Current and Past McCalla Professors

The McCalla Research Professorships are awarded by the University to professors who have made significant contributions in their field, and who successfully integrate teaching, learning and research. The awards provide teaching release to allow recipients to concentrate on research and creative projects.

2013-2014

Margriet Haagsma, History & Classics

Margriet Haagsma is the director of the Kastro Kallithea project. Haagsma and her team are working to map and explore the architecture and artifacts of Kastro Kallithea, a city that has previously never been studied. Haagsma specifically looks at how houses are architecturally articulated to determine the lifestyle and the relative wealth of these past households, the relationship between men and women, the relationship between citizens and slaves, and the economic base of the households. Haagsma will use her award to coordinate the publication of a book about the findings from the site, as well as to write her own chapter about the city plan and Housing 10, a large house that was excavated. She also wants to hire some research assistants to assist with project administration.

2012-2013

Nora Stovel, English & Film Studies

Nora Stovel’s teaching and research plan on Women’s Writing involves three interrelated objectives: a new graduate course, a monograph, and a community outreach program. First, a new graduate course involving Carol Shields will enable her to supervise graduate students’ theses, MA projects, conference papers, and publications on women’s archives. Second, she will complete her SSHRC-funded research project, a monograph entitled “Sparkling Subversion”: Carol Shields’ Vision and Voice, and related conference papers and scholarly articles. Third, she will liaise with Edmonton-area high school English teachers to develop educational programs involving her students with Edmonton high school students to research Alberta women’s archives.

 

2011-2012

Frances Pownall, History & Classics

Frances Pownall’s McCalla project focuses upon the compelling, yet elusive, figure of Alexander the Great. Although Alexander’s brilliant military leadership has made him a household name, his portrayal by both ancient and modern sources is strikingly varied, ranging from a dreamy idealist to a dreary butcher. Pownall will teach a seminar course on Alexander, emphasizing the historical problems associated with his reign, many of which stem from the near-complete loss of all the contemporary historical accounts. Her research will focus on the source tradition for Alexander in order to arrive at a more balanced assessment of his actual achievements.

Susan Smith, History & Classics

Susan Smith’s McCalla Professorship will enable her to address the pressing needs of the Department of History & Classics and her SSHRC-funded research project. First, she will expand the learning opportunities for graduate student instructors and teaching assistants in the department through the development of a series of teaching workshops. Second, she will make research a greater part of the undergraduate learning environment in order to get students excited about Arts disciplines in general and the field of history in particular. Third, she will write a book called Mustard Gas Madness: The Health Consequences of World War II in North America. 

 

 

 

2010-2011

Linda Trimble, Political Science

Linda Trimble is writing a book entitled Mediating Leadership: Women Prime Ministers and the Press, in which she will compare newspaper and television coverage of New Zealand Prime Ministers Helen Clark and Jenny Shipley with equivalent reportage of their male counterparts and competitors. Trimble will also develop course content and pedagogy for teaching political science research methods, and will incorporate this material into undergraduate and graduate-level courses, workshops and presentations.

2009 - 2010

Gary Kelly, English & Film Studies

Gary Kelly will survey popular print culture in Britain during the Romantic period as part of a larger program to examine the role of culture and especially print in the processes of shaping what historians call modernity, and the modern nation-state. The study will result in both a book and an open-ended online archive and resource hub illustrating, augmenting, and commenting on the popular print culture examined. Kelly will also teach a course dealing with a significant aspect of the research project, literature for children and youth.

Christopher Fletcher, Anthropology

Digital storytelling uses basic image editing software to combine digital still photos with narrative to create short, evocative and informative multimedia pieces. This technique is particularly useful for giving voice to marginal and counter-narratives, and while it has become popular in schools and community programs, no academic assessment has yet been done on its effectiveness in Canada. Working with the Community Service-Learning program and Visual Anthropology students, Fletcher will test and report on digital storytelling experiments in pedagogy and collaborative research.

2008 - 2009

Sally Rice, Lingustics

Sally Rice will develop the curriculum for the six-course Community Linguist Certificate delivered through the U of A’s Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute  (CILLDI) by integrating documentation efforts and basic research on understudied Aboriginal languages of Western Canada, with the training of native speakers as linguists in their own right. Rice will also analyse previously collected language data to develop problem sets for undergraduate linguistics courses, as well as searchable language databases for use by scholars and speakers.

Jennifer Welchman, Philosophy

We all seem to agree that we should “be green” or act as stewards of nature, but what does this mean? Stewardship involves acting to promote someone else’s interest in whatever is entrusted to one’s care. Whose interests does our stewardship serve? Towards which features of nature can we meaningfully act as stewards? And can the answers to these questions explain how or why “being green” is increasingly being seen as a necessary ingredient of a good moral character?