department of Social Sciences and the School of Women’s Studies. Her work addresses unions, globalization and women’s power, union renewal, equity bargaining/bargaining equity, worker militancies, pedagogies and power, and privileging agency: a strategy for women’s studies in troubled times. She is currently researching union leadership, strategies for ensuring equity representation inside unions, women’s participation in collective bargaining and social dialogue, and worker militancies, with a special focus on nurses on strike.
Visit: www.yorku.ca/lbriskin/
Email:lbriskin@yorku.ca
Stephen Cain
English, Faculty Associate
Stephen Cain is a professor in the Department of English. He specializes in the field of cultural production including matters of book design distribution promotion and other paratextual issues as well as the culture of the small and micro presses in Canada. Other fields include Avant-garde Movements, Poetry and Poetics, Modern and Contemporary Literature, and Canadian Literature in general. With Tim Conley, he has written The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (Greenwood, 2006). He was the editor of a special issue of Open Letter on “The Little Literary Serial in Canada (1980-2000)” and his academic articles have appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature, Open Letter, Canadian Literature, and as chapters in the books Sound As Sense (2003), The Canadian Modernists Meet (U of Ottawa, 2005), The State of the Arts: Living With Culture in Toronto (2006) and Antiphonies: Essays on Women’s Experimental Poetries in Canada (2008).
Research Interests: Canadian Studies, Canadian literature, Canadian poetry, small press, avant-garde movements, poetry, poetics, cultural production, little magazines, postmodernism, modernism
Email: sjcain@yorku.ca
Barbara Cameron
Equity Studies and Politics, Faculty Associate
Barbara Cameron is a professor emerita in the Departments of Equity Studies and Politics.
Research Interests: Policy , Women , Women and Public Policy, The Political Economy of Women’s Equality/Inequality, Labour Market Policy and Precarious Employment
Email: barbarac@yorku.ca
John Carlaw
Political Science, Glendon, Faculty Associate
John teaches in the Political Science Department at Glendon College and is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at X University’s Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Migration and Integration Program.
His work explores the politics and social relations of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism. From 2015 to 2019, he was Project Lead of York’s Syria Response and Refugee Initiative at the Centre for Refugee Studies.
His work has or will soon appear in Canadian Diversity, the CERC/RCIS Working Paper Series, the Conversation, the Journal of Canadian Studies, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ The Harper Record 2008-2015 and Studies in Political Economy.
Email: carlaw@yorku.ca
Lily Cho
English, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Lily Cho is an associate professor in the Department of English. Her research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and Asian North American and Canadian literature. Her book, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2010) examines the relationship between Chinese restaurants and Canadian culture. She is currently conducting research on a set of Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as “C.I. 9’s.” These certificates mark one of the first uses of identification photography in Canada. Drawing from this archive, her research explores the relationship between citizenship, photography, and anticipation as a mode of agency. She is also co-editor, with Jody Berland, of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Email: lilycho@yorku.ca
Colin Coates
Canadian Studies, Glendon, Senior Fellow and former director of the Robarts Centre
Colin Coates teaches in the Canadian Studies programme at Glendon College. He was director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies from 2011-2015. He was also president of the Canadian Studies Network – Réseau d’études canadiennes, an association dedicated to the scholarly study of Canada. A specialist in the history of early French Canada and environmental history, he also conducts research on Canadian utopias. He recently published with co-editor Graeme Wynn, The Nature of Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019).
Email: ccoates@glendon.yorku.ca
Gabriella Colussi-Arthur
Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Faculty Associate
Gabriella Colussi Arthur is a professor emerita in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. She is a Founders College Fellow and recently celebrated thirty years at York University and upgraded her academic and professional expertise by completing a doctoral degree in Education with a dissertation titled Methodological Reflections in Italian-Canadian Storytelling. She continues to teach and publish in the areas of Italian language and culture, Italian L2 pedagogy, translation, and Italian-Canadian Studies. Her service record includes Italian Studies Program Coordinator, Multimedia Language Centre Academic Coordinator, Program Director of the Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies, Director of Undergraduate Programs, LL and Associate Dean—Curriculum in the former Faculty of Arts, and Canadian Regional Representative in the American Association of Teachers of Italian. She is co-director of the York University-University of Bologna Immersion Summer School program and currently serves as Vice-President of the Italian-Canadian Archive Project (ICAP).
Her main areas of expertise and publication include teaching Italian language and culture, Italian L2 pedagogy, translation, and Italian-Canadian Studies.
Research Interests: Italian L2 pedagogy, Italian-Canadian immigration, Italian L2, translation, Italian-Canadian Studies
Email: gcolussi@yorku.ca
Alan Corbiere
History, Faculty Associate
Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere, Bne doodem (Ruffed Grouse clan), is an Anishinaabe from M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. He was educated on the reserve and then attended the University of Toronto for a Bachelor of Science, he then entered York University and earned his Master’s of Environmental Studies. During his master’s studies he focused on Anishinaabe narrative and Anishinaabe language revitalization. For five years he served as the Executive Director at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation (OCF) in M’Chigeeng, a position which also encompassed the roles of curator and historian. Dr. Corbiere has published essays in exhibit catalogues for the National Gallery of Canada and the National Museum of the American Indian. He also served as the Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) Revitalization Program Coordinator at Lakeview School, M’Chigeeng First Nation, where he and his co-workers developed a culturally based second language program that focused on using Anishinaabe stories to teach language. In 2019 he defended his PhD thesis “Anishinaabe Treaty-Making in the 18th- and-19th -Century Northern Great Lakes: From Shared Meanings to Epistemological Chasms.” He is now an Assistant Professor in the History Department at York University and currently holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous History of North America.
Email: ojiigcor@yorku.ca
Boyd Cothran
History, Faculty Associate
Boyd Cothran is an associate professor of U.S. Indigenous and Cultural History. His current research investigates the intersection of cultural history and critical Indigenous studies with special focus on historical memory, historiography, and popular representations of American Indigenous peoples. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Marketplaces of Remembering: American Innocence and the Making of the Modoc War, which will focus on the historiography of the Modoc War (1872-1873), California’s so-called last Indian war, to explore the complex and often overlooked relationship between how Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals alike have remembered incidents of U.S.-Indian violence and the marketplaces – the systems, institutions, procedures, social relations, and arenas of trade – within which those remembrances have circulated. He argues that individuals have shaped their historical remembrances of the conflict, transforming an episode of Reconstruction Era violence and ethnic cleansing into a redemptive narrative of American innocence as they sought to negotiate these marketplaces. The aim in looking at these cultural and commercial associations is to delve into the question of how, since the nineteenth century, they have been directly related to the widespread belief that the Modoc War and other incidents of U.S.-Indian violence were ultimately justified and the tendency to view the westward expansion of the United States within the framework of inevitability.
Email: cothran@yorku.ca
Cheryl Cowdy
Humanities, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Cheryl Cowdy is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities. Her current research explores the ideological work of play, ritual, and of trauma in 19th-century and contemporary English-Canadian adventure novels, in YA fiction and in graphic texts. Her work also explores the psychogeographical, examining the relationship between spaces and subjectivity in English-Canadian suburban texts for adults and young people. She is dedicated to interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research.
Email: cccowdy@yorku.ca
Warren Crichlow
Education, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Warren Crichlow is an associate professor emeritus in the Faculty of Education.
Email: wcrichlow@edu.yorku.ca
Peter Cumming
Humanities, Faculty Associate
Peter Cumming is a professor emeritus in the Department of Humanities and was the past coordinator of the Children’s Studies Program. His work–in theatre, creative writing, and elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education–focuses on children and youth. His academic research focuses on children’s and youth literature and culture; contemporary Canadian fiction; constructions of masculinities in contemporary literature; digital culture; and First Nations writing in English (he worked for six years in Inuit communities in Nunavut). Peter is currently developing new undergraduate and graduate courses related to his research. He is President of the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP).
Visit: www.yorku.ca/cummingp/
Email: cummingp@yorku.ca
Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert
Urban Studies, Faculty Associate
Francesca D’Amico-Cuthbert is an adjunct faculty member in the Urban Studies program and the Chief Research Officer at the New York City based Hip Hop Education Center. An award-winning historian of American and Canadian Hip Hop culture, the creative industries, and the music marketplace, Francesca holds a Ph.D. in History from York University in Toronto, Canada (2019) and has served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto (2020-2022) and the University of Calgary (2022-2023). Her doctoral research traced how American emcees in the era of mass incarceration constructed complex ethnographies of urban spaces, transformed dispositions of power, and unmasked the modes and mechanisms of a persistent and haunting coloniality in the afterlives of American slavery. Her current postdoctoral research explores Canadian Hip Hop’s relationship to national mythmaking, commerce, anti-Black market segmentation and the availability of state revenue streams and marketplace exposure. Her research has been published in: #HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip Hop Education, The Journal of Canadian Historical Association, Canadian Journal of History, Musicworks, and The Dance Current. As an educator, Francesca has taught several courses on the histories of popular culture, including the Urban Studies course “Hip Hop and the City” which explores Hip Hop’s evolution from a translocal urban art form to a global commodity. In addition to being a multi-disciplinary creative with training in vocal and instrumental music, dance, and the dramatic arts, Francesca is also the creator of Artefacts By Francesca (@artefactsbyfrancesca) – a collection of wearable clay art pieces inspired by classic Hip Hop albums that pay homage to the fashion of 1980s medallions and Hip Hop’s fifth element (knowledge of self).
Email: fdamico@yorku.ca
Megan Davies
Social Science, Faculty Associate
Megan J. Davies is a professor emerita in the Department of Social Science and a BC historian with research interests and publications in madness, marginal and alternative health practices, old age, rural medicine and social welfare. She is currently engaging in curating After the Asylum, a national History of Madness research site about the history of deinstitutionalization in Canada, is a team member for the post-secondary on-line education project History in Practice: Community-Informed Mental Health Curriculum, and was executive producer and collective member on the documentary project, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Stories from MPA.
Research Interests: Madness, marginal and alternative health practices, old age, rural medicine and social welfare
Email: daviesmj@yorku.ca
Andrew Dawson
Department of Sociology, Glendon College, Faculty Associate
Andrew Dawson is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Glendon College. His current research analyzes the cross-national causes and consequences of state legitimacy and the rule of law, with a particular interest in violence.
Research Interests: Political sociology; political trust; violence; international development.
Email: acdawson@yorku.ca
Joseph F. DeSouza
Psychology, Faculty Associate
Joseph F. DeSouza is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology & Graduate programs in Biology, Interdisciplinary Studies and Neuroscience Graduate Diploma Program at York University’s Centre for Vision Research. He received his PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario in 2001, which was followed by postdoctoral training at the Robarts Research Institute and the Centre for Vision Research. Since 2006, his lab focuses on how multisensory signals are attended depending on the behavioural context for the eye, hand and/or body movements using neuroimaging. The translational research with people with Parkinson’s Disease, people with depression, chronic pain and Problem Gamblers aims to show how and where in brain networks change as a function of neurorehabilitation.
Email: desouza@yorku.ca
Mario Di Paolantonio
Education, Faculty Associate and member of the Robarts Executive Committee
Mario Di Paolantonio is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education. Drawing on innovative methodologies and ethical philosophy, his international, award-winning research explores the contested and varying ways that memorial sites and cultural-aesthetic forums pedagogically reckon with traumatic historical wrongs. Professor Di Paolantonio is an International Research Associate at the Centro de Estudios en Pedagogías Contemporáneas and the Escuela de Humanidades at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Email: mdipaolantonio@edu.yorku.ca
Daniel Drache
Politics and Communications and Culture, Senior Faculty Associate, former Director Robarts Centre
Daniel Drache is a Senior Faculty Associate and former director of the Robarts Centre. He is a professor emeritus in the Department of Politics. He has written extensively on global governance, the WTO and the global south as well many studies on North American integration and its consequences for Canadian public policy. His latest book Defiant Publics: The Unprecedented Reach of the Global Citizen, Polity 2008 examines the impact of new social media and the rise of citizen web 2.0 activism. He teaches in Culture and Communication and Politics.
Visit: www.yorku.ca/drache
Email: drache@yorku.ca
Sabine Dreher
International Studies, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Dr. Dreher teaches in the International Studies department on the Glendon campus. Her research has been focused on the transformations within the global political economy concerning migration (Neoliberalism and Migration. An Inquiry into the Politics of Globalisation) and religion. In 2020, she published Religions in International Political Economy with Palgrave Macmillan. She is now developing a new research program on food systems transformation on Canadian university campuses with a specific focus on Glendon.
Email: sdreher@yorku.ca
Robert Drummond
Politics and Public Policy and Administration, Faculty Associate
Robert Drummond is a professor emeritus in the Department of Politics and in the School of Public Policy and Administration. His early research was on electoral behaviour and survey research, but has more recently turned to public policy and provincial politics. He has an interest particularly in policy as it is affected by population aging, and more specifically policy in the realm of pensions (public and private), and an interest (but limited expertise) in policy regarding labour, health care, and post-secondary education. He is currently gathering information for a possible policy history of the Davis government in Ontario — 1971-85 — as that was a period of considerable change in public policy in the province.
Email: robertd@yorku.ca
Denielle Elliott
Social Science, Faculty Associate
Denielle Elliott is an associate professor in the Departments of Social Science and Anthropology. Interested in the anthropology of medicine, science, and technology, her research explores the unintended consequences of “good intentioned” interventions with postcolonial communities. Her doctoral research focused on the unanticipated effects of the declaration of a public health emergency in Vancouver’s inner city, focusing on injection drug users, HIV/AIDS, and the Canadian state. She is co-founder and a curator of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography.
Research Interests: Biomedicine, community development (medicine, aid and science), and governmentality.
Email: dae@yorku.ca
Andrea Emberly
Children’s Studies Program, Humanities, Faculty Associate
Andrea Emberly is an ethnomusicologist and associate professor in the Children, Childhood & Youth program at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her work focuses on the study of children’s musical cultures and the relationship between childhood, wellbeing, and musical arts practices. She is presently leading the Connecting Culture and Childhood Project (SSHRC Partnership Development) that brings together young people, community leaders, and researchers to explore how connection to archival and heritage musical materials can contribute to the sustainment of musical traditions.
Research Interests: Music , Children, Ethnomusicology.
Email: aemberly@yorku.ca
Geoffrey Ewen
Canadian Studies, Glendon, Faculty Associate and member Robarts Executive Committee
Geoffrey Ewen is an assistant professor at Glendon in the Department of History and the coordinator of the Canadian Studies Program.
