Field: Arts

Research Expertise:
blues, chamber music, guitar, jazz, music composition, opera, orchestra

Expert: Dr. Andrew P. MacDonald
Department: Music
Interview languages: English

Dr. Andrew P. MacDonald

Retired Professor, Director of the Bishop’s Chamber Orchestra

(B.Mus. Western; M.Mus. and D.M.A. Michigan)The compositions of Andrew Paul MacDonald have won many prestigious prizes, including the 1995 Juno Award for “Best Classical Composition” for his Violin Concerto. His many compositions have been performed across the country by such notable ensembles as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, l'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Esprit Orchestra, l'Orchestre symphonique de Québec, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, The Evergreen Club and the I Musici de Montréal.…Contact Information

Phone: 819-822-9600 ext. 2395 Email: andrew.macdonald@ubishops.ca

(B.Mus. Western; M.Mus. and D.M.A. Michigan)

The compositions of Andrew Paul MacDonald have won many prestigious prizes, including the 1995 Juno Award for “Best Classical Composition” for his Violin Concerto. His many compositions have been performed across the country by such notable ensembles as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Esprit Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Québec, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, The Evergreen Club and the I Musici de Montréal. He has had works commissioned by outstanding orchestras, chamber ensembles, solo performers, music competitions, the Canadian Opera Company and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His works are frequently broadcast on CBC and Société Radio-Canada, and have been performed in Australia, China, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, the United States, Ukraine and Canada. Thirty-three of his compositions have been recorded on eighteen compact discs to date, and two for violin and piano on the ATMA and Centrediscs labels were both nominated for the 2005 East Coast Music Award. Of these, Jasper Wood’s recording of MacDonald’s works won that award, as well as the 2005 Canadian Independent Music Award. MacDonald recently finished Mary’s Wedding, a major opera for Pacific Opera Victoria, with libretto by Stephen Massicotte, which was premiered in November 2011 in Victoria, B. C. and later broadcast by the CBC.

Past Vice-President and Council member of the Canadian League of Composers, Executive Committee member of the Canadian Music Centre and founding Artistic Director of Ensemble Musica Nova, MacDonald performs in concert as a jazz and new music guitarist and as a conductor, and is professor of composition at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke (Lennoxville), Québec. Biographical articles on MacDonald are to be found in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2ed., 2001), the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada and the Canadian Who’s Who.

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Office: NOR 117

Research Expertise:
archives, Canadian women authors, female authorship, feminist theory

Expert: Dr. Linda Morra
Department: English
Interview languages: English

Dr. Linda Morra

Full Professor

Dr. Linda Morra is a Full Professor of English at Bishop’s University. She served as the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin for the 2016-2017 year. During her term in Dublin, she conceived of and staged ‘Untold Stories of the Past 150 Years’ (April 2017), from which she is co-editing a volume of papers. In January 2016, with a Sproul Fellowship from the Institute of Canadian Studies, she served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently holds three SSHRC grants, one of these a Connection Grant for the 'Untold Stories' conference and another an Insight Grant to support her research for Jane Rule's biography.…Contact Information

Phone: 819-822-9600 ext. 2872 Email: linda.morra@ubishops.ca

Dr. Linda Morra is a Full Professor of English at Bishop’s University. She served as the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin for the 2016-2017 year. During her term in Dublin, she conceived of and staged ‘Untold Stories of the Past 150 Years’ (April 2017), from which she is co-editing a volume of papers. In January 2016, with a Sproul Fellowship from the Institute of Canadian Studies, she served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently holds three SSHRC grants, one of these a Connection Grant for the ‘Untold Stories’ conference and another an Insight Grant to support her research for Jane Rule’s biography.

Her most recent book, Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship (University of Toronto Press in December 2014), was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English in 2015. Awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2005-2009) and the FQRSC Etablissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs (2009-2013) for research that undergirds this book, she examines how Canadian women writers approached their own archives for the purposes of locating self-agency. She then investigates how they were regulated and contained, and how they existed in or resisted both personal and professional antagonist relationships. These antagonisms generated the very divisions, the conflictual set of relations, by which women then engaged in productive disruptions.

During her research for the latter book, she discovered Jane Rule’s hand-written autobiography, Taking My Life, in the University of British Columbia archives. She subsequently transcribed, edited, and prepared the autobiography for publication (Talon 2011) and also wrote the afterword. Taking My Life was shortlisted for the LAMBDA Award (2012), received a nomination for the Stonewall Book Award (2011), and garnered many positive reviews. One such review appeared in The Globe and Mail. She is drawing upon this research to write the biography of Jane Rule, her current research in progress.

