Current Research
faculty Research
Classical Studies
Kelly Olson (Classics) | Faculty Scholars Award 2011-12
Kelly Olson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and is interested in Roman society and culture (social attitudes, women and the family, sexuality, and slavery, clothing); Roman art and architecture and Latin historiography. Olson has published articles on themes of costume, women, Roman art, and ancient society and is currently working on a book entitled Men, Appearance and Sexuality in Roman Antiquity.
Elizabeth Greene (Classics) | Vindolanda
Elizabeth Greene recently joined the Department of Classical Studies at Western as Assistant Professor in Roman Archaeology. With research focusing on Roman archaeology and social history, Greene has been engaged in field work at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda near Hadrian’s Wall in Northern England for the last nine years. During the summer of 2012, Greene conducted an archaeological field school for students from the Classical Studies program at Western.
English
Alison Conway | Graham and Gale Wright Distinguished Scholar 2012
Alison Conway, Professor in the Department of English, specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and culture, feminist theory, and the history of the novel. Conway’s most recent publication, The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 examines religious controversy and courtesan culture as well as the evolution of prose fiction. Conway is currently working on a project that investigates the intersection of discourses of sexual and religious difference, particularly the representation of interfaith marriage in the eighteenth-century novel. A Huntington Library Fellowship will allow her to work on this project throughout the summer in California. Conway is also the previous recipient of the Marilyn Robinson Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Steven Bruhm | Graham and Gale Wright Distinguished Scholar 2011
Steven Bruhm, professor and Chair of Graduate Studies in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario is a gothic and horror specialist and has recently taken over the editorship position of an international journal entitled Horror Studies. Exclusively examining horror, this biannual journal presents scholarship from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including literature, film, dance, fashion and more. Steven Bruhm’s research has a wide thematic range from Romantic fiction and gothic aesthetics to queer narcissism, children and dance. With the common link of his work being an interest in the body, Bruhm’s current research on dance considers how the body's reactions to pain come to frame choreographies of mortality from the Romantic ballet to Michael Jackson.
Matthew Rowlinson | Faculty Scholars Award 2011-12
Since joining Western English in 2002, Matthew Rowlinson has completed one monograph, Real Money: Money, Materiality and the Literary Commodity in Nineteenth Century Britain (just published by Cambridge), and is working on his third book, The Social Meanings of Blood in Victorian England. Rowlinson teaches courses on 19th century poetry and prose, and retains a keen interest in literary and cultural theory.
Film Studies
Joe Wlodarz
Joe Wlodarz specialized in the study of American cinema history, international queer cinema, African-American cinema, film theory, television studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer theory, genre theory, audience/reception studies, cultural studies, and theories of stardom. Wlodarz's recent work includes Unmaking Macho: Race, Gender, and Stardom in 1970s American Cinema and Culture (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press) and The Baltimore Projects, which examines the use of Baltimore in film and television for the exploration of American identity and urban culture through the lens of racial, ethnic, and class conflict.
French Studies
Daniel Vaillancourt | Graham and Gale Wright Distinguished Scholar 2010
Daniel Vaillancourt is a Professor in the Department of French Studies. Vaillancourt's research focuses on representations of the city in the 16th and 17th centuries, including through specific urban forms (street, sidewalks, lighting, facades) and different types of discourse (tourism, legal, historiographical, and fictional).
Linguistics
David Heap
David Heap is an associate professor in the Department of French Studies and a member of the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Laboratory. Heap is well versed in the unpublished field notebooks of the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula (ALPI, by its Spanish acronym) from the 1930s. He has been in collaboration with a team based in Spain to work on the re-transcription of the ALPI, which will eventually produce a searchable online linguistic atlas from the dialect data.
Ileana Paul
Ileana Paul, from the Department of French Studies and the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Laboratory, recently held the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. Her research focuses on the syntax of Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar. As part of her ongoing studies, Paul has created a Malagasy Language Database that can be accessed by linguistic researchers and laypersons alike.