Email: gewen@glendon.yorku.ca
Seth Feldman
Cinema and Media Arts, Senior Faculty Associate, former Director Robarts Centre
Seth Feldman is a professor emeritus in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts where he is known for his research into Canadian and Documentary cinema. He is the author of 26 radio documentaries for the CBC program, IDEAS and has recently directed two documentary films. Professor Feldman is the former Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and the former Director of the Robarts Centre. He holds the honorific title of University Professor, one of twenty awards given to York University professors who have made outstanding contributions in the areas of teaching and administration.
Email: sfeldman@yorku.ca
Fred Fletcher
Political Science and Communications and Culture, Senior Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Fred Fletcher is a professor emeritus in the Department of Politics. His interests include mass media and politics, communication policy, election campaigns and public opinion (all with a focus on Canada), also federalism and environmental issues. Publications include articles in many journals and edited books. He is the co-author of Canadian Attitude Trends, 1960-78, The Newspaper and Public Affairs, Canadian Politics Through Press Reports, Media Elections and Democracy, and Reaching the Voter: Constituency Campaigning in Canada. He has worked for three Royal Commissions, including the recent Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing, where as Research Coordinator, Media and Elections. His current research focuses on the impact of the Internet on Canadian culture and society and on civic engagement in Canadian politics. He is president of the Canadian Internet Project Research Group — an affiliate of the World Internet Project — and is the co-author (with Charles Zamaria, Ryerson University) of two major reports on Internet use in Canada.
Email: ffletch@yorku.ca
Victoria Freeman
History, LA&PS and Canadian Studies, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Victoria Freeman is a public historian and was a course director in the Department of History, LA&PS, and in the Canadian Studies Program at Glendon. She engages in community-based research through First Story Toronto on the Indigenous history of Toronto, with projects on local treaties, digital mapping, and Indigenous women’s experience as community builders and activists. The author of Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America and also a multidisciplinary artist, she conducts arts-based research and education focused on treaty awareness and decolonization through a joint project between First Story Toronto and Jumblies Theatre called Talking Treaties, which will culminate in an installation and community arts performance at the Indigenous Arts Festival at Fort York in June 2017. She is also involved in projects to create a new heritage trail along the Credit River and increase Indigenous content in programming at Evergreen Brickworks and other Toronto community and heritage sites.
Research Interests: Decolonization and reconciliation; Toronto’s Indigenous history; treaties; history of Canadian Indigenous-settler relations; arts-based decolonization education; digital mapping.
Visit: www.victoriafreeman.ca
Marina Freire-Gormaly
Lassonde School of Engineering, Faculty Associate
Marina Freire-Gormaly, PhD, is an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering Department at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University. Her research focusses on the development of stand-alone solar powered reverse osmosis water treatment systems and energy recovery systems for remote communities that lack access to grid electricity, including Indigenous communities in Canada. She also is interested in machine learning applications for smart design of innovative energy and water systems. Her research interests are also in aerosol transmission of COVID-19, advanced manufacturing, smart systems using Internet of Things & artificial intelligence, and advanced additive manufacturing methods.
She completed her Ph.D. and M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Mechanical Engineering. Her M.A.Sc. was on pore space characterization of carbonate rocks using micro computed tomography and pore network modeling for advancing Carbon Capture and Storage Technology. She has previously been a course instructor for undergraduate energy related engineering courses at the University of Toronto.
She has also worked at Ontario Power Generation (OPG) on the Darlington New Nuclear Project and the Darlington Refurbishment Project. She contributed to a World Bank project evaluating Canada’s ‘Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy’ (RISE). She currently serves as the Chair of Student and Young Professional Affairs for the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers (CSME). She also serves on the NSERC 202 – Scholarships and Fellowships Selection Committee for Mechanical Engineering. She is the Co-lead of the Strengthening Engineering Education and Research Initiative at Academics Without Borders which strives to enable capacity building for Early Career faculty members in low-income countries.
She is passionate about research and teaching energy systems to inspire the next generation of engineers to tackle society’s growing sustainability challenges. Her research interests include energy systems, optimization and design for global engineering contexts.
To learn more about her research visit: https://freire-gormaly.lab.yorku.ca/
Email: marina.freire-gormaly@lassonde.yorku.ca
Lee Frew
English, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Lee Frew is an assistant lecturer in the Department of English at Glendon College. He teaches courses in Canadian Literature, Postcolonial Literatures and Theory, and Transatlantic Modernisms. His upcoming book, Ernest Thompson Seton: Selected Animal Stories, will be published as part of the Canadian Critical Edition series by Tecumseh Press.
Email: leefrew@yorku.ca
M. Bernie Frolic
Politics and Executive Director, Asian Business and Management Programme, Schulich School of Business, Faculty Associate
Bernie Frolic is a professor emeritus in the Department of Politics and the Executive Director of the Asian Business Management Programme. He is the author of several books, monographs and articles on democracy, human rights and civil society, particularly on China and Russia. He is co-editor of Democracy, Human Rights and Civil Society in Asia (2001), Civil Society in China (1997), and Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the PRC (1995). He is the author of China’s Second Wave of Development (1995) and Mao’s People (1980). He has written several articles and papers on modernization and urbanization in China and the USSR, state-led civil society, transitions to democracy after the cold war, non-comparative communism between China and the USSR, among a host of others.
Keywords: Democracy; human rights; civil society; China; Russia.
Email: bfrol@yorku.ca
Francis Garon
Political Science, Glendon and Graduate Program Director, Glendon School of Public and International Affairs, Faculty Associate
Francis Garon is an associate professor and received his Ph.D. from Université de Montréal. He has been at Glendon College since 2007. His research interests are in the fields of deliberative democracy and immigration and integration issues. He is teaching courses on public policy analysis and the management of diversity.
Research Interests: Public policy and administration, deliberative democracy, Québec and Canadian politics
Email: fgaron@glendon.yorku.ca
Ian Garrett
Theatre, Faculty Associate
Ian Garrett is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre. His work focuses on the intersection of sustainable development and the arts, where he researches the impacts of cultural participation, ecoarts practices, and practical resource management for artistic production. His research includes sustainable production practices in Ontario theatres, audience transportation and cultural offsetting. He is currently coordinating sustainability programming for World Stage Design, a quadrennial festival/symposium on global design for performance which will be in Cardiff in September 2013 and started in Toronto in 2005. He is also an accomplished theatrical designer and manager and co-director of Los Angeles based Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA).
Visit: www.toasterlab.com/ and CSPA www.sustainablepractice.org/
Email: igarrett@yorku.ca
Shelley A.M. Gavigan
Osgoode Hall Law School, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Shelley A.M. Gavigan is a Professor Emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University.
Following graduation from law school in 1975, she articled in a rural-based community legal clinic, was called to the Bar in 1976, and continued to practise in Saskatchewan, as a legal clinic lawyer. Appointed to the faculty of the School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University in 1984, she joined the Osgoode faculty in 1986. She has held appointments as Associate Dean and as Academic Director of Osgoode’s Intensive Program in Poverty Law at Parkdale Community Legal Services.
Her publications include Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905 (UBC Press & The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2012); “Something Old, Something New? Re-theorizing Patriarchal Relations and Privatization from the Outskirts of Family Law” (2012) 13 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 271; The Legal Tender of Gender: Welfare Law and the Regulation of Women’s Poverty, Shelley A.M. Gavigan & Dorothy E. Chunn, eds. (Hart, 2010); The Politics of Abortion with Jane Jenson and Janine Brodie (OUP, 1992); and, several articles informed by feminist, socio-legal, and historical perspectives on the legal regulation of familial relations, lesbian parenting, welfare law, abortion and access to justice.
Professor Gavigan’s areas of teaching include Criminal Law, Family Law, Children & Law, Law & Poverty, Law & Social Justice, and Clinical Legal Education.
Research Interests: Socio-Legal Studies, Legal History, Criminal Law, Feminist Legal Studies, Family Law, Clinical Education
Email: sgavigan@osgoode.yorku.ca
Mahtot Gebresselassie
Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Mahtot Gebresselassie is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. She researches transportation, technology, and accessibility to people with disabilities. She also studies extreme-weather events and transportation. Mahtot’s work includes platform labor in the transportation sector and broadly.
Email: mahtote@yorku.ca
Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas
History, Faculty Associate
Dr. Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at York University specializing in Modern Greek and Mediterranean History. Sakis is also the coordinator of the Hellenic Studies Program, Department of Humanities at York University. He obtained his MA (Social History) and Ph.D (History) from the University of Essex and his BA (History) from Ionian University, Corfu. His research interests include the history of British colonialism in the Mediterranean, the economic and social history of the Ionian Islands and the Greek State and the history of migration in diaspora, in Canada in particular.
Visit: Hellenic Heritage Foundation Chair
Email: agekas@yorku.ca
Liette Gilbert
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Liette Gilbert is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Her research interests are articulated around two poles: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Citizenship (multicultural cities and identities; politics of difference in the city; neoliberalisation of immigration policy; social justice, media representations of immigration and multiculturalism, and North American border politics) and Urban and Environmental Politics (planning, design and urbanism; exurban growth and environmental conservation; political ecology of landscapes; and environmental justice).
Email: gilbertl@yorku.ca
Philip Girard
Osgoode Hall Law School, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Philip Girard is a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. Professor Girard is one of Canada’s most distinguished and pre-eminent legal academics and legal historians. In 2011, he was made an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the first Canadian to be so recognized.
His publications include A History of Law in Canada, Vol. I, Beginnings to 1866 (2018), authored with Jim Phillips and Blake Brown, the first overview of the development of law, legal orders and legal institutions in Canada, including the Indigenous, Quebec civil law and common law traditions. Prof. Girard is also the author of Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life (2005), winner of the Floyd Chalmers Award in Ontario history, and numerous articles and book chapters on Canadian and comparative legal history.
Email: pgirard@osgoode.yorku.ca
Stephanie Gora
Lassonde School of Engineering, Faculty Associate
Professor Gora is an assistant professor in Civil Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University in Toronto. She and her team study drinking water treatment, quality, and safety with a focus on small, decentralized, and Arctic drinking water systems in Canada. Their research also encompasses the development and evaluation of light-based water purification and sensing technologies like UV LEDs, advanced oxidation, and nanomaterial-driven photocatalysis. Professor Gora teaches courses related to drinking water, wastewater, and water resources and contributes to STEAM outreach activities at York University. Professor Gora is a past recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Manulife-Engineers Canada Graduate Scholarship, and the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. She holds an NSERC Discovery Grant entitled “Expanding the water safety toolbox for small and decentralized drinking water systems using risk analysis, photocatalytic technologies, and pilot scale equipment” and is registered as a professional engineer in Ontario and Nova Scotia. She is active in numerous water industry groups including the Treatment Committee of the Ontario Water Works Association, the Board of the Canadian Association on Water Quality, the Organic Contaminants Research Committee of the American Water Works Association, and the International UV Association. Professor Gora became a parent for the first time in 2020 and is devoted to her son, Simon, and her partner, Andrew. In earlier times she led rock bands in Halifax, Toronto, and Kingston. In her spare time she enjoys hiking, photography, cooking, brewing, and exploring the rich cultural scene in Toronto.
Jan Hadlaw
Design, Faculty Associate
Jan Hadlaw is an associate professor in the Department of Design and holds appointments in the Communications & Culture, Science & Technology Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Art History & Visual Culture graduate programs. Her research interests focus on histories of modern technologies and the imaginaries that have shaped their design and meaning. She is especially interested in 20th century technological artifacts, their representation in popular culture, and the roles they played in shaping and advancing modern conceptions of time, space, and identity. She is currently working on two research projects: the first examines the interconnections of technology, design, and Canadian national identity in the post WWII years to 1975; the second is a history of the development and introduction of dial telephony in Central Canada, 1890 to 1930.
Email: jhadlaw@yorku.ca
Celia Haig-Brown
Education, Faculty Associate
Celia Haig-Brown is a professor in the Faculty of Education
Research Interests: (De)colonizing research and practice; Critical ethnography; Critical/feminist pedagogy; Learning from place; Adult & community education; Curriculum development; Ways of knowing
Email: chaig-brown@edu.yorku.ca
Alison Halsall
Humanities, Faculty Associate
Alison Halsall is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities. Her teaching and scholarly strengths are interdisciplinary and trans-generic, and she has won several teaching awards, including the 2017 Department of Humanities Excellence in Teaching Award and the 2010 Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. She specializes in Victorian and modernist literatures, with a particular emphasis on Visual Cultures, which includes the study of paintings and illustrations, contemporary film, comics and graphic novels. She has also developed a substantial expertise in Children’s Literature, and is currently working on a project that looks at graphic narratives for and about children and youth.
Research Interests:English, Children and Youth, Victorian, Visual Cultures, Adaptation and Transmedia Studies
Email: ahalsall@yorku.ca
Eve Haque
Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, member of Robarts Executive Committee, Faculty Associate
Eve Haque is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the Graduate Program Director for Social and Political Thought. Her research interests include white settler nationalism and colonialism in the Canadian context, ethnolinguistic nationalism, language policy, multiculturalism and critical race studies. Her book Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework (University of Toronto Press, 2012) examines the intertwined roots of multiculturalism and bilingualism in Canada. Her current work explores how policy imperatives for the integration of im/migrants are embedded in racializing discourses.
Research Interests: Language, race, immigration, multiculturalism, colonialism
Email: ehaque@yorku.ca
Alison Harvey
Communications at Glendon College, Faculty Associate
Alison Harvey is Assistant Professor in Communications at Glendon College, York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015, Routledge) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity). Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including Games & Culture, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Social Media & Society, and Studies in Social Justice.
Research Interests: Inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, Gender and labour in digital games
Email: alison.harvey@glendon.yorku.ca
Nadia Z. Hasan
School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Faculty Associate
Dr. Nadia Hasan is an assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her research and community work focus on systemic racism and Islamophobia in legal, administrative, and discursive regimes and their relation to Muslim life. She previously worked in the non-profit sector on issues related to human rights, racism and Islamophobia in Canada.