As she worked on her monograph, she also collaborated with Dr. Jessica Schagerl on editing Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives (WLUP 2012), a collection of essays that assesses the negotiations—and sometimes contradictions—involved in responsibly dealing with the tangible records of women’s public and private lives, and the fact that these preserved archival documents were often not seen as part of a systematic nation-building process.

This collaboration was preceded by another with Dr. Deanna Reder. Together, they co-edited the interdisciplinary collection, Troubling Tricksters (WLUP 2010). Dr. Reder and she collaborated on another book, which comes out of support by a SSHRC Connections Grant (January 2014) and which drew together Indigenous studies scholars and students from across the country to consider pedagogical approaches to Indigenous literatures. The event took place at the end of February 2014 in Vancouver, at which time she and Dr. Reder workshopped their new anthology, Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2016).

She is also at work with Dr. Laura Davis (Red Deer) on a book, forthcoming with the University of Alberta Press and which is titled, Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland: Letters (forthcoming 2018). The project was supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to 2016. She has received a contract for a volume of papers she edited, titled Moving Archives (WLUP), submitted in 2017.

Dr. Morra has won several teaching awards, including the Departmental teaching Award (2008-2009) and Best Professor of the Humanities (2007-2008 and 2009-2010), and has been nominated for several others, including the William and Nancy Turner Teaching Award (2010-2011). She was also awarded the Faculty Evaluation Committee Merit Award for Research/Teaching in 2010 and then again in 2013.

She served as the President of the Quebec Writers’ Federation (2014-2016), for which she developed their Youth Prize, and sits on the advisory board for Guernica Press, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She runs the Morris House Reading Series at Bishop’s University and the Student Writing Week/End in the Eastern Townships (SWEET). Visit her website.

Research

Dr. Linda M. Morra is working on research related to Jane Rule (1931-2007). Novelist, short story writer, essayist, activist, and contributor to the queer liberation periodical, The Body Politic (1971-1987), Rule made an enormous contribution to the literary and socio-cultural production of, and enlargement of space for, the queer community during her lifetime. This research grew out of her most recent book, Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship, which recalibrates current scholarly perspectives on Canadian women writers’ agencies in the twentieth century by historicizing the emergence of the notion of unhindered female authorship and by examining how their literary archives came to be forged within, against, or outside centralized repositories of official records. She is also editing a volume of essays, forthcoming in 2016, titled Moving Archives, in which contributors assess the affective, digital, and contextual processes that affect how archives are shaped and change shape over time.

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Office: MOR 211

Research Expertise:
Shakespeare, medieval England, Chaucer, Kings and Queens of England, Knights, Arthurian literature, chivalry, gender and political spectacle, higher education, humanities and public discourse, the value of a BA, teaching and learning in higher education, liberal education, undergraduate education, student learning, writing and literacy

Expert: Dr. Jessica Riddell
Department: English
Interview languages: English

Dr. Jessica Riddell

Full Professor, English Department, 3M National Teaching Fellow (2015), Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence

Phone: 819-822-9600 ext. 2392 Email: jessica.riddell@ubishops.ca

Dr. Jessica Riddell is a Full Professor in the English Department at Bishop’s University specializing in late medieval and early modern dramatic and non-dramatic literature. Dr. Riddell teaches a wide range of courses, including medieval romance, medieval drama, Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Sixteenth and Seventeenth century poetry and prose. She is also the inaugural Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence: in this capacity, she explores innovative teaching and learning practices, creates mentorship opportunities for students and faculty, mobilizes knowledge around learning in higher education (with a particular focus on the humanities), enhances professional development initiatives for her colleagues, and participates in a wide range of visioning and consultations at the national and international levels. She is the VP Canada on the Board of ISSoTL (International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) as well as a Board member for the 3M National Executive Council. Dr. Riddell is the faculty columnist of University Affairs and her articles appear in a series called “Adventures in Academe.” Dr. Riddell was awarded the 3M National Teaching Fellowship in 2015, the first recipient of the award at Bishop’s University. She was also awarded the William and Nancy Turner Award for Teaching Excellence (2011-2012), the most prestigious recognition of teaching excellence at Bishop’s. Dr. Riddell earned her MA and PhD in English Literature from Queen’s University.

Research

Dr. Riddell’s research interests encompass late medieval and early modern literature, performance and ritual theory, and the articulations of subjecthood in courtly and civic drama from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Her disciplinary research theorizes that sixteenth-century drama provides well-documented intersections between politics, performance, and power. Her SSHRC Insight Development Grant enabled her to investigate how technologies in the sixteenth century (the printing press, illuminated manuscripts, heraldic scrolls, portraits) recorded and shaped identity and gender, especially pertaining to political leadership in Elizabeth I’s court. Her recent work has examined early Tudor representations of sovereignty in theatrical, visual, and verbal forms in order to argue that there is significant and strategic generic experimentation in the recording of royal, aristocratic, and civic spectacle – spectacle designed to advance the political agendas of the monarch, the aristocracy, and the civic authorities. She is currently working on a book length project on Elizabeth I that probes 1) the manner in which the queen and her male courtiers commissioned innovative and hybrid genres; 2) the representational strategies within these genres by means of which gender is contested and re-formed; and 3) the modes of dissemination of these hybrid performance-texts (i.e. manuscript and print). By examining how performance is textualized in these new genres, Dr. Riddell’s work attempts to expose the tensions animating the often fraught relationships among the Queen, her nobility, and the civic populace.

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Office: MOR 103

Research Expertise:
historical memory, representing trauma, Spanish cultural studies, Spanish film, Spanish literature

Expert: Dr. Jordan Tronsgard
Department: Modern Languages
Interview languages: English, Spanish

Dr. Jordan Tronsgard

Associate Professor – Department Chairperson

Jordan Tronsgard obtained his Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Ottawa after having studied Spanish at the undergraduate and Master’s levels at the University of Calgary. His doctoral dissertation, which was awarded the Pierre Laberge Prize from the University of Ottawa for excellence in a doctoral thesis, explores self-awareness and irony behind the construction of historical memory of the Spanish Civil War in four contemporary Spanish novels. At Bishop’s, Dr. Tronsgard teaches courses on Spanish and Latin American literatures, cultures and film, in addition to Spanish language courses at all levels.Contact Information

Phone: 819-822-9600 ext. 2429 Email: jordan.tronsgard@ubishops.ca

Research

Dr. Tronsgard’s research agenda centres on contemporary Spanish narrative fiction and cultural studies, Hispanic film, the Spanish Civil War/Franco regime, and transnational identities.

His current project seeks greater understanding of how the stories we tell, and how we tell them, characterize a community’s engagement with its collective history. In particular he is interested in the visible space of pop-culture as a powerful voice in framing who we are as a function of where we have been. Indeed, in 21st-century Spain what do graphic novels, B-movies, noir fiction, pornography, and more “serious” works of literature and film have in common? They are all examples of genres and media that give increased awareness to the nation’s traumatic past of civil war (1936-1939), repressive dictatorship under General Francisco Franco (1939-1975), and the still-unresolved transition to democracy. Beginning at the end of the 1990s, censorship and self-censorship toward these events gave way to an explosion of interest in what has been called “historical memory,” leading to the proliferation, and profitability for publishers and the box-office, of novels and films that touch on the war and its continued legacy. This study focuses on how this dynamic has played out in the last 10 years in two distinct but related ways: the “infiltration” of historical memory in areas of popular culture not previously invested in the debate about the past, and the ironic approach of many of these texts as they merge historical fiction with parody, self-criticism, and a self-aware understanding of how the past has become a commodity. Whereas much research in Spanish cultural studies to date has focused on the overtly earnest approach to historical memory in the Spanish novel, this project seeks to address the emerging ironic appropriation of the past by understanding a new dynamic in new narratives: irreverence.

Publications

Works in Progress

Books
Exploration and Exploitation of Historical Memory in 21st-Century Spanish Literature and Film

Refereed Publications

“Drawing the Past: The Graphic Novel as Postmemory in Spain” Submitted for peer-review. 2016.

“Detectives y desencanto: memoria en la novela negra de Javier Calvo.” Reescrituras del imaginario policiaco en la narrativa española e hispanoamericana contemporáneas (Roberto Bolaño, Eugenio Fuentes et alii). Ed. Felipe Aparicio Nevado. Jaraíz de la Vera (Cáceres): Editorial Gráficas Morgado, 2016. 125-133.

“Difference but not Deference: Historical Memory as Dialogue in Benjamín Prado’s Mala gente que camina.” Ciberletras 36 (2016): No pagination. Web.

“El dolor del puzle: la novela policíaca, la tortura y la transición en El jardín colgante de Javier Calvo.” La tragedia del vivir: Dolor y mal en la literatura hispánica. Ed. Ricardo de la Fuente Ballesteros, Jesús Pérez Magallón, and Francisco Estévez. Valladolid: Editorial Verdelis, 2014: 377-384.

“El doble filo de la ironía en la metaficción historiográfica de Cercas y Bolaño.” Ficções da História: Rescritas Latino-americanas. Ed. Jorge Carlos Guerrero and Aimée González Bolaños. Rio Grande: Editora da Furg, 2013. 151-164.

“Memory, Migration and Identity in Manuel Rivas’s El lápiz del carpintero and Almudena Grandes’s Malena es un nombre de tango.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 36.3 (2012): 501-517.

