Since its beginning in 2009, the Arts and Humanities Colloquium Series has engendered conversations about ideas among members of the Arts and Humanities Faculty and their communities both at VIU and in the mid-Island region. Our presenters have shown how important the arts and humanities are to understanding today’s world. We are delighted to share exciting scholarly and creative work with our audiences and invite you to join us in 2024-25.
Fall 2024
Shakespearean Neverwheres: Victoria (BC), Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, and Nostalgia for "Merry Olde England"
September 20, 10-11:30am, Malaspina Theatre
Sarah Crover, English
Victoria, BC, has had a love affair with England since colonization. A big part of its self-fashioning has been centred around recreating a fantasy of Old England. This impulse extends to appropriating the cultural capital that was most toted by the empire as it extended its grasp across the globe: in other words, the celebration of and insistence upon the superiority of the English literary canon. From streets in his name to festivals of his works, Victoria has long participated in the adoration of one of the literary cannon’s most lionized members: Shakespeare. It is not surprising then, in the wake of WWII, in a young capital city anxious to solidify its distinct Canadian-British identity, that some local enthusiasts recreated the Bard’s principal home and marketed it as a tourist attraction. They arranged for the grand opening, in 1959, to coincide with a royal visit by Elizabeth II. For fifty years, Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, an exact replica of the thatched original and its gardens, was a fixture in Victoria – a must-see on the tourist circuit. This talk explores how, rather than engage with its own violent colonial past and attempt meaningful social reparations, citizens mobilized Shakespeare and a sanitized vision of Merry Olde England, to paper over the fault lines between white settler, "foreigner," and Indigenous communities, and imagine a venerable, harmonious English city.
All Things Language: Linguistics of VIU
October 18, 10-11:30am, Malaspina Theatre
Yoichi Mukai, Modern Languages Studies
This talk will introduce two of VIU's linguistic initiatives: The Linguistic Research Lab, and the “Linguistics of the Day'' activities in our linguistics courses. The research lab is intended to serve as an interdisciplinary research hub. To introduce the capabilities of our new eye-tracking equipment, Yoichi Mukai will present a series of completed and planned eye-tracking studies, encompassing topics such as the influence of literacy skills on spoken language, the interaction of words in bilingual minds, and factors that impact cognitive effort when speaking or understanding a second language. The demonstration for “Linguistics of the Day” will include a mini experiment and an analysis of real-world language examples, aiming to raise awareness of the often-overlooked complexity of and assumptions about how we use language. These demonstrations illustrate how linguistics can transform intuitions of language into explicit meta-linguistic awareness.
Philosophy Now! Genealogies of Philosophical Journalism and the Question of the Present
November 22, 10-11:30am, Malaspina Theatre
Magnolia Pauker, Studies in Women and Gender
The ubiquity of the interview as a naturalized form across multiple domains of everyday life – journalism and media, politics, education, etc. – stages an opportunity for critical intervention and invention. Magnolia Pauker's current book project – Philosophy Now! – takes its cue from Democracy Now! to pursue the question(s) of our present through an explicit commitment to social justice. She traces genealogies of philosophical journalism in which the intellectual interview, and its resistant form – which I term the philosophical interview – are central elements and actors. Taking as its archive Michel Foucault’s substantial body of interview work, this talk reads his engagement of "the philosophical interview" as distinct and integral to his larger oeuvre. A self-identified “philosopher-journalist,” Foucault describes his method as “a kind of radical journalism” and his work overall as a mode of “philosophical journalism.” Avowedly embedded in the contemporary moment, philosophical journalism engages critically with “the question of the present,” a practice that Foucault not only aligns with but calls on others to engage, declaring that “philosophers must become journalists.” This is the work of philosophical journalism.
Please email Theo.Finigan@viu.ca if you would like to be added to our mailing list.
- Listen to Conversations in the Arts & Humanities, the Colloquium Series podcast
- View past Colloquium presentations on YouTube
- View posters from past seasons