Email: nzh@yorku.ca
Wilburn Hayden
Social Work, Faculty Associate
Wilburn Hayden is a Senior Scholar in the School of Social Work. A leading expert on Black Appalachians, Hayden joined York University after a long and distinguished career of university teaching, academic leadership and social work practice. His last post before coming to York was at the California University of Pennsylvania where he was professor and director of the Master of Social Work Program. Having grown up in the county of Forsyth in North Carolina, he has worked and been involved in Appalachian studies for a lifetime and has taught in three Appalachian universities. He was featured in the PBS documentary film “The Appalachians”, which has been shown regularly on local PBS stations since April 2005. His scholarship has been complemented by extensive community practice as well as professional credentials that include the Academy of Certified Social Workers. He has been selected the National Association Social Workers Social Worker of the Year in North Carolina, 1988 and Pennsylvania, 2007. Since returning to Canada, Hayden has continued his earlier research on black Canadians and is currently on sabbatical building his research agenda, which includes field visits to early historical black sites throughout Canada funded through a YUFA grant.
Email: whayden@yorku.ca
Lyse Hébert is a graduate of the Glendon College School of Translation (B.A. and an M.A.) and holds a PhD in Humanities from York. Her research focuses on the sociology of translation and on curriculum development. She practiced as a professional translator for over 20 years, both in the public sector and as co-owner of a private translation firm.
Email: lhebert@glendon.yorku.ca
Natasha Henry-Dixon
History, Faculty Associate
Natasha Henry-Dixon is an assistant professor of African Canadian History in the Department of History. Her primary research and teaching focus is on the historical experiences of people of African descent in Canada. The 2018 Vanier Scholar is currently researching the enslavement of African people in colonial Ontario. Her publications include Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (reprinted 2021), Talking about Freedom: Celebrating Freedom in Canada (2012), a number of youth-focused titles, and several entries for the Canadian Encyclopedia on African Canadian history.
Research Interests: African Canadian History, African Diaspora, African Enslavement in Colonial Canada, Gender and Slavery, Emancipation and Freedom, History of Black education in Ontario, Transnationalism
Email: henryn@yorku.ca
Craig Heron
History, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Craig Heron is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History. His research interests are Canadian Social History, especially relating to class and gender.
Visit: Faculty Profile
Email: cheron@yorku.ca
Anna Hudson
Visual Arts & Art History, Senior Faculty Associate and member Robarts Executive Committee
Anna Hudson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts & Art History and a Tier II – York Research Chair in the School of Arts, Media, Performance & Design.
Dr. Hudson is an art historian, curator, writer and educator specializing in Canadian art and visual culture. Formerly associate curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, she brings to her teaching extensive hands-on experience in institutional curatorial practice.
Dr. Hudson is currently leading a major Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant project titled “Mobilizing Inuit Cultural Heritage: a multi-media/multi-platform re-engagement of voice in visual art and performance” with 10 researchers – including Professor Susan Dion in the Faculty of Education and Professor Angela Norwood from the Faculty of Fine Arts – and nine partner organizations. The goal of the project is to conduct collaborative research on the contribution of Inuit visual culture, art and performance to Inuit language preservation, social well-being and cultural identity. The project builds on “Breaking the Boundaries of Inuit Art: New Contexts for Cultural Influence,” a previous SSHRC supported project for which she and her research team organized School’s Out — a four-day workshop and two-day concert in Iqaluit, Nunavut (celebrating National Aboriginal Day and the end of the school term), co-produced by Alianait Arts Festival.
Dr. Hudson’s curatorial credits include the international touring show Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven (with Ian Dejardin and Katerina Atanassova, for the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK); inVisibility: Indigenous in the City, part of INVISIBILITY: An Urban Aboriginal Education Connections Project (for the John B. Aird Gallery, Toronto); The Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1920-1950 (with Michèle Grandbois, for the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec); and the AGO exhibitions Woman as Goddess: Liberated Nudes by Robert Markle and Joyce Wieland and Inuit Art in Motion (co-curated with Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory).
Professor Hudson continues to pursue research in the area of her doctoral dissertation, Art and Social Progress: the Toronto community of Painters (1933-1950). Her most recent publications include “Jock Macdonald’s weave of reality” (forthcoming 2014), “Time and Image: Picturing Consciousness in Modern Canadian Painting” (2013), “Stepping into the Light of Clark McDougall’s Landscapes” (2011) and “Landscape Atomysticism: A Revelation of Tom Thomson” (2011).
Research Interests: Art in Canada; Art in the Americas; Circumpolar Art; Indigenous Thought; Inuit Art; 20th C humanism
Visit: www.mich.info.yorku.ca/
Email: ahudson@yorku.ca
Johanne Jean-Pierre
Sociology, Faculty Associate
Johanne Jean-Pierre is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology (LAPS). She conducts bilingual research in the fields of sociology of education, higher education, and child and youth studies. Her research focuses on Black Canadians and Francophone minority communities. She is a member of the Empowering Next Generation Researchers in Perinatal and Child Health (ENRICH) Network. To highlight the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), she co-edited several special issues pertaining to Black Canadians in national peer-reviewed journals (Canadian Journal of Sociology, Canadian Journal of Education, Canadian Review of Sociology). She is the lead co-editor of the introductory textbook Reading Sociology Fourth Ed.: Decolonizing Canada (Oxford University Press).
Email: jjpierre@yorku.ca
William Jenkins
Geography, Faculty Associate
William Jenkins is an associate professor in the Department of Geography. He is a historical geographer whose primary research interest lies in the immigration of Irish men, women and children to Canada and the United States between 1815 and 1914. He also has research and teaching interests in the historical geographies of cities in the West, Irish history in the 19th and 20th centuries, transnational and diaspora studies and the political geographies of nationalism. His latest book Between Raid and Rebellion: the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto 1867-1916 was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Research Interests: Immigration, History, Geography, Transnational Studies, Nationalism.
Email: wjenkins@yorku.ca
Korina Jocson
Faculty of Education, Faculty Associate
Korina Jocson is Associate Professor of Digital Futures and Associate Dean Academic in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her scholarly interests include youth cultural studies, digital media technologies, race and ethnic studies in education, and critical methodologies. She is the author of award-winning Youth Media Matters: Participatory Cultures and Literacies in Education and the editor of Cultural Transformations: Youth and Pedagogies of Possibility. She holds a PhD in Education from UC Berkeley. A U.S.-Canada Fulbright Scholar, she served as Visiting Research Chair of Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa.
Email: kjocson@edu.yorku.ca
Sean Kheraj
History, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Sean Kheraj is an assistant professor in the Department of History. He teaches in the fields of Canadian and environmental history. His current research looks at the interrelationship between humans, non-human animals, and urbanization in Canada. Previously, his research examined historical conservation and parks policy to understand the role that people have played in creating protected natural spaces in Canada. Dr. Kheraj is also the host and producer of Nature’s Past a monthly audio podcast on environmental history research in Canada.
For more information on Dr. Kheraj’s work, please visit www.seankheraj.com
Email: kherajs@yorku.ca
Katherine Knight
Visual Art and Art History, Faculty Associate
Katherine Knight is an associate professor in Visual Art and Art History in the School of Arts, Media, performance and Design. She is nationally recognized for her photographic and installation works, which often incorporates black and white stills, text and archival material. Her work explores the intersection of private and public experience through landscape-based approaches.
Professor Knight has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows across Canada and in the United States, and her works are held in many public and corporate collections including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Banff Centre for the Arts and The Canada Council Art Bank. She was awarded the Canada Council’s Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography in 2000 in recognition of the excellence of her work.
Exhibition highlights include Marguerite, which tells the story of Marguerite Bourgeoys, Canada’s first uncloistered teaching nun and founder of the Congregation Notre-Dame, using photography and narrative to interpret history and contemporary experience, and I Became Unconscious, which combines references to an 1883 London, Ontario shipwreck and Hurricane Hazel, developing the image of water as a metaphor for unconscious choices of will.
In 2006, Professor Knight founded Site Media Inc to produce documentaries on creative individuals in extraordinary places. Site Media has produced six documentaries on Canadian artists: Annie Pootoogook; Kinngait: Riding Light into the World; Pretend Not to See Me: The Art of Colette Urban, which received Special Mention at the 2010 Ecofilm Festival in Rhodos, Greece; and KOOP – The Art of Wanda Koop, which premiered as the gala night selection at the 2011 Reel Artists Film Festival, Toronto (see story); Spring & Arnaud, a top ten audience award at Hot Docs 2013 and Strange and Familiar; Architecture on Fogo Island.
Visit: Katherine Knight’s Photography and Site Media Inc.
Email: kknight@yorku.ca
David Koffman
History, Faculty Associate
David S. Koffman (PhD, NYU, 2011) is a cultural and social historian of Canadian and US Jewries. He holds the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry, and is an associate professor in the Department of History at York University, where he teaches courses on Canadian Jewish history, religion in American life, the meanings of money, genealogy as history, modern antisemitism, and religion & capitalism. His first monograph, The Jews’ Indian: Colonialism, Pluralism, and Belonging in America (Rutgers University Press, 2019), explores the American Jewish encounter with Native America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written on recent Canadian Jewish interest in Indigenous people and issues. He is the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays entitled, No Better Place?: Canada, Its Jews, and the Idea of Home (University of Toronto Press), and is pursuing new research on the Prime Ministers & The Jews, and Jews and Mayoral Power. He serves as the associate director of York’s Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, and as the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes.
Research Interests: Modern Jewish history, historiography, 19th and 20th Canadian and U.S. social and cultural history, race, religion, medicine and gender.
Email: koffman@yorku.ca
Jennifer Korosi
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Professor Jennifer Korosi is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Her research examines how human activities drive ecological and biogeochemical change in aquatic ecosystems, including the use of lake sediment cores (the field of paleolimnology)to study recent aquatic ecosystem change over the context of the last several hundred years. She works in both temperate and high latitude regions throughout Canada, and currently has a strong focus in the Northwest Territories..
Research Interests: Environment, Global/Climate Change , limnology, biogeography, biogeochemistry.
Visit: www.korosi-lab.com/
Email: jkorosi@yorku.ca
Jacqueline Krikorian
Politics/ Social Science, Faculty Associate
Jacqueline Krikorian is an associate professor and a member of the bar of Ontario. She received a PhD from the University of Toronto (Political Science), an MA from Dalhousie (Political Science), an MLitt from the University of Oxford (Modern History) and her law degree from Queen’s University. In the winter 2014 term, Professor Krikorian held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in US-Canada Relations at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Economic Law at Georgetown University Law Center.
Professor Krikorian teaches in the Department of Politics and in the Law & Society program at York University. She specializes in government and public law, with a particular emphasis on Canada and US relations. She has been the recipient of funding from a number of institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Fulbright Canada, and the Commonwealth awards program.
Her book, International Trade Law and Domestic Public Policy: Canada, the United States and the WTO (2012), has received strong reviews. It adopts the methodological approaches traditionally used to study the effect of domestic high courts in order to analyze the policy impact of decisions issued by the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. She has published her research in a number of noted refereed journals including the Journal of International Economic Law, the University of Toronto Law Journal, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Research Interests: Constitutional politics, international law, government, Canadian government and politics
Email: jdk@yorku.ca
Magdalena Krol
Lassonde School of Engineering, Faculty Associate
Dr. Magdalena Krol is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering. Dr. Krol received her B.E.Sc. and M.E.Sc. from the University of Western Ontario in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto. Dr. Krol’s area of expertise is in environmental engineering, specializing in numerical modeling of subsurface fate and transport and the effect of heat on the subsurface environment. Her research activities include optimizing groundwater remediation technologies, assessing performance of underground storage of spent nuclear fuel, and geothermal optimization.
Professor Krol has served as the Chair of the NSERC Civil, Industrial and Systems Engineering Scholarships Committee (2017-2020), and the Geoenvironmental Division Chair for the Canadian Geotechnical Society. She has been an invited lecturer at numerous institutions, including Environment Canada and Climate Change. In addition, she has been very active at numerous outreach events including speaking at local girl guide meetings, GoEngGirls events, FIRST Robotics, and SHAD Canada.
Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr. Krol worked as a Remediation Engineer in Boston, MA on a diverse set of remediation projects dealing with a wide range of contaminants and sites. She is the author of numerous journal and conference publications and is a licensed professional engineer in the province of Ontario.
Email: magdalena.krol@lassonde.yorku.ca
Fuyuki Kurasawa
Sociology, Faculty Associate
Fuyuki Kurasawa is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology.
Basic Fields of Interest: Classical and Contemporary Social Theory; Political Sociology; Cultural Studies/Sociology.
Research Interests: 1. The history of humanitarianism. 2. Global justice and human rights. 3. Visuality and distant suffering. 4. Contemporary critical theories.
Email: kurasawa@yorku.ca
Laura Kwak
Social Science, member of Robarts Executive Committee, Faculty Associate
Laura J. Kwak is Assistant Professor in the Law and Society Program at York University. Her research has been published in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, and Amerasia Journal. She is developing her first monograph “Playing by the Racial Rule(s): Asian Conservatives in Canada’s Federal Legislature,” which challenges the supposed incommensurability of racialized identity and Conservative politics. Her SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2020-2022) funded research project “Race and Representation in Canada’s Parliament, 2006-2019” explores the contributions of racialized Members of Parliament (MPs) across Canada’s three main federal political parties.
Email: ljkwak9@yorku.ca
Anita Lam
Social Science, Faculty Associate
Anita Lam is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Science. Her research has focused on the television production of Canadian crime dramas, using actor-network theory to examine representations of crime. Her new project explores the sociolegal regulation and policing of urban Chinese grocery stores in Toronto, documenting their historical trajectory from suspect spaces to model businesses.
Email: lamanita@yorku.ca
Catherine Lamaison
Language Training Centre for Studies in French, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Catherine Lamaison is an Assistant Professor at the Language Training Centre for Studies in French. Her research interests revolve around French and francophone cultural studies (particularly the educational, political and social scopes of black music from the African and Caribbean diasporas) and French as a second language teaching and learning (innovative and inclusive teaching methods and the development of (inter)cultural competences in FSL).
She has published, with Muriel Péguret, on the influence of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) on FSL university courses in Canada, and she is currently working on the creation a pedagogical guide to better accommodate D/deaf and hard and hearing students in oral language university courses.
Email: lamaison@glendon.yorku.ca
Marie-Hélène Larochelle
Directrice des programmes de maîtrise en études françaises et de doctorat en études francophones, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Marie-Hélène Larochelle est professeure agrégée à l’Université York. Ses recherches portent sur la violence dans la littérature contemporaine. Elle est l’auteure des essais L’abécédaire des monstres. Fragments de Réjean Ducharme (PUL, 2011) et Poétique de l’invective romanesque, L’invectif chez Louis-Ferdinand Céline et Réjean Ducharme (YYZ, 2008). Elle a dirigé plusieurs dossiers de publication dont Le Dire-monstre (Tangence, 2009), Identités monstrueuses : violences et invectives dans le roman francophone européen (Présence francophone, 2010) et Monstres et monstrueux littéraires (PUL, 2008). Elle est également l’auteure d’un roman, Daniil et Vanya (Québec Amérique, coll. « Littérature d’Amérique », 2017), et d’une nouvelle, Crudité (Québec Amérique, coll. « La Shop », 2018), qui travaillent la mise en esthétique de la violence. Elle travaille en ce moment à l’écriture de son second roman Cyan (Leméac, 2019).
