Professor Emeritus John Baird on the legacy of the popular novelist.
February 7, 2012 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens, whose work is as popular today as it was when he was a celebrity in Victorian England. U of T Professor Emeritus John Baird discusses just what is it was – and is – that makes Dickens exceptional in the history of literature. [...]
Literary theorist Marlene Goldman on how we narrate memory loss
When we talk about Alzheimer’s disease, what kind of story are we telling? A horror story, at least here in contemporary North America, says Marlene Goldman. “The media’s take on Alzheimer’s is very Gothic and apocaplytic,” she says, a story of the slow loss of mind and self. “The typical presentation is: we have a [...]
First International McLuhan Conference and Festival
(TORONTO, ON, September 22, 2011) — The legendary media theorist Marshall McLuhan will be celebrated in Toronto at the most significant gathering of McLuhan thinkers and creators ever assembled. Then I Now I Next: International Conference and DEW Line Festival runs from November 7 to November 10. Registration is now open. The conference and festival [...]
Muslim thinkers have been imaginative in seeking reasonable compromise
THE statistics do not look very encouraging. Of the 50-plus countries where Muslims are in the majority, only two (Indonesia and Mali) enjoy political liberty as defined by Freedom House, a New York-based monitor of human rights and democracy. read more
Evolutionary movements haven't sprung up overnight
Watching the recent events in the Middle East play out in the mainstream media, one might be inclined to believe that these evolutionary movements have sprung up overnight. “We have a lot of problems in the way the popular media frames and covers Islam and the Muslim world and the only cure to that, of [...]
Linguist preserving threatened languages
When Professor Keren Rice went North from Toronto in 1973, she entered “a completely different world” in order to study the Slavey language, which was then in danger of slowly dying out in the Mackenzie River Valley, where it had been spoken for thousands of years. read more
Are too many books written and published?
Are too many books written and published? A funny question considering we are a university. However, this isn’t a contemporary question. It is the title of an unpublished BBC broadcast by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Melba Cuddy-Keane, a Virginia Woolf scholar and professor in the Department of English at U of T Scarborough and the [...]
Matching architecture with landscape
Around the time when most students were getting into the swing of the fall semester, 13 architecture, landscape and design graduate students and their instructor, Professor Mason White headed to Iqaluit, Nunavut, for five days. Last July the Bulletin told you about White’s architectural firm, Lateral Office, receiving the Canada Council for the Arts Prix [...]
Museum studies student solves art mystery
Sophie Hackett, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s assistant curator of photography, didn’t have high hopes when she asked her summer intern, Vanessa Fleet, to help her determine the creator of a collection of French photographs. “It’s the stuff of careers to figure out who did something, to answer the question, ‘Who created an unknown work [...]
Traditional English texts have appeal to readers across the world
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is known as one of the world’s greatest and most enduring love stories. This tale of the first glance, the first kiss and forbidden love among feuding families has been turned into movies, music and prose familiar to people of all ages. It’s just one of many of the traditional English [...]