“Ironic Nostalgia: The Second Republic Today in Manuel Rivas’s El lápiz del carpintero.” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 36.1 (2011): 225-247.

“Ver el pasado no visto: postmemoria desde el útero en Rabos de lagartija de Juan Marsé.” Un hispanismo para el siglo XXI. Ed. Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego and Alberto Villamandos. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2011. 261-277.

“Alguien te mira: Voyerismo y transición en Te trataré como a una reina de Rosa Montero.” Espéculo 37 (2007-2008): No pagination.

Book Reviews

Rev. of Líneas de fuego. Género y nación en la narrativa española durante la Guerra Civil (1936-1939), by Iker González-Allende. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. 423-425.

Rev. of Contemporary Spanish Fiction. Generation X, by Dorothy Odartey-Wellington. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 34.2 (2010): 420-422.

Recent Conference Papers

“Memoria, misterio y trauma en la novela policíaca actual.” Congreso International BETA: Conflictos y Desplazamientos en las Culturas Hispánicas, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain, June 2016.

“Trauma, tortura y textos marginales en la memoria histórica española.” 52nd Conference of the Asociación Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, University of Calgary, Calgary, June 2016.

“Dibujando el pasado: La novela gráfica como posmemoria.” Congreso Internacional: Cómic y compromiso social, Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain, November 2015.

“Tiempo, espacio y memoria en la novela negra de Javier Calvo” Coloquio Internacional – Reescrituras del imaginario policiaco en la literatura española y latinoamericana contemporáneas (1990-2015). Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, France, June 2015.

“From Pornography to Parody: Ironic Approaches to the Spanish Civil War.” 50th Conference of the Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas, Brock University, Waterloo, May 2014.

“El dolor del puzle: la novela policíaca, la tortura y la transición en El jardín colgante de Javier Calvo.” Congreso Internacional La Tragedia del vivir: Dolor y mal en la literatura hispánica. Universitas Castellae and McGill University. Valladolid, Spain, June 2013.

“Putting together the pieces? The crisis of aporia in Lucía Etxebarria’s Lo verdadero es un momento de lo falso and Rosa Montero’s Te trataré como a una reina.” XXXVIII International Symposium of Hispanic Literature – CSUDH, Carson, California, March 2013.

“Buscando pistas una generación después: la novela policíaca y la transición en El jardín colgante de Javier Calvo.” 48th Conference of the Asociación Canadiense de Hispanistas, Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, June 2012.

“Dos escritores, dos personajes, dos traumas nacionales: La autorreflexión irónica en la ficción histórica de Javier Cercas y Roberto Bolaño.” 4th International CELEHIS Conference, Mar del Plata, Argentina, November 2011.

“Negotiating ‘Spanishness:’ Memory and Identity.” ACFAS, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, June 2011.

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Office: JOH 116B

Research Expertise:
cringe comedy, film studies, James Bond, Krzysztof Kielowski

Expert: Dr. Steven Woodward
Department: English
Interview languages: English

Dr. Steven Woodward

Full Professor – Department Chairperson

Dr. Steven Woodward has wide-ranging interests in the areas of film and media studies. He grew up in England, fully expecting to become a secret agent as an adult, but the closest he’s come to that is publishing an article on villains in the James Bond movies. After studying at Queen’s University, Ryerson University, and the University of Toronto, he taught at Nipissing University, the University of Toronto, and Clemson University (South Carolina).Dr. Woodward has edited two books about Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski and has written articles about the use of colour in Kieslowski’s films, the import of Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs, architecture in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and murderous girls in the movies, amongst other subjects.…Contact Information

Phone: 819-822-9600 ext. 2250 Email: swoodwar@ubishops.ca

Dr. Woodward has edited two books about Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski and has written articles about the use of colour in Kieslowski’s films, the import of Hungarian film theorist Bela Balazs, architecture in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and murderous girls in the movies, amongst other subjects.

Dr. Woodward directs the Bishop’s University Film Festival and is currently executive producer of the BU175 documentary-film series.

Research

Dr. Woodward’s long-term research project focuses on the phenomenon of cringe comedy, or simply “cringe.” Cringe is so extreme in its violation of taboos and narratological conventions of identification that it initially embarrasses its audience before allowing them any kind of comic relief in laughter. TV shows such as Fleabag, The Office, and Curb Your Enthusiasm and movies such as Team America and Borat are good examples. Dr. Woodward’s research, already presented in numerous conference papers, explores cringe comedy on three fronts: first, in the context of traditional comedy in general and screen comedy in particular; second, in relation to the social and cultural milieu in which it has flourished; and third, in terms of the social and psychological functions it might fulfill.

Custom Metadata Fields

Office: MOR 109