Email: mlarochelle@glendon.yorku.ca
Audrey Laurin-Lamothe
Social Science, Faculty Associate
Audrey Laurin-Lamothe holds a PhD in Sociology (2017, Université du Québec à Montréal). Her thesis created a portrait of the economic elite in Quebec in the context of increased firm financialization, through an analysis of individual profiles, compensation and social networks. Her research program is informed by the understanding that financialization is a driving force of economic transformation and more broadly, profoundly influences relationships among households, organizations and the State. Her previous academic contributions analyzed gender-based fiscal policies, public indebtedness, and wages’ stagnation in Canada.
Email: audrey.laurin_lamothe@yorku.ca
Emily Laxer
Sociology, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Emily Laxer is Associate Professor of Sociology at Glendon College and the York Research Chair in Populism, Rights, and Legality. Her research broadly considers how contests for political power shape the incorporation of ethno-religious minorities in largescale immigration countries. Dr. Laxer’s 2019 book – Unveiling the Nation: The Politics of Secularism in France and Québec (McGill-Queen’s University Press) – was awarded the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association in 2020. Her research has also been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Nations and Nationalism, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Migration Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, as well as in edited volumes.
Visit: laxeremily.wordpress.com
Research Interests: Political Sociology; Populism; Immigration, Citizenship & Nationalism; Religious Accommodation.
Email: emily.laxer@glendon.yorku.ca
Marie-Élaine Lebel
Centre de formation linguistique pour les études en français / Language Training Centre for Studies in French, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Marie-Élaine Lebel est professeure agrégée au Centre de formation linguistique pour les études en français du Collège Glendon. Elle a obtenu un PhD en linguistique de l’Université du Québec à Montréal et de l’École Normale Supérieure Fontenay/St-Cloud en 2003, avec une thèse de doctorat portant sur le morphème par en ancien français. Aujourd’hui ses recherches portent principalement sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage du français en milieu bilingue et plurilingue, mais aussi sur les approches décoloniales pour l’enseignement des langues.
Email: melebel@glendon.yorku.ca
Laura Levin
Theatre, Faculty Associate
Laura Levin is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre. She is a performance theorist and practitioner whose research focuses primarily on contemporary North American theatre and performance art. Her areas of interest include: performance theory; gender and sexuality in/as performance; urban, site-specific and environmental performance; intermedial and online performance; practice as research; photographic theory and performance; disciplinary genealogies in performance studies. She is the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Theatre Review.
Email: levin@yorku.ca
Abril Liberatori
Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies, History, member of Robarts Executive Committee, Faculty Associate
Abril Liberatori is the new Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies at York University. She received her PhD in History from York University in 2017. A historian by training, her research focuses on the experiences of Italian Canadians in the post-Second World War period. She is particularly interested in ethnic identity formation, as well as gender, transnational, and oral history. She has published on topics such as language, memory, music, and food among Italian immigrants in North and South America. Dr. Liberatori also has experience in the public sector, and has taught courses on Canadian history, social history, and global history.
Email: abrill@yorku.ca
Maria Liegghio
School of Social Work, Faculty Associate
Maria Liegghio is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at York University. Her main areas of research are social work epistemology in mental health; the stigma of mental illness in child and youth mental health, or more critically children’s psychiatrization; critical social work education, theory, and practice; and collaborative, community-based and participatory action research. She has extensive experience working as a child and family mental health therapist. Her current work is focused on the experiences psychiatrized children and youth and their caregivers have of crisis responses, policing, and police encounters. She has four projects: 1) a study exploring the “mental health” experiences children and youth have, in particular, their experiences of “crisis/distress” and of accessing and using mental health services, specifically crisis and police services; 2) a study exploring the emotional, functional, and financial (provisioning) contributions youth make living in low-income, lone mother households; 3) an international collaboration exploring resilience to trauma as an organizing framework for violence prevention and intervention in El Salvador, with a particular focus on de-colonial research and practice approaches; and 4) a MITACS supported initiative exploring “promising practices” for multi-sector collaboration in the provision of child and youth mental health services.
Research Interests: Children and Youth, Mental Health, Critical Social Work Theory, Practice, and Education, Stigma of Mental Illness, Resilience and Trauma, Community-based/Participatory Action Research
Email: mlieg@yorku.ca
Evan Light
Communications, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Evan Light is an assistant professor of communications. He holds a Ph.D. in communication from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Evan does research in the areas of surveillance and privacy, communication and telecommunications policy, participatory democracy, community and independent media, social movements, the radio spectrum and investor activism.
Visit: Border Probes
Email: elight@glendon.yorku.ca
Brenda Longfellow
Cinema and Media Studies, Faculty Associate
Brenda Longfellow is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Production and director of Graduate Programs in Cinema and Media Studies (MA,PhD).
Professor Longfellow has published articles on documentary, feminist film theory and Canadian cinema in Public, CineTracts, Screen, and the Journal of Canadian Film Studies. She is a co-editor (with Scott MacKenzie and Tom Waugh) of the anthology The Perils of Pedagogy: the Works of John Greyson (2013) and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women Filmmakers (1992). Her documentaries have been screened and broadcast internationally, winning prestigious awards including the Audience Award for Best Experimental Film for Dead Ducks at the Santa Cruz Film Festival (2011); A Bronze Remi Award for Weather Report at the Houston Film Festival (2008); Best Cultural Documentary for Tina in Mexico at the Havana International Film Festival (2002); a Canadian Genie for Shadowmaker/ Gwendolyn MacEwen, Poet (1998) and the Grand Prix at Oberhausen for Our Marilyn (1988). Other films include Gerda, (1992), A Balkan Journey(1996) and Carpe Diem (2010).
She recently launched the SSHRC funded interactive web documentary OFFSHORE, co-directed with Glen Richards and Helios Design Lab. OFFSHORE may be viewed at www.offshore-interactive.com/site/
Email: brendal@yorku.ca
Anne F. MacLennan
Communication Studies, Faculty Associate
Anne MacLennan is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at York University and former Graduate Program Director of the Joint Program in Communication & Culture at York and Ryerson Universities. Her ongoing work includes: a book on early Canadian radio programming; SSHRC funded research project entitled, “Remembering Radio: The Canadian Radio Audience in the 1930s” and a Canadian Media Research Consortium funded project, First Person Plural: Transcribing the Perspectives of Canadian Broadcast Pioneers for a Digital Age” with Prof. Paul Moore, Ryerson. In 2017 she curated a show of historical radios and radio advertising accompanied by the book Seeing, Selling, and Situating Radio in Canada, 1922-1956 with Michael Windover for a SSHRC Insight Grant. On its first stops the shows were “Making Space for Radio in Canada,” at the Archives of Ontario; Seeing, Selling, and Situating Radio in Canada, Sound and Moving Image Library, York University; Radio in Canada, 1922-1956 MacOdrum Library Discovery Centre, Carleton University; Making Radio Space in 1930s Canada, Carleton University Art Gallery, and will soon be moving on to Montreal. She has published in the Journal of Radio & Audio Media and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Radio Journal, Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Urban History Review and in a variety of collections. She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Radio and Audio Media. Her work includes work on community radio, media history, broadcasting, popular culture, radio, Canadian history and Canadian studies, women, social welfare, poverty and cultural representations in the media.
Research Interests: Communications, Canadian Studies, Media history, Popular culture, Broadcasting, oral history, advertising, consumption, social welfare, poverty, labour and methodology
Email: amaclenn@yorku.ca
Janine Marchessault
Cinema and Media Studies, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Janine Marchessault is a professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, where she held the Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization (2003-2013). She was the co-founder of Future Cinema Lab and the inaugural Director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology Research at York University. In 2012, Professor Marchessault was awarded a prestigious Trudeau Fellowship to pursue her ground breaking curatorial and public art research around the problem of sustainable development. She has (co)curated numerous large-scale public art exhibitions in Toronto and beyond—Being on Time (2001), The Leona Drive Project (2009), Museum for the End of the World (2012) and Land|Slide, Possible Futures (2013) which are all site specific exhibitions. Land|Slide was named one of the best exhibitions in Canada in 2013 by Canadian Art Magazine, and was invited to be part of the Shenzhen/Hong-Kong Architectural Biennale (2013-2014).
For over the past five years she has also worked with researchers and curators to uncover some of missing film experiments pioneered at Expo 67. Her latest co-edited anthology (with M. K. Gagnon) Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (McGill-Queen’s Press, Fall 2014) documents these multiscreen events. She is also involved in on-going archival research related to Edmund Carpenter and Marshall Mcluhan’s media think-tank and journal Explorations in the early 1950s at the University of Toronto under the rubric of the Explorations Seminar. The anthology Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (with M. Darroch, McGill-Queen’s 2014) examines new models of the media city. Marchessault is the author of ten monographs and (co)edited volumes, and over fifty articles in books, journals and catalogues devoted to cinema, new media, and contemporary art. She is a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada and a co-founder of the Future Cinema Lab devoted to creating ‘new stories for new screens’. She has lectured widely, and held faculty positions at McGill University and Ryerson University. Monographs in preparation: Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecology (forthcoming MIT Press); and Archival Imaginary: Creative Approaches to Digital Memory. Collections in preparation include The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema (with Will Straw, Oxford) and Process Cinema: HandMade Film in the Digital Age (with S. MacKenzie McGill-Queen’s). Exhibition in preparation includes a site specific engagement with revitalization in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights, Houses on Pengarth (2016-2019).
Visit: https://janinemarchessault.wordpress.com/
Email: jmarches@yorku.ca
Marcel Martel
History, Faculty Associate
Marcel Martel is a professor in the Department of History and holder of the Avie Bennett Historica Dominion Institute Chair in Canadian History. He is a specialist in twentieth-century Canadian history and has published on nationalism, relations between Quebec and the French-speaking minorities of Canada, moral regulation, public policy and counterculture, and RCMP surveillance activities.
Recent monographs: Canada the Good? A Short History of Vice Since 1500 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014) 189 p. Translated in French Une brève histoire du vice au Canada depuis 1500 (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2015) 225 p.
Not This Time: Canadians, Public Policy and the Marijuana Question, 1961-1975 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) 277 p.
with Martin Paquet, Langue et politique au Canada et au Québec (Montréal: Boréal, 2010) 335 p. Translated by Patricia Dumas:SpeakingUp. A History of Language and Politics in Canada and Quebec (Toronto:Between the Lines, 2012) 300 p.
Research Interests: Moral regulation, social activism, and state; Minority rights, activism, courts and state; Surveillance, deviance, and activism; Nations, myths, identity, and memory; Language rights and public policy
Email: mmartel@yorku.ca
Ian Martin
Associate Professor, Department of English, Glendon College, Faculty Associate
Ian Martin graduated in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Toronto. He teaches in the English Department of Glendon College, York University, where until 2021, he coordinated the Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an International Language (Cert D-TEIL). His main fields of interest are English language teacher training and Indigenous language policy. He is a member of the graduate programs of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Public and International Affairs, and Translation Studies. He became involved alongside Brian Morgan in the Brazilian scene in 2011 with the Brazil-Canada Knowledge Exchange Project and participated in annual conferences and workshops with Brazilian language teacher educators who were connected to the Novos Letramentos project. This took him to São Paolo, Sergipe, Alagoas, Rio de Janeiro and, especially, Campo Grande, since Glendon College and the Universidade Estadual do Mato Grosso do Sul (UEMS) became partner institutions through these two projects. Two of our D-TEIL students have done their international teaching practicum in Campo Grande and three times, our D-TEIL students have participated in a telecollaboration with master’s students in Campo Grande, exchanging views on topics related to International English. Every two years from 2006 to 2018, Ian accompanied D-TEIL students to Havana, Cuba, and he has written about English in Cuba in the TESOL Quarterly and elsewhere. Brian Morgan and Ian contributed a chapter on the D-TEIL Cuba experience in Unequal Englishes (R. Tapas, ed. Palgrave MacMillan 2015). He has researched Indigenous language policy in Brazil and was guest editor of the e-journal Tusaaji – a Translation Studies Journal in 2015, on Indigenous language translation in the Americas. In honour of the UNESCO Year of Indigenous Languages, he co-organized a National Colloquium on Indigenous Language Policy in Canada, which was held at Glendon in October 4-6, 2019. The papers from that event, including two from Nunavut have been accepted for publication by MQUP with the title Canada’s Indigenous Language Policy at the Turning Point (co-edited by Maya Chacaby, Amos Key Jr. and Ian Martin).
Email: imartin@glendon.yorku.ca
Stephanie Martin
Music, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Centre Executive Committee
Canadian composer Stephanie Martin is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in Music. She is director of the women’s medieval ensemble Schola Magdalena, conductor emeritus of the large oratorio choir Pax Christi Chorale, and past director of music at the historic church of Saint Mary Magdalene, Toronto.
Martin’s recent opera Llandovery Castle (2018) commemorates Canadian WW1 nurses. A second collaboration with librettist Paul Ciufo The Sun, the Wind, and the Man with the Cloak (2019) adapts Aesop’s ancient fable about power politics and conflict resolution.
Martin holds degrees from the University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University, and is an Associate of the Royal Canadian College of Organists. In York University’s Department of Music, Faculty of Fine Arts, she teaches music history and performance, harpsichord, organ and coaches historical ensembles.
Visit: Stephanie Martin Music
Email: stmartin@yorku.ca
Patricia Mazepa
Communication Studies, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Patricia Mazepa is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication Studies. She was appointed to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and the Faculty of Arts, Division of Social Sciences in July 2004. Prior to joining York University, she was a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa. She taught in the Politics and Policy stream at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Professor Mazepa’s research concentrates on social movement media in Canada, and the critical political economy of communication in general.
Email: pamazepa@yorku.ca
Julie McDonough Dolmaya
School of Translation, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Julie McDonough Dolmaya is an assistant professor in the School of Translation at the Glendon campus. She obtained her PhD in Translation Studies, with a specialization in Canadian Studies, from the University of Ottawa in 2009. Her research interests range from translation, politics and oral history to translation in digital spaces.