Philosophy
Henrik Lagerlund | Graham and Gale Wright Distinguished Scholar 2012
Henrik Lagerlund is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, as well as a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. Lagerlund is the editor of the book series Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, as well as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, which is widely considered to be the most comprehensive reference work in medieval philosophy. Lagerlund is currently working on a project entitled The Mechanization of Philosophy. This collaborative project, which looks at mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century, supports a larger objective of bridging the gap between medieval and early modern philosophy. In the near future, Lagerlund also plans to continue research on Arabic logic, as well as the history of Scandinavian philosophy.
Carolyn McLeod | Graham and Gale Wright Distinguished Scholar 2011
Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the Department of Philosophy, Carolyn McLeod’s research focuses on moral dilemmas that occur in the health care system. McLeod has tackled moral dilemmas having to do with miscarriage, infertility, embryo and oocyte donation or selling, contract pregnancy, fertility preservation in girls or women with cancer, and conscientious refusals by health care professionals to provide standard services such as abortion services. McLeod’s current research deals with how to understand conscience and conscientious refusal.
Women's Studies and Feminist Research
Tracy Isaacs | Faculty Scholars Award 2011-12
Tracy Isaacs, Associate Professor Department of Philosophy, and Chair, Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research has recently published two works that focus on the areas of moral philosophy and action theory: A Question of Values: New Canadian Perspectives in Ethics and Political Philosophy and Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. Tracy is also developing research and community engagement in Tanzania, as part of Western Heads East.
Helen Fielding | Faculty Scholars Award 2009-10
Helen Fielding, Undergraduate Chair - Women's Studies and Feminist Research focuses on the area of feminist phenomenology. Thematically Fielding explores questions about the intersections of technology, art, embodiment, dwelling, sexuality and subjectivity.
Modern Languages and Literatures
Laurence de Looze | Faculty Scholars Award 2009-10
Laurence de Looze is Professor of Modern Languages. He came to UWO after having been a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Boston University and Harvard University (USA). Trained as a medievalist at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, de Looze has published books and articles on medieval English, French Icelandic, and Spanish literature. He teaches a wide range of courses in the Department of Modern Languages and the French department at Western.
Visual Art
Kathy Brush (Visual Arts) | Graham and Gale Wright Distinguished Scholar 2010
Kathy Brush’s undergraduate and graduate teaching focuses on medieval art and architecture and on the histories, theories, and practices of art history and visual culture in the modern era. Her primary research interests are: Romanesque and Gothic art, medieval sculpture, the historiography of cultural-historical thought, and histories of museums, archives, and art collecting. Brush is currently conducting research for a book that will map and contextualize the scholarly imagination of Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933), North America’s pioneering scholar of medieval visual culture. Bush has received a three-year grant (2009-2012) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to support this project. She is also preparing several articles on related topics, including a study of the formation of Harvard University’s collection of medieval art.
Patrick Mahon (Visual Arts)
Patrick has worked as an artist, writer and academic at Western since 1995. With a focus on print-making, Patrick’s work as a visual artist has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. As a writer and curator, Mahon publishes and produces exhibitions related to print culture, post colonialism, and aesthetics. Recently Mahon was awarded funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for an upcoming project entitled: “Immersion Emergencies and Possible Worlds: Engaging Water as Culture and Resource through Contemporary Art.” Patrick's Co-Applicants are Gu Xiong (UBC) and Soheila Esfahani (Independent Artist; MFA, Western).
Digital Humanities:
The CulturePlex is the research lab for Cultural Complexity and Digital Humanities at Western. The CulturePlex does research on the several phases of cultural dynamics: creation, transmission, and representation. The different academic perspectives of our researchers —from philosophy to mathematics, computer science, economics, philology, and art history— provide a varied toolbox that allow for the development of the most appropriate solution for the problem at hand.
Research Events
Monday, March 25, 2013
Join us for a celebration of research! Meet your Arts and Humanities colleagues as well as researchers from the Faculties of Education and Information and Media Studies. Everyone welcome, refreshments will be served. Click here for details...
Quick Links
- Classical Studies
- English
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- Modern Languages and Literatures
- Philosophy
- Visual Arts
- Women's Studies and Feminist Research
- Linguistics Program
- Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication