Executive Council
Dr. Shelley Alexander
Dr. Shelley Alexander is an international canid specialist and the founder of the Canid Conservation Science Lab at UCalgary. She has conducted field-based and geospatial (GIS, Remote Sensing, statistics) analysis of large carnivore ecology, specializing in wolves and coyotes, and studied human-wildlife conflict since 1990. She also is an expert wildlife tracker, an established road ecologist, a specialist in non-invasive approaches to wildlife monitoring, and an advocate of animal welfare in science. Shelley also is highly engaged mobilizing science to community, regularly reporting research results through short nature hikes, lectures to community groups, and media outreach
Dr. Ozouf Sénamin Amedegnato
As a Sociolinguist, Dr. Amedegnato is interested in the contact of languages, variation in French, language policy, language attitudes, as well as Francophonie, with a tangential interest for the didactical implications of sociolinguistic situations (i.e. Second Language Teaching). As a Semiotician of Literature, he studies the interface between Linguistics and Literature. His main geographical research area is Subsaharan (West) Africa. Dr. Amedegnato is also founder of the Cercle Benveniste Circle.
Dr. George Colpitts
As an environmental historian, Dr. George Colpitts is interested in relationships between human and non-human animals in colonial North America and recent times. He has published on animal history, the fur trade, conservation and the modern fur industry in Canada’s north. His most recent book, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780 – 1882, was published by Cambridge University Press, 2015. He currently serves as the Associate Dean - Research and Graduate Studies, in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Penelope Farfan
Dr. Penny Farfan is Professor of Drama at the University of Calgary and the author of Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge UP, 2004) and Performing Queer Modernism (Oxford UP, 2017), as well as many articles and book chapters on modernism and performance and on contemporary women playwrights. She is also the editor with Lesley Ferris of Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century (U of Michigan P, 2021) and Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and a past editor of Theatre Journal. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a past Annual Fellow of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.
Dr. James Ellis, CIH Director
Jim Ellis teaches sixteenth and seventeenth-century poetry and prose. Along with numerous essays on early modern literature, he has written two books: Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (U of Toronto P, 2003) and The Poem, the Garden and the World: Poetry and Performativity in Elizabethan England (Northwestern UP, 2022). Another major area of publication is queer and Black experimental filmmakers, including the book Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (Minnesota UP, 2009). He also writes about contemporary art, most recently in Border Crossings.
Dr. Noreen Humble, CIH Associate Director
Dr. Noreen Humble (CIH Associate Director) is Professor of Classics at the University of Calgary and was a fellow at the CIH in 2013-14. She has published widely on the Athenian writer Xenophon (c. 430-355 BCE), focusing on him as a political philosopher and as a literary innovator. Her monograph Xenophon of Athens: A Socratic on Sparta will be published in 2021 by Cambridge University press. She also works on the reception of ancient authors (particularly Xenophon and the later Greek biographer Plutarch) in the Byzantine and early modern periods, exploring how and why their works were appropriated into different intellectual milieus. She has served on a variety of University committees and currently sits on the boards of the Canadian Institute in Greece and the University of Calgary Press.
Dr. Pablo Policzer
Dr. Pablo Policzer is an Associate Professor of Political Science. A specialist in comparative politics, his research focuses on the evolution of violent conflict - especially among armed actors such as militaries, police forces, and non-state armed groups - in authoritarian and democratic regimes. He held the Canada Research Chair in Latin American Politics (2005-2015), and is a Fellow at the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, He was also an active Fellow at the Latin American Research Centre before being appointed Director from 2015-20. His book The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile (Notre Dame University Press, 2009) was named a Choice Magazine "Outstanding Academic Title", and won the 2010 award for best book in Comparative Politics from the Canadian Political Science Association. He obtained his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his BA (Honours, First Class) in political science from the University of British Columbia. in comparative politics, with a focus on Latin America.
Dr. Trevor Stark
Trevor Stark is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History, University of Calgary. He is the author of Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé (MIT Press, 2020). His research focuses on the emergence and legacies of the “avant-garde” in twentieth-century art, music, and poetry, and his writing has appeared in journals including Art History, Critical Inquiry, October, and Texte zur Kunst. He was the Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities in 2020-21.
Nancy Tousley
Nancy Tousley is a senior art critic, arts journalist and independent curator, who received the Governor General’s Award for Media and Visual Arts for outstanding contribution in 2011. As art critic of the Calgary Herald, she was a fulltime journalist for more than 30 years. As a freelance, she has written reviews, interviews and feature articles that have appeared in magazines such as Artscanada, Vanguard, Parachute, Border Crossings, and Canadian Art since the mid 1970s, in print and more recently online. Her essays on artists have appeared in more than 30 public art gallery and museum catalogues and books. She has been a contributing editor to Canadian Art magazine since 1986.