Email: dolmaya@yorku.ca
Laura McKinnon
Multi-Disciplinary Studies, Glendon and Graduate Program in Biology, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Centre Executive Committee
Laura McKinnon is an assistant professor in the Department of Multi-Disciplinary Studies, Glendon and the Graduate Program in Biology. Her long term research examines the ecology and evolution of migratory birds. Her current research explores interactions between migration strategies and life history traits in arctic-nesting birds. Much of this research involves quantifying the costs and benefits of migration by estimating adult survival, reproductive success, and ecological conditions for birds breeding at various latitudes. She is also investigating how potential reproductive benefits of migration may be threatened by climate change by combining an ecosystem approach with physiological investigations to study the growth and survival of offspring in a changing arctic climate. This research will provide valuable insight into the potential effects of climate change on arctic-nesting birds.
Research Interests: Arctic, behavioural ecology, climate change, evolutionary biology, trophic interactions, migration, Ecology and evolution of migratory strategies of Arctic nesting birds; Trade-offs between direct (physiological) and indirect (trophic interactions) effects of climate change on the growth and survival of chicks of Arctic nesting birds; Effects of spatial and temporal variations of trophic constraints (predation risk, food availability on reproduction of migratory birds).
Email: lmck@glendon.yorku.ca
Patricia McMahon
Osgoode Hall Law School, Faculty Associate
Professor Patricia McMahon’s areas of teaching and research are civil procedure, law and equity and legal history broadly defined. She is also the Director and Lead Interviewer of the Oral History Program at the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and the Co-Academic Director of the Winkler Institute for Dispute Resolution. She joined the faculty in July 2022 after a number of years in private practice.
Professor McMahon has published widely in her fields of study, including two books. The Persons Case: The Origins and Legacy of the Fight for Legal Personhood (with Robert J. Sharpe) was published jointly by the University of Toronto Press and Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History in 2007.
In addition, Professor McMahon has published widely on aspects of legal history, access to information, the fusion of law and equity and equitable procedure. She is currently working on two manuscripts: one related to the history of the fusion of law and equity and another with co-author Robert Bothwell on a multi-million-dollar fraud that involved the Canadian company that supplied uranium to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War.
Professor McMahon’s work with the Osgoode Society involves overseeing the oral history collection, which is the largest collection of its kind in the world. She is also the lead interviewer and regularly conducts interviews with lawyers and judges about their contributions to the legal profession.
Research Interests: civil procedure; legal process; the impact of COVID-19 on the courts and the legal profession; lawyers in public life; law reform (both modern and historical); the fusion of law and equity; equitable procedure; and legal history broadly defined, including legal biography.
Visit: https://www.osgoode.yorku.ca/faculty-and-staff/patricia-mcmahon/
Email: pmcmahon@osgoode.yorku.ca
David McNab
Equity Studies and Humanities, Faculty Associate
David T. McNab is a leading authority on Indigenous Treaties, land, and resource issues in Canada. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada on November 24th, 2017, McNab taught Indigenous Thought and Canadian Studies in the Departments of Equity Studies/Humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University (2004-2018) where he was a Full Professor. He is now Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University. He was one of the first Metis historians to complete his doctorate on British Imperial policy towards Indigenous peoples in 1978 at the University of Lancaster. In two books (Circles of Time, Aboriginal Rights and Resistance in Ontario, 1999; No Place for Fairness: Indigenous Land Rights and Policy in the Bear Island Case and Beyond, 2009), he shows that much was achieved for Indigenous rights in the 1980s and early 1990s in Ontario. McNab has published, or is completing, more than 15 books, and many other publications numbering well over 140. In 2009 he published the Fourth Edition (with Olive Patricia Dickason), of Canada’s First Nations, (Oxford University Press). In 2013 he co-authored Indigenous Voices and Spirit Memory with Aboriginal Issues Press as well as Historic Saugeen Metis, A Heritage Atlas (with Paul-Emile McNab). In 2015 he co-edited Tecumseh’s Vision, Indigenous Sovereignty and Borders in the Great Lakes, and Beyond with Aboriginal Issues Press at the University of Manitoba. McNab is currently completing an edited multi-volume edition of the Journals (1885-1912, 1918-1928) of Ezhaaswe (found in 2003 at more than 6,000 pages), William A. Elias (c. 1849—1929) for Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Ezhaaswe was a citizen of Bkejwanong, residential school survivor at Mount Elgin, graduate of Victoria College in the University of Toronto, Methodist missionary, teacher and medicine person. McNab is a champion of knowledge mobilization, exploring through community engagement the Truth about Canada’s policies as they impact on First Nations’ and Metis communities and on their lands and resources. He has always been guided by the Two Row Wampum, Indigenous Knowledge and Thought, and by the true meaning of Canada as a place of both Reconciliation and Truth.
Research Interests: Aboriginal History and Literature, Indigenous Thought, Aboriginal Land and Treaty Rights, Canadian Studies, British Imperial History, Canadian History, Ontario History
Email: dtmcnab@yorku.ca
Kent McNeil
Law, Faculty Associate and 1997-98 Robarts Professor in Canadian Studies
Kent McNeil is an Emeritus Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. He has been a faculty member at Osgoode School since 1987, and was formerly the Research Director of the University of Saskatchewan Native Law Centre. He teaches Property Law, First Nations and the Law, and Trusts. In 2006, he was awarded a prestigious Killam Fellowship to pursue research on the legality of European assertions of sovereignty in North America.
His primary research interest is the rights of Indigenous peoples, particularly in Canada, Australia, and the United States. He has written a book, Common Law Aboriginal Title, and numerous monographs and articles on this subject, some of which are collected in Emerging Justice? Essays on Indigenous Rights in Canada and Australia. Aspects of his work include land rights, treaty rights, and self-government. He has acted as a consultant and expert witness on these matters, most recently in relation to a land claim by Mayan people in Belize.
Email: kmcneil@osgoode.yorku.ca
Kathryn McPherson
History and Women’s Studies, Faculty Associate
Kathryn McPherson is an associate professor in the Department of History.
Research Interests: History of Women and Health; History of Nursing; Gender and Colonialism in the Canadian West
Email: kathryn@yorku.ca
Casey Mecija
Communication and Media Studies, Faculty Associate
Casey Mecija is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.
Email: cmecija@yorku.ca
Andrea Medovarski
English/Humanities, Faculty Associate
Andrea Medovarski teaches in the departments of Humanities and English, and in York’s Transition Year Program. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on situating Canada within the context of the Americas and exploring histories of transatlantic slavery and colonization. Her published work examines black diasporic cultural productions with a particular focus on black Canadian literature and film. Her current research projects include an examination of the second-generation children of immigrants in black Canadian and black British women’s writing, and an exploration of cultural representations of the Middle Passage. She also serves on the editorial boards of the journal Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, and Inanna Publications, a feminist press.
Email: medov@yorku.ca
Gertrude Mianda
Gender and Women’s Studies, Glendon and Director, Harriet Tubman Institute, Faculty Associate
Gertrude Mianda is an associate professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at Glendon Campus. She also served as the chair of the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University from 2011-15. She has a PhD in sociology in gender and development from Université Laval in Quebec City.
Her research interests focus on gender and post-colonialism in Africa, particularly Congolese women. Her research on gender and immigration in Canada focuses on francophone African immigrants in francophone minority communities in Ontario.
Research Interests: Africa, Francophonie, Globalization, Immigration, Women and Feminism
Email: mianda@yorku.ca
Jacinthe Michaud
Chair, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies/ Coordonnatrice, Genre, sexualité et études des femmes, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Jacinthe Michaud est professeure agrégée et directrice de School of Gender, Sexuality Studies and Women’s Studies, Université York (Toronto). Elle est l’auteure de The Multifaceted soul of a Movement: Exploring the Frontiers of Québec and Italian Feminism(s) (soumis à UBC Press), ainsi que plusieurs articles dont, «La synergie entre le féminisme et la gauche québécoise vue à travers quelques débats parus dans la vie en rose et le Temps fou» in Resources for Feminist Research; “The Politics of Representation and the Problem of Loyalties within Feminist Research: Revisiting the Position/Location of the ‘Native Informant’ in Gayatri Spivak” in Studies in Political Economy. Elle travaille présentement à l’analyse critique des facteurs de psychiatrisation et la criminalisation de certaines catégories sociologiques de personnes pour cause de participation à des mouvements radicaux et politiques..
Email: jmichaud@yorku.ca
Ola Mohammed
Humanities, Faculty Associate
Ola Mohammed specializes in interdisciplinary research exploring Black cultural production, Black social life and Black being as sites of possibility. Her dissertation, The Black Nowhere: The Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s), examines the sonic dimension of anti-Blackness in Canada; her research interests include Black Popular Music, Black Studies, Sound Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performance Theory and Digital Culture. Ola Mohammed has an extensive background in student activism, is a founding member of the York Black Graduate Students’ Collective which advocated and worked to implement Black Studies/ Black Canadian Studies at York at the undergraduate and graduate level and is looking forward to continuing to contribute to the development of Black Studies at York as a faculty member.
Research Interests: Black Studies, Black Popular Music and Sound Studies, Diaspora Studies, Performance Theory and Digital Culture
Email: olam555@yorku.ca
Michael Moir
Associate Archivist, York University Libraries, Faculty Associate
Michael Moir was University Archivist and Head of the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections at York University from 2004 to 2024. His research focuses on Canadian shipbuilding and port management during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is the Past President and Secretary of the Canadian Nautical Research Society and is on the editorial team of its journal, The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord.
Email: mmoir@yorku.ca
Marina Morrow
School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty Associate and member Robarts Executive Committee
Marina Morrow is Chair of the School of Health Policy and Management in the Faculty of Health. She has a research focus in critical health policy that explores the following themes: 1) Mental health reform, service provision and access to health services, 2) Mental health and social inequity, 3) Mental health, citizen engagement and social justice, 4) Neoliberal reforms, gender and health and, 5) Intersectional theory and approaches in mental health. Before joining the School of Health Policy and Management Marina was a charter faculty member in the Faculty of Health Sciences as Simon Fraser University in BC. Marina is the lead editor of Critical Inquiries for Social Justice in Mental Health, forthcoming University of Toronto Press. Marina’s research strongly supports public scholarship and collaborative research partnerships with community-based organizations, health care practitioners, advocates and policy decision makers.
Research Interests: Critical health policy; mental health reform; service provision; access to health services; mental health and social inequity; mental health, citizen engagement and social justice; neoliberal reforms; gender and health; intersectional theory and approaches in mental health
Email: mmmorrow@yorku.ca
Gabrielle Moser
Education, Faculty Associate
Gabrielle Moser is an art historian, writer, and independent curator. She is the author of Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State University Press, 2019) and she is currently at work on her second book, Citizen Subjects: Photography and Sovereignty in Post-War Canada (under contract with McGill-Queens University Press). Her writing appears in venues including Artforum, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, and Prefix Photo. Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, the Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia, and the British Library, and she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she is an Assistant Professor of Aesthetics and Art Education in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Email: gamoser@edu.yorku.ca
Nick Mulé
School of Social Work, Faculty Associate
Nick Mulé is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. Dr. Mulé’s research interests are in the areas of advocacy, social inclusion/exclusion of gender and sexually diverse populations (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, two-spirit, genderqueer, intersex, queer, questioning – LGBTQ) in social policy and service provision and the degree of recognition of these populations as distinct communities in cultural, systemic and structural contexts. He also engages in critical analysis of the LGBTQ movement and the development of queer liberation theory.
Nick is also active at the community level as founder and chairperson of Queer Ontario. In the past he was a founding member of Amnesty International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Action Circle; founding board member for the Canadian Rainbow Health Coalition, active with the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ontario (CLGRO) for 20 years including director and spokesperson; founded and was chairperson of the Rainbow Health Network. He has been appointed co-chairperson of the Ontario LGBT Research & Policy Think Tank by Rainbow Health Ontario and founder of CLGRO’s successor Queer Ontario.
Research Interests: Social Work, Sexuality, • Social inclusion/exclusion of gender and sexually diverse populations in social policy and service provision and the degree of their recognition as distinct communities in cultural, systemic and structural contexts • Gender and sexually diverse populations and their role as a social movement in civil society • Regulation of advocacy and lobbying in the nonprofit sector and its impact on social change and democratization, Theorizing queer liberation
Email: nickmule@yorku.ca
Ann Marie Murnaghan
Children, Childhood and Youth Program, Humanities, Faculty Associate
Ann Marie Murnaghan (Assistant Professor, Children, Childhood, and Youth Program, Department of Humanities) researches discourses of childhood and material cultures in Canadian cities, both historically and in the present. As a committed collaborator, she currently participates in three SSHRC-funded projects and is passionate about community-oriented teaching and research. Authoring over 20 articles and chapters, she co-edited the internationally representative and interdisciplinary Children, Nature, Cities, published by Routledge (2016). She has taught at Manitoba and Ryerson, and held research fellowships at the Centre for Digital Humanities (Ryerson) and the Centre for Research in Young Peoples Texts and Cultures (Winnipeg).
Email: amfm@yorku.ca
Karen Bridget Murray
Politics, Faculty Associate
Karen Bridget Murray is associate professor of political science. She teaches courses on Canadian politics, urban governance, and women and politics. Karen draws heavily on neo-Foucaultian themes with a primary emphasis on biopower, urban governance, state racism, reproduction, and the governance of children. She is a member of the editorial boards of Global Discourse, and BC Studies, which recently published her “Making Space in Vancouver’s East End: From Leonard Marsh to the Vancouver Agreement.” She has also recently published a piece on colonial urbanism entitled “The Silence of Urban Aboriginal Policy in New Brunswick,” Urban Aboriginal Policy Making in Canadian Municipalities, edited by Evelyn Peters (McGill-University Press 2012). Her work also has appeared in various other edited collections and journals, including the Canadian Historical Review, Canadian Journal of Urban Research, Canadian Public Administration, and the Canadian Review of Social Policy.
Email: murrayk@yorku.ca
Katherine Nastovski
Work and Labour Studies, Dept. of Social Science, Faculty Associate
Katherine Nastovski is an Assistant Professor in Work and Labour Studies in the Department of Social Science at York University. Rooted in her experience as a union activist and educator, Katherine’s community-engaged research agenda works to advance the field of Global Labour Studies. Katherine’s research explores the possibilities of transformative models of transnational trade union action, solidarity, and coordination. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Transnational Horizons: Workers in Canada Enter the Global Sphere (under contract with the University of Toronto Press).
