In Memoriam

The Werklund School of Education is saddened by the loss of Professor E. Lisa Panayotidis, who passed away on December 6, 2016.

Lisa is remembered as a dear and caring friend and colleague with a deep sense of purpose and passion with her academic work and her friendships.

Lisa joined the Faculty of Education in 1997 as a Post-Doctoral Fellow after completing her doctoral degree at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto.  As a professor within the area of Curriculum and Learning, Lisa had an impressive academic career. An interdisciplinary historian she studied the socio- cultural life, identities, and subjectivities of the Canadian university of students, professors, and universities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canada. A second complementary and interrelated strand of her research was concerned with reflective practice and contemporary issues and debates in visual arts teacher education, curriculum theorizing, and historical thinking. Lisa’s most recent book, Women in Higher Education, 1850-1970: International Perspectives, is a product of the long-standing collaboration between Lisa and her husband, Paul, that examines the ways in which women’s experiences of academe could be both contextually diverse but historically and culturally similar.

Throughout her career Dr. Panayotidis received many academic and research awards including the CAFE Publication Award for her book Provoking conversations on inquiry in teacher education and the English-Language Article Prize for her article The mythic campus and the professorial life. She was also invited to share her work on the history of student initiation rituals on western Canadian campuses as part of the Werklund School of Education’s Engaging New Ideas in Education speaker series. 

Dr. Darren Lund

From the moment I arrived at the University of Calgary I experienced Lisa’s generosity and support; she willingly shared her knowledge and resources with a brand new scholar, including a successful SSHRC application (which still seems remarkable to me now). She made it a habit of popping in to my neighbouring office to share ideas, plans, and sometimes chocolate. Our 15-year collaboration on various papers, presentations, and a co-written book felt more like being part of a family. In our group, Lisa played a key role that worked against the competitive environment that too often characterizes the academy. She was invariably our taskmaster, the catalyst for our ongoing work. Lisa had a strong drive to create high quality, provocative writing that spoke courageously to her commitments around history, identity, embodiment, and visuality, among others. She has made an indelible impact on me, her peers, and her field, and I will miss her dearly.

Jo Towers

Lisa was a caring friend and a true scholar. She and I began our journeys at the University of Calgary around the same time and we soon became friends and collaborators. Lisa was unfailingly generous with her time and expertise and thoroughly dedicated to showing how an interpretive approach to the challenges of work in the academy could have both theoretical