Visit: http://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/nastov/
Email: nastov@yorku.ca
Adeyemi Olusola
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Adeyemi Olusola is a river catchment scientist with a strong focus on rivers; their dynamics and human impacts (urbanization) on river catchments, extreme events such as floods, droughts, and changing climate on river processes. His aim regarding river dynamics is to understand the interactions between the water flowing within the channel, the floodplain, and the biota and how these interactions can be predicted using a combination of field-based measurements, Earth Observations, and machine learning algorithms. In addition, he interrogates the role of extreme events and human activities on basin eco-geomorphology and their impacts on the river ecosystem. In essence, he assesses the overall impact of combined pressures (such as anthropogenic activities and changing climate) on rivers and their catchments using a combination of field measurements, historical analysis, models, and statistical and geospatial techniques.
Email: aolusola@yorku.ca
Rosa Orlandini
Associate Librarian, York University Libraries, Robarts Associate
Rosa Orlandini is a Data Services Librarian at York University Libraries. She is a specialist in maps, physical geography, historical geography, data and statistics, and geospatial data. Her current research investigates the presence (or lack thereof) of data about racialized and ethnic populations in the Census of Canada and social surveys published by Statistics Canada. Her other major research project investigates and documents the geographic locations of Indian Residential Schools in Canada, which can be found on this website: https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse/rslp.
Research Interests: decolonization and reconciliation; Indigenous cartographies; Indian residential schools; treaties; digital mapping; geospatial and map literacy; ethnicity mapping; food security; history of modern cartography; ethnicity data; data about racialized populations in Canada.
Email: rorlan@yorku.ca
Gillian Parekh
Education, Faculty Associate
Dr. Gillian Parekh is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Disability Studies in Education (Tier 2) within the Faculty of Education at York University. Gillian is cross-appointed with York’s graduate program in Critical Disability Studies. As a previous teacher in special education and research coordinator with the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Gillian has conducted extensive system and school-based research in Toronto in the areas of structural equity, special education, and academic streaming. In particular, her work explores how schools construct and respond to disability as well as how students are organized across programs and systems. Gillian has published in several academic journals including Disability and Society, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Canadian Journal of Education, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, and Educational Policy. She has presented at over 120 academic conferences, scholarly and professional meetings. Her latest book, Ableism in Education: Rethinking School Practices and Policies, examines how the structure and organisation of schooling can be deeply influenced by ableism and offers strategies on how to think through inclusive pedagogy and design. For an interactive critical reflective practice guide addressing human rights and equity in special education, please check our collaborative project, offering resources for educators and system leaders: https://www.criticalreflectivepractice.com/
Email: parekhg@edu.yorku.ca
Sarah Parsons
Visual Art and Art History, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Sarah Parsons is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History. Professor Parsons teaches courses in the history and theory of photography, modern art, Canadian art, and art crime.
Her research focuses primarily on photography and her current book project explores the interconnected histories of privacy and photography.
In 2014, Professor Parsons contributed an e-book for the Art Canada Institute: William Notman: Life & Work (www.aci-iac.ca/william-notman/). Her research on the prolific 19th century Montreal photographer continues with an essay on the performative space of Notman’s studio for an upcoming exhibition at the McCord Museum, Montreal. Parsons is also the editor of Emergence: Contemporary Canadian Photography (Gallery 44 and Ryerson University, 2009) and a forthcoming volume of essays on gender, genre, and photography (Duke University Press, 2016).
Email: sparsons@yorku.ca
Muriel Péguret
French Studies Departement at Glendon College and Faculty of Education, Faculty Associate
Muriel Péguret is an associate professor in the French Studies Department and in the Bachelor of Education program (French as as Second Language Teaching specialization) at Glendon Campus. She is the academic coordinator of the Glendon B.Ed. program. Her research interests currently focuses on post-immersion pedagogy and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). She has published in the field of immersion studies, language awareness, phraseodidactics, language learning strategies and self-efficacy.
Research Interests:Immersion and post-immersion pedagogy, language competence, language awareness, phraseology, bilingualism, plurilingualism, language learning strategies, self-efficacy, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), teacher training, and global competencies
Email: mpeguret@glendon.yorku.ca
Roberto Perin
History, Glendon, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Roberto Perin is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the History Department, Glendon College. His areas of specialization include immigration, religion, and Québec.
Email: rperin@glendon.yorku.ca
Ellie Perkins
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Ellie Perkins is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. She is an ecological economist concerned with climate justice: addressing global inequities while advancing the energy transition. She is interested in the political ecology of commons governance, local economies, and energy transitions; feminist theory and practice in times of climate change; and metals and minerals resources for the green transition. She teaches courses in Ecological Economics, Community Economic Development, and interdisciplinary qualitative research design. She often works with students pursuing research themes related to climate justice, local economic development, trade and the environment, water management, and feminist ecological economics
Research Interests: Climate justice; commons governance; participatory watershed management; feminist ecological economics; metal markets, trade and environment; community economic development.
Email: esperkins@yorku.ca
Radha Persaud
Political Science, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Rhada Persaud is a course director in the Department of Political Science at Glendon College.
Research Interests: Quebec government, role of Lieutenant Governor in Quebec
Email: rpersaud@glendon.yorku.ca
Dennis Pilon
Politics, Faculty Associate
Dennis Pilon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University. His research focuses on Canadian and comparative democratization, with a particular focus on the politics of institutional reform. He also researches in the areas of provincial politics, questions of working class identity, and left politics. He is the author of two books, The Politics of Voting: Reforming Canada’s Electoral System, (Emond Montgomery 2007), and Wrestling with Democracy: Electoral Reform as Politics in the Twentieth Century West, (University of Toronto Press 2012), and co-editor (with Michael Howlett and Tracy Summerville) of British Columbia Politics and Government (Emond Montgomery 2010). His research has also appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies and the Canadian Political Science Review.
Visit: www.people.laps.yorku.ca/people.nsf/researcherprofile?readform&shortname=dpilon
Email: dpilon@yorku.ca
Carolyn Podruchny
History, Senior Faculty Associate, member Robarts Executive Committee and Acting Director (2024-25)
Carolyn Podruchny is an associate professor in the Department of History.
Mission Statement: My professional and personal goal is to champion Indigenous sovereignty and resistance, make sense of Canada’s colonial past, and to support reconciliation by exploring the history of encounters and relationships.
Research Interests: Indigenous peoples in northern North America before 1900; French colonialism in early North America; Metis and fur trade history; Anishinaabe history; oral history; ethnohistory; linguistic history and history of the book; cultural history including masculinity, labour, ethnicity, and constructions of identity
Visit: www.carolynpodruchny.ca/pages/
Email: carolynp@yorku.ca
Valerie Preston
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Valerie Preston is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
Research interests: gender and urban labour markets, immigration and Canadian cities, social and economic effects of economic restructuring
Email: vpreston@yorku.ca
Audrey Pyée
History, Glendon College, Faculty Associate
Audrey Pyée is an associate professor in the Department of History at Glendon. Professor Pyée’s research specialty is Canadian history. Audrey is particularly interested in “la francophonie” (francophone diaspora in North America, immigration and memory), historical memory, and immigration history. Her research also focuses on digital storytelling and pedagogy.
Email: apyee@yorku.ca
Roberto Quinlan
Biology, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Roberto Quinlan is an associate professor in the Department of Biology. His research interests are primarily focused on the effects of human disturbances on aquatic ecosystem health and functioning. Using the natural archives of environmental information preserved in the sediments of lake and ponds, he uses a long-term perspective to examine changes in water quality and ecological communities, with study sites across the Canadian Arctic and southern temperate areas.
Research Interests: Biology, ecology, lakes, aquatic ecosystems, paleolimnology, climate change, Arctic
Email: rquinlan@yorku.ca
Geoffrey Reaume
Health Policy and Management, Faculty Associate
Geoffrey Reaume is an associate professor in the Faculty of Health.
Research Interests: Mad People’s History, Medical History, Critical Disability Studies, History of People with Disabilities, Class, Labour and Disability; Disability and the Left, Psychiatric Survivor/Consumer Movement, Archiving Psychiatric Survivor and Disability History, Health Care Ethics
Email: greaume@yorku.ca
Kael Reid
Humanities, former member Robarts Executive, Faculty Associate
Kael Reid is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Department of Humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. With a lengthy background in teaching and learning, including a PhD from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), they teach core and elective courses in Children, Childhood, and Youth Studies (CCY).
Kael is also a musician and recording artist and brings together their musical and academic backgrounds to conduct research using ethnographic songwriting methods they developed. They conduct qualitative participatory research that involves collaborating with children and youth to assist them in documenting and sharing their perspectives and stories through songwriting, singing, and recording. Kael uses the songs they compose and record with research participants as curriculum texts to teach CCY students about the lived experiences of young people and the value of learning directly from them through lyrics and music.
Kael also combines public pedagogy with musical activism related to queer and trans equity by delivering workshops, concerts, and musical keynote addresses to universities and colleges, secondary schools, youth conferences, unions, and community service organizations.
In their spare time, Kael loves backcountry hiking in the mountains, camping, paddling, watching birds, riding their bike, and generally being outside.
Visit: https://kaelreid.com
Email: kaelreid@yorku.ca
Tarmo Remmel
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Shape and pattern measurement, comparison, and analysis are central to my research and is spurred by the desire to understand boreal forest disturbance patterns, their residual vegetation structures, and regeneration processes. I focus on developing theoretical approaches and tools for quantifying and comparing 2D shapes and patterns and extend those to the segmentation of 3D features into morphological classes. My work contributes to the collection of tools that characterize planar shape through the tracking of specific geometric measurements along gradients of iterative inward step-wise shrinking of polygons, to assessing the porosity of raster shapes to infer fragmentation, compaction, and shape complexity.
Recently I developed a method for characterizing planar raster binary shapes by recording hyper-local configurations and then accumulating information into empirical distributions of known configuration elements. These concepts have evolved to data in the 3D domain of voxels, and my most recent work that automatically performs mathematical morphological segmentation of features. My work in this area strives to develop new tools and to disseminate them openly to support better scientific analysis of data. Intertwined in all of this work is the desire to quantify and understand uncertainty, accuracy, and the sensitivity of measurements.
Email: remmelt@yorku.ca
Amanda Ricci
History, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Amanda Ricci is assistant professor in the Department of History at the Glendon campus of York University. She specializes in women’s and gender history in Québec and Canada, transnational social movements, and international migration. She is working on turning her Ph.D. thesis into a book manuscript tentatively entitled There’s No Place Like Home: Feminist Movements and Women’s Activism in Montreal, 1960-1990. It focuses on the feminist movement in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in Montreal, Quebec. Her new project explores transnational feminism in a Canadian context
Email: amanda.ricci@glendon.yorku.ca
Ian Roberge
Political Science, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Ian Roberge is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Glendon College.
Research Interests: Politics and government; International relations, Canadian financial services sector policy; Canadian and comparative public policy; public administration.
Email: iroberge@glendon.yorku.ca
Joanna Robinson
Sociology, Glendon College, Faculty Associate
Joanna Robinson is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Glendon College. Her research interests include social movements, globalization, the environment, climate change, labour and inequality. Her first book, Contested Water: The Struggle against Water Privatization in the United States and Canada (forthcoming from MIT Press, March 2013) is based on a cross-national comparative study of anti-water privatization movements in the U.S. and Canada. The book examines how globalization shapes the development, dynamics and outcomes of social movements at the local level. Her current research projects include a comparative study of environmental-labour coalitions and green jobs in Canada and the U.S. and a study of the changing world of work for individuals and organizations in traditional carbon-intensive sectors in the transition to a low-carbon economy in Canada.
Email: jrobinson@glendon.yorku.ca
Sylvie Rosienski-Pellerin
French Studies, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Sylvie Rosienski-Pellerin is an Associate Professor in Glendon’s Department of French Studies and holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Toronto. She is the author of a book on Georges Perec (Perecgrinations ludiques, Editions du Gref, 1995), she is currently conducting research on children’s literature (metafiction, culture of the Other, culture and heritage).
Sylvie Rosienski-Pellerin’s research interests also include teaching and learning French (as a first and as a second language). Co-author of ‘’Voyage au bout de l’écrit’’ (Editions du Gref), she contributed for more than a decade to the educational program of the magazine L’Actualité (manuals, activity sheets and other educational resources).
She has been Director of the Graduate Studies Program in French Studies in York, Coordinator of the Language Program of Glendon’s Department of French Studies and Director of that Department. She is presently Director of the Research Centre for Language and Culture Contact (Glendon).
Email: rosienski@glendon.yorku.ca
Tameka Samuels-Jones
School of Administrative Studies, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Centre Executive Committee
Dr. Tameka Samuels-Jones teaches Corporate Social Responsibility & Sustainability with an emphasis on developing country contexts. Her research interests include environmental crime and regulatory law. Specifically, she conducts research on the role of legal pluralism on regulatory compliance among legally autonomous groups in the Global South. Dr. Samuels-Jones has received numerous awards for her work in this area including the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship award. Dr. Samuels-Jones’ work has been published in various academic journals and presented at international conferences.
Degrees: PhD Criminology & Law, University of Florida, USA.
Research Interests: Green Criminology, Environmental Sustainability, Regulatory Law in Emerging Economies, Legal Pluralism, Corporate Crime, Business Ethics
Email: tsjones@yorku.ca
Leslie Sanders
Humanities, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Centre Executive Committee
Leslie Sanders was made a University Professor in 2003. She teaches in Humanities, Graduate English, and the Writing Department. She works in African American and Black Canadian literatures. She is the author of The Development of Black Theater in America (l988), a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes, and the volume editor for two volumes of plays and other performance works. Aside from publications on Hughes, she has published on such Black Canadian writers as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Nourbese Philip, Claire Harris, George Elliot Clarke, Maxine Tynes and Djanet Sears. She is a founder of the Centre for the Study of Black Cultures in Canada and webmaster for African Canadian Online (www.yorku.ca/aconline).
In 2015, Professor Sanders gave the Annual Robarts Lecture in Canadian Studies, ‘The People Who Led to My Ideas’: Thinking About Black Canadian Studies.
Email: leslie@yorku.ca
Catriona Sandilands
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Catriona Sandilands is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and a Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture.
Research Interests: Environmental cultural studies; Environmental/ecological literary criticism, environmental writing; Sexuality, gender and environments: queer ecologies, ecological feminisms; Nature and environment in social and political thought.
Email: essandi@yorku.ca
Sandra Schecter
Education, Faculty Associate
Sandra Schecter is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Graduate Program in Education. Her research is interested in the education of linguistic minority students in Canada, in particular, Generation 1.5 students.
Email: sschecter@edu.yorku.ca
Albert Schrauwers
Anthropology, Faculty Associate
Albert Schrauwers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. As an economic anthropologist, he examines the cultural and political history of the corporation. He analyzes this relatively new form of social organization through the lens of colonial historiography, governmentality, and development theory. He has written extensively on the corporate origins of early Canada’s transition to a capitalist economy.
Email: schrauwe@yorku.ca
Jamie Scott
Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty Associate
Jamie Scott is a professor in the Department of Humanities.He has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in Religion and Culture, and his current research interests include interdisciplinary work in Religion and Film and Religion and Geography. He is contributing editor of The Religions of Canadians (University of Toronto Press, 2012), the first comprehensive study of world religions in Canada. His current research interests include interdisciplinary work in Religion and Film and Religion and Geography. Professor Scott serves as Director of the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies, and he is a member of the graduate programs in Geography, English and Humanities.
Visit: Faculty Profile
Email: jscott@yorku.ca
Abigail Shabtay
Humanities, Faculty Associate
Abigail Shabtay teaches in the Children, Childhood, and Youth program in the Department of Humanities. She has also lectured in the fields of childhood studies, creative arts, and education at McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Ryerson University. She has received awards for excellence in teaching and research in her field, including the Ada Slaight Drama in Education Award (2018-2019), the Jackie Kirk Fieldwork Award (2018-2019), the DISE Outstanding Teaching Award (2018) and the Dean’s Graduate Award in Education (2015-2018). Abigail’s published work focuses on children’s rights, child-centred pedagogies, youth activism, and drama-based participatory action research. She has served on organizing committees for six national academic conferences in her field and is the primary organizer and conference chair for this year’s Children, Youth and Performance Conference at the Toronto Young People’s Theatre. Her research and teaching interests include: children’s rights, child-centred research methodologies, experiential learning, participatory youth cultures, drama and arts-based methods, and youth activism.
Email: ashabtay@yorku.ca
Shirin Shahrokni
Sociology, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Shirin Shahrokni is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University’s Glendon Campus. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Cambridge University and a Master’s from McGill University. Prior to coming to York, she held a post-doctoral fellowship at the INED, National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris and was a teaching instructor at Sciences-Po Paris. Her work examines identity negotiation processes, educational and professional trajectories as well as issues of racism and discrimination in the lives of immigrants and their children.
Email:sshahrok@yorku.ca
Theresa Shanahan
Education, Faculty Associate
Theresa Shanahan is a lawyer, full professor, and former associate dean in the Faculty of Education. She is also an associate member of the Graduate Program in Public Policy, Administration and Law. She is currently the Coordinator Graduate Diploma in Postsecondary Education. Her research interests are in the intersections of Canadian education law and policy (K-12 and postsecondary), Canadian higher education policymaking and governance. Current research projects include: the status of the Canadian university as a legal entity; higher education governance and policy; policy enactment and teacher professionalism; university leadership and liability; fiduciary duties of university governing boards in Canada.
Email: tshanahan@edu.yorku.ca
Sapna Sharma
Biology, Faculty Associate
Sapna Sharma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology and York Research Chair in Global Change Biology. She has transformed the understanding and study of how lakes worldwide respond to climate change, including rapid ice loss, warming water temperatures, degrading water quality, and changing fish distributions. She reinvigorated the field of winter limnology using big data and cutting-edge statistical analysis. Her innovative research on lake ice and temperatures and its strategic importance earned her a prestigious Government of Ontario Early Researcher Award, York University President’s Emerging Research Leadership Award, and the Faculty of Science Early Career and Established Researcher Awards. She is a dedicated science communicator, generating millions of media impressions by clearly conveying complex research and as founder of SEEDS, an outreach program for refugees. For her commitment to science outreach, she was appointed to the Science Advisory Council for the Royal Canadian Institute for Science (RCIS), a charity dedicated to public engagement to expand science dialogue and promote informed decision making, and awarded the Canadian Council of University Biology Chairs Science Promotion Prize in 2019 for engaging the public and scientific community on issues surrounding climate change.
Email: sharma11@yorku.ca
Marlene Shore
History, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Marlene Shore is a Professor Emerita in the Department of History.
Research Interests: Intellectual and cultural history of Canada and United States
Email: mshore@yorku.ca
Gabrielle Slowey
Associate Professor, Politics, Senior Fellow, member Robarts Executive Committee and former Director of the Robarts Centre
Gabrielle Slowey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She was director of the Robarts Centre in Canadian Studies 2015-2021. She has been working with indigenous peoples since 1997. Since that time, travelling to (or working in/with) the Miqmaq and Malisset communities of New Brunswick, the Mikisew Cree First Nation of Alberta, the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec, the Ngai Tahu and Tainui of New Zealand, the Vuntut Gwitchin of Old Crow Yukon, the Inuvialuit of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories and the Delaware of Soutwesthern Ontario. Her research concentrates on the political economy of resource development, land claims and self-government. Her publications reflect her travels. Her approach is very much community-based and community-driven research that draws on broader theoretical concerns.
Area of Specialization: Aboriginal and Arctic Politics
Research Interests: Aboriginal Peoples , Northern Development , Resource Exploration and Development, Treaties and Self-Government, Canadian Politics
Email: gaslowey@yorku.ca
Bruce Smardon
Politics, Faculty Associate
Bruce Smardon is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics.
Research interests: Political economy of Canadian economic development; state-business relations; political economy of technological change; comparative innovative systems.
Email: bsmardon@yorku.ca
Miriam Smith
Social Science, Faculty Associate
Miriam Smith is a professor in the Department of Social Science.
Research interests: Canadian & U.S. politics, public policy, public law, social movements, sexuality and politics
Visit: www.yorku.academia.edu/MiriamSmith/
Email: mcsmith@yorku.ca
Luisa Sotomayor
Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Luisa Sotomayor is an Associate Professor and Planning Program Coordinator in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Her research and teaching interests are focused on the various dimensions of urban inequality and their connections to governance and planning practice. She studies urban violence and insecurity, homelessness and exclusions from housing markets, premium infrastructures, and the formation of new peripheries and informalities. She also examines planning and urban policy responses to these issues through questions of urban politics, including the role of state and non-state actors in mobilizing, negotiating, or contesting planning agendas. At its core her work questions the limits and possibilities of planning to redress socio-spatial injustices and to promote more equitable cities. The geographic scope of her research includes both Latin America and Canada.
Research Interests: Equity Planning; Urban Policy & Governance Housing; Community Planning; Informality; Urban Politics; Latin America.
Email: sotomay@yorku.ca
Zachary Spicer
School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty Associate
Zachary Spicer is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy and Administration at York University in Toronto, Canada. He previously served as the Director of Research and Outreach with the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC). He began his career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University and completed post-doctoral fellowship at the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy at Wilfrid Laurier University and the Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance at the University of Toronto. His research centers on Canadian local government.
Email: zspicer@yorku.ca
Karen Stanworth
Education and Fine Arts, Faculty Associate
Karen Stanworth is a professor emeritus and senior scholar in the Faculty of Education.
Professor Stanworth has published on topics related to visual culture and pedagogy; higher education and the arts; feminist cultural theory and production; and narrative and history. Her teaching and research address issues of knowledge formation within visual culture, with a particular emphasis on the representation of identities, and the paradox of belonging and difference.
Dr. Stanworth is completing a manuscript on visual culture and identity in 19th century Canada which examines the ways in which visual culture participates in the construction and mediation of social identities, particularly in early museum pedagogies, visual spectacle and the representation of group identities. Current research initiatives include the development of a collaborative network for historical research in visual culture in Canada, and a research project of case studies about bawdy images in 20th century Canada.
Email: kstanworth@edu.yorku.ca
Jennifer Stephen
History, Faculty Associate
Jennifer Stephen is an associate professor in the Department of History.
Email: stephenj@yorku.ca
Yukari Takai
History, Faculty Associate
Yukari Takai is a Course Director in the Department of History at York. Born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, she completed her PhD in history at the Université de Montréal in Canada. She is a historian of North America and Asia specialized in issues of migration, women and gender, border and borderlands. A former Fulbright Research Fellow at Columbia University in New York, Takai is the author of Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920 (2008). Currently, she is completing a book on Japanese transmigration across the Pacific and across the Canada-U.S. border during the Exclusion Era (1882-1941). She is also conducting a new project on the gender and social relations of Japanese in Hawai‘i in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.
Dr. Takai is a recipient of grants and fellowships from several organizations, including, among others, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Japan-U.S. Educational Commission (Fulbright Japan).
Email: ytakai@glendon.yorku.ca
Aparna Mishra Tarc
Education, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee
Aparna Mishra Tarc is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education. She received her doctorate from York University in 2007 and joined the Faculty at York in 2009. She has worked as an elementary school teacher in the Philippines, Vietnam and Canada. Her work presently conducts a series of philosophical investigations into the problem of studying and learning from the lives of others. Professor Tarc seeks to foster, with students and colleagues, more imaginative and responsive modes of living, learning and relating to others and to develop committed and justice-seeking pedagogical interventions and practices.
Scholarly Interests: Aesthetics, Diaspora, History and Memory, Literature, Pedagogy, Psychoanalysis, Urban Education
Email: amishratarc@edu.yorku.ca
Laura Taylor
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Laura Taylor is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, who teaches undergraduate courses in urban ecologies and courses in the MES Planning Program.
Research Interests: Exurban political ecology and landscape studies; planning and growth management in the Toronto region, including the Lake Simcoe watershed; climate change and land-use planning in Ontario; and greenbelts.
Visit: www.taylorl9.blog.yorku.ca/
Email: taylorl9@yorku.ca
Matthew Tegelberg
Social Science, Faculty Associate
Matthew Tegelberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University. Since 2009, he has worked collaboratively, as part of a transnational network of researchers, to study climate change communication in diverse Canadian and international contexts. His research and teaching interests include global and local tourism, environmental communication, and evolving relationships between technology and social movements.
Email: mtegel@yorku.ca
Philippe Theophanidis
Programme de communications/ Communications, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Philippe Theophanidis est professeur agrégé du Programme de communications au campus universitaire Glendon de l’Université York. Il détient un doctorat en communication de l’Université de Montréal. Il s’intéresse aux philosophies de la communication, aux études des médias et à la culture visuelle. Il a publié des articles académiques et des chapitres de livres en français et en anglais sur une variété de sujets dont le cinéma et certains enjeux politiques contemporains. Certains de ses essais ont été traduits en grec et en perse.
Philippe Theophanidis is associate professor with the Communications Program at York University’s Glendon Campus. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Université de Montréal. He works at the intersection of philosophies of communication, media studies and visual culture. He has published academic articles and book chapters in French and English on a variety of topics, ranging from cinema to contemporary political issues. Some of his essays have been translated into Greek and Persian.
Visit: https://ptheophanidis.com/
Email: theop@yorku.ca
Gregory Thiemann
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Gregory Thiemann is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. His research focuses on the foraging ecology and conservation of Arctic carnivores. By examining the trophic relationships between top predators and their prey, we can define the structure of food webs and monitor changes in ecosystems over time. By understanding where, when, and how predators hunt for food, we can better act to protect wildlife populations and entire ecosystems.
Research Interests: Arctic ecosystems, food web ecology, wildlife conservation, resource management, animal physiology
Email: thiemann@yorku.ca
Joshua Thienpont
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Professor Thienpont’s research interests focus on landscape disturbances and how they impact ecosystem processes. He is particularly interested in the connection between physical disturbances and ecosystem changes, including the biogeography of organisms, in the context of climate warming. Prof. Thienpont’s research uses lake sediment records to reconstruct past environments where direct monitoring data are sparse or absent, to understand past ecosystem changes. His current research is examining how marine storm surges in the Mackenzie Delta of the western Canadian Arctic result in widespread salinization, fundamentally altering terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. He is also working to understand the impacts of the thaw of ice-rich permafrost and subsequent geomorphic disturbances on aquatic ecosystem functioning, again focused on the Mackenzie Delta region in northwestern Canada.
Research Interests: Quaternary Environments; Landscape Disturbance; Permafrost Thaw; Aquatic Ecosystems; Arctic Coasts
Visit: www.lprg.ca/
Email: jthienpo@yorku.ca
Jesse Thistle
Equity Studies, Faculty Associate
Jesse Thistle is a P.E. Trudeau and Vanier doctoral scholar, as well as a Governor General Silver Medalist. Jesse was the Resident Scholar of Indigenous Homelessness at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness where he drafted the National Definition of Indigenous Homelessness in Canada. His historical research has been published in numerous academic journals, book chapters, and featured on CBC Ideas, CBC Campus, and Unreserved. His most recent work is a memoir published by Simon and Schuster entitled From the Ashes, release date August 6, 2019. Jesse sits on the executive board of Raising the Roof homeless foundation and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness..
Email: m6l1l4@yorku.ca
Kelly Thomson
Administrative Studies, Faculty Associate
Kelly Thomson is an assistant professor in the School of Administrative Studies. She does research on the transition of internationally educated professionals to Canada and the emergence of the Canadian cable industry. She uses social constructivist frameworks and qualitative methods to analyse organizing processes in a variety of domains. She is engaged in research examining how professionals, patients and their families organize health care and how adverse events are reported. She also studies how entrepreneurs engage with other actors (e.g. regulators, financiers, associations) to contest existing structures and constitute new ones as they create new opportunities, fields and industries. Finally, she looks at processes of change in fields.
Email: thomsonk@yorku.ca
Malcolm Thurlby
Visual Arts, Faculty Associate
Malcolm Thurlby is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts. He is an internationally renowned specialist in medieval art and architecture and Canadian architectural history.
A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, he has published more than 80 articles on aspects of Romanesque and Gothic architecture and sculpture in Britain and 19th century architecture in Canada.
Email: thurlby@sympatico.ca
Roopa Desai Trilokekar
Education, Faculty Associate
Roopa Desai Trilokekar, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, York University, comes to an academic career after 20 years of professional experience in international education in Canada, India and the US. Her research interests focus on government policy in the internationalization of Canadian higher education, student experiential learning through international education and internationalizing pre-service teacher education. She has co-edited 3 volumes, published 28 book chapters and journal articles and written for several international education newsletters. She has a successful record of research grants, the most recent one with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to examine the similarities/differences in labour market experiences/outcomes of international and Canadian born students. She is a Fulbright Research Chair in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California (2020-2021) for the study of International Education as Soft Power: in a world of changing US – Canada relations and new geopolitics.
Latest Publication: Tamtik, M., Trilokekar, R. D., and Jones, G. A.(2020). International Education as Public Policy in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Email: rdesaitrilokekar@edu.yorku.ca
Ethel Tungohan
Politics, Faculty Associate
Ethel Tungohan is the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy, Impacts and Activism, and Assistant Professor of Politics at York University. She has also been appointed as a Broadbent Institute Fellow. Previously, she was the Grant Notley Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta’s Department of Political Science. She received her doctoral degree in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto.
Her research looks at migrant labor, specifically assessing migrant activism. Her forthcoming book, “From the Politics of Everyday Resistance to the Politics from Below,” which will be published by the University of Illinois Press, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics, Groups, and Identities, and Canadian Ethnic Studies. She is also one of the editors of “Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility,” which was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2012.
Dr. Tungohan specializes in socially engaged research and is actively involved in grassroots migrant organizations such as Gabriela-Ontario and Migrante-Canada.
Email: tungohan@yorku.ca
Usha Viswanathan
Centre de formation linguistique pour les études en français / Language Training Centre for Studies in French, Glendon, Faculty Associate
Je m’appelle Usha Viswanathan. Je suis titulaire d’un Doctorat en éducation, spécialisation en enseignement des langues, de l’Université de Toronto. Je suis professeure adjointe au Centre de formation linguistique pour les études en français au Collège universitaire Glendon de l’Université York depuis 2012. Je m’intéresse au développement des approches pédagogiques en français langue seconde qui permettent aux étudiants de développer les compétences du 21e siècle. J’ai développé un programme innovant pour les cours FLS au Canada. Je travaille présentement avec des enseignants du secondaire en Ontario pour mettre en oeuvre le progamme.
Email: uviswanathan@glendon.yorku.ca
Rémi Vivès
Economics, Glendon , member of Robarts Executive Committee, Faculty Associate
Rémi Vivès is a quantitative researcher in the social sciences. His current research draws on techniques from data science to derive insights from digital data across a diverse range of fields, including public health, finance, and populism. He currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Economics at Glendon College, York University, and received his PhD in Economics from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France. Before coming to York, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Portuguese Catholic University and a Franco-German University Fellow at the University of Konstanz.
Email: remi.vives@glendon.yorku.ca
Leah Vosko
Politics, Faculty Associate
Leah Vosko is a professor in the Department of Politics and a Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy. Her latest book, Managing the Margins: Gender, Citizenship and the International Regulation of Precarious Employment (2010) is published with Oxford University Press, UK. Since 2001, she has overseen collaborative Gender and Work Database-Comparative Perspectives on Precarious Employment Database project (GWD-CPD) involving co-investigators from across Europe and North America as well as Australia.
Research Interests: Comparative labour and social policy; the political economy of work; gender and work; economic restructuring; globalization
Visit: Gender and Work Database and Closing the Employment Standards Enforcement Gap
Email: lvosko@yorku.ca
Allan Weiss
Humanities, Faculty Associate
Professor Allan Weiss is an Associate Professor in the Division of Humanities. He is a creative writer and scholar with a variety of interests. He has published mainstream/literary, science fiction, and fantasy short stories in numerous periodicals and anthologies.
His story collection, Living Room–a story cycle–appeared in 2001. He has also been working on historical fiction and other creative projects. As a scholar, he specializes in Canadian literature and fantastic fiction; among his publications are A Comprehensive Bibliography of English-Canadian Short Stories, 1950-1983 (ECW Press, 1988) and two volumes of proceedings of the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction, of which he is Chair. As both a writer and academic, he is interested in questions of genre: how it works and how we respond to and understand it.
Visit: www.allanweiss.com
Email: aweiss@yorku.ca
Agnes Whitfield
English, Faculty Associate
Agnes Whitfield is a professor in the Department of English and founding director of Vita Traductiva an international peer-reviewed series in Translation Studies (http://vitatraductiva.blog.yorku.ca/). She teaches primarily in the area of Canadian literature.
Professor Whitfield is a literary critic, translator, poet and educator specializing in translation theory and 20th century Canadian anglophone and francophone literature. She recently received an Ontario/Baden-Württemberg (OBW) Faculty Research Exchange Program to study Voice-based Pedagogical Strategies in Intercultural Reading Contexts.
Professor Whitfield has published 11 books including La Francophonie ontarienne : bilan et perspectives de recherche (1995), Writing Between the Lines. Portraits of Canadian Anglophone Translators (2006), Le Métier du double. Portraits de traducteurs et traductrices francophones short-listed for the CFHSS Raymond-Klibansky Prize, 2007) and L’écho de nos classiques: Bonheur d’occasion et Two Solitudes en traduction (2009). She is the author of over 90 articles in Canadian Literature, Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec, Francophonies d’Amérique, Études canadiennes, Voix et Images, Méta, Palimpsestes, Target, and international conference proceedings. From 2002-2016 she was responsible for the Translation/Traductions review in the annual “Letters in Canada” issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly.
Professor Whitfield is also the author of three works of poetic fiction: Ô cher Émile je t’aime ou l’heureuse mort d’une Gorgone anglaise racontée par sa fille (1993), Où dansent les nénuphars (1995), and Et si les sirènes ne chantaient plus (2001). In 1991, Divine Diva, her translation of Daniel Gagnon’s novel, Venite a cantare, was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award.
Professor Whitfield has received SSHRC funding for research on the contribution of literary translation to linguistic duality in Canada, Hannah Josephson, the American translator of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, and literary exchange between Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Romania. Visiting Professor at the University of Bologna’s Centro di Studi Québecchesi (May 2003) and Seagram Visiting Chair at the McGill University Institute for the Study of Canada (2003-2004), Professor Whitfield was Joint Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University (2009-2010).
Professor Whitfield is a founding member of the International Research Group Voice in Translation based at the University of Oslo, and an Associate member of TRACT (Traduction et communication transculturelle, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle ‒ Paris 3).
Research Interests: French-English and English-French literary translation in Canada, theories of translation and cultural exchange, and voice in translation.
Visit: www.people.laps.yorku.ca/people.nsf/researcherprofile?readform&shortname=agnesw
Email: agnesw@yorku.ca
William Wicken
History, Faculty Associate
William C. Wicken is a Professor of history and has published various books, articles, reports and chapters covering the areas of Native & Colonial North American history, with a focus on government policies towards Aboriginal people in Eastern (the Maritimes) and Central Canada (Ontario/Quebec). He has been qualified as an expert in 16 constitutional trials, mostly in Atlantic Canada, and including R. v. Donald Marshall Jr (SCC 1999), R. v. Josh Bernard (SCC 2005), R. v. Stephen Frederick Marshall (SCC 2005), and Daniels v. Canada, which is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. In 2015, he served on a government-appointed Environmental Impact Assessment in New Brunswick (the Sisson Project). He is the author of The Colonization of Mi’kmaw Memory and History, 1794-1928: The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy which in 2013 won the Canadian Historical Association’s Sir John A. Macdonald for the best book published in 2012 on Canadian History. This book was also awarded a Governor General’s award for Scholarly Achievement. Professor Wicken is also the author of Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial: History, Land and Donald Marshall Junior (2002), and co-author of The Conquest of Acadia, 1710: An Interpretive and Contextual History (2004). His current project examines the history of the Six Nations Grand River reserve, and analyses the factors, which led many indigenous people in the early twentieth century to merge into the ‘white’, urban, working classes of southern Ontario.
Research Interests: Native and Colonial North America
Email: wwicken@yorku.ca
Mark Winfield
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Mark Winfield is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
Current research and teaching activities are focused in three areas: Environmental Policy and governance; Sustainable energy; Sustainability of urban communities
Areas of Academic Interest: Environmental Policy; Environmental Law; Sustainable Energy; Urban Sustainability; Climate Change Policy
Visit: www.marksw.blog.yorku.ca/
Email: marksw@yorku.ca
Sue Winton
Education, Faculty Associate
Dr. Winton’s critical policy research examines how education policies and policy processes support and/or undermine critical democratic commitments to equity, diversity, social justice, and public participation in policymaking.
Email: swinton@edu.yorku.ca
Patricia Burke Wood
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate and member of Robarts Executive Committee
Patricia Burke Wood is Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. She studies citizenship, activism, and governance, particularly the experiences of groups whose way of life brings them into conflict with their neighbouring communities or the state. With David Rossiter, she is the co-author of several articles on the politics of Aboriginal title in British Columbia and they are currently completing a book on the subject for UBC Press. She is also conducting comparative research on municipal and urban regional governance, across Canada and internationally, and she writes an urban affairs column for Spacing.ca.
Email: pwood@yorku.ca
Kathy Young
Environmental and Urban Change, Faculty Associate
Kathy Young is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
The long-term goal of my research is focused on improving our understanding of the inter-relationships that exist between climate, hydrology and ecology of permafrost environments. My High Arctic research continues to evaluate the processes leading to the sustainability of ponds and wetlands across various scales (local to regional) and climatic regimes (polar desert to polar oasis). Since 2007, my students and I have worked at Polar Bear Pass, a large wetland in the middle of Bathurst Island, Nunavut. We now know that not all ponds are created equal. Depending on their location in the landscape, linkages with other water sources, and substrate type, ponds, including wet meadows can respond quite differently to extended dry periods or extreme rainfall events. This is an important finding as we consider how northern wetlands will respond to future mining and oil & gas development here, including global warming. Much more work is still required to better understand runoff processes and storage changes in our High Arctic wetlands. In 2014-2015, considerable emphasis will be placed on evaluating groundwater flow and watershed runoff at Polar Bear Pass. This research is supported by NCE-ArcticNet: Sub-projects No. 2.1-Freshwater Resources of the Eastern Canadian Arctic (P.I.: Warwick Vincent, Laval U); No. 1.3-High Arctic hydrological, Landscape and Ecosystem Responses to Climate Change (co P.Is: Scott Lamoureux, Melissa Lafreniere, Queen’s University). In the future, we plan to extend our hydrologic research to Iceland-the Land of Ice and Fire!
Research Interests: arctic wetland hydrology; arctic ecohydrology; hillslope and catchment hydrology; regional snowmelt modelling;impact of extreme events on arctic hydrology
Visit: www.yorku.ca/klyoung
Email: klyoung@yorku.ca
Robert Zacharias
English, Faculty Associate
Robert Zacharias is an assistant professor in the Department of English.
Research Interests: Canadian literature, diaspora studies, Mennonite writing, literary history, and spatiality.
Email: rzach@yorku.ca
Joyce Zemans
Arts and Media Administration, Schulich School of Business, Faculty Associate and former member Robarts Executive Committee, Robarts Chair (1995-96)
Joyce Zemans is a University Professor Emerita and Director of the Arts and Media Administration Program in the Schulich School of Business.
Her current research projects are on the role of cultural diplomacy in Canadian foreign policy, youth arts policy in Canada, and the work of Canadian artist Jock Macdonald. Past research has focused on cultural policy, curatorial practice and Canadian art. Her work on cultural policy includes Where is Here? Canadian Cultural Policy in a Globalized Environment (Robarts Centre, 1996), and Comparing Cultural Policy: A Study of Japan and the United States(AltaMira/Sage, 1999),). Her art historical and gallery work include exhibitions of the work of Kathleen Munn and Edna Taçon, Jock Macdonald, Christopher Pratt and Tony Urquhart. Her work on Canadian art history includes a series of articles in The Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien examining the role of reproductions in framing the notion of Canadian art; and articles in RACAR on the status of women artists in Canada: A Tale of Three Women The Visual Arts in Canada / A Current Account/ing » (RACAR, vol. XXV, no 1–2) and Where are the Women? Updating the Account, (RACAR, vol. XXXVIII, no. 1) with Amy Wallace. She is co-editor, with Griselda Pollock of Strategies of Engagement: Museums after Modernism (Blackwells, 2007).
Research Interests: Cultural policy with specific reference to the Canadian experience, Canadian art history, and arts and cultural management.
Email: jzemans@yorku.ca
Qiang Zha
Education, Faculty Associate
Qiang Zha is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, York University, where he served as the Director of Graduate Program in Education in 2017-2020. In 2021-2022, he was appointed as a York University Provostial Fellow. Now he serves as an associate editor of Springer’s journal Innovative Higher Education, and Taylor & Francis’ Chinese Education & Society. His research interests include Chinese and East Asian higher education, international academic relations, global brain circulation, internationalization of higher education, globalization and education, differentiation and diversity in higher education, theories of organizational change, and liberal arts education in China and elsewhere. He has written and published widely on these topics in journals such as Compare, Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Higher Education in Europe, Harvard China Review, China Quarterly, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and as books or book chapters. In 2004, he was a co-recipient of the inaugural IAU/Palgrave Prize on Higher Education Policy Research. His published books include a co-authored book (with Ruth Hayhoe et al) Portraits of 21st Century Chinese Universities: In the Move to Mass Higher Education (Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong and Springer, 2011), and five edited volumes Education and Global Cultural Dialogue (co-edited with Karen Mundy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Education in China. Educational History, Models, and Initiatives (Berkshire Publishing, 2013), Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation: An Untold Story (co-edited with Ruth Hayhoe and Julia Pan, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), China’s University-Industry Partnership, Cooperative Education, and Entrepreneurship Education in a Global Context (co-edited with Guangfen Yan et al, Routledge, 2017), and International Status Anxiety and Higher Education: The Soviet Legacy in China & Russia (co-edited with Anatoly Oleksiyenko et al, Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong and Springer, 2018).
Email: qzha@edu.yorku.ca
Michael Zryd
Cinema and Media Arts, member of Robarts Executive Committee, Faculty Associate
Michael Zryd is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the Department of Film, and is appointed to the Graduate Programs in Cinema and Media Studies, and Communication and Culture, at York University in Toronto. He was founding co-chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Experimental Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group (ExFM) and of the Toronto Film Seminar. He is a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada, and served on the boards of SCMS and the Images Festival. His research areas include experimental film & media, Hollis Frampton, and the history of the discipline of cinema and media studies, and media education in the 1960s and 1970s. He has published essays in Canadian Journal of Film Studies, CineAction, Cinema Journal, The Moving Image, October, and Public, in addition to several edited collections, including the Wiley-Blackwell History of American Cinema, Useful Cinema, Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom, Optic Antics: Ken Jacobs, and Inventing Film Studies. He has lectured in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Spain, United States, and United Kingdom. In 2011, he was awarded the Faculty of Fine Arts Senior Faculty Teaching Award.
Email: zryd@yorku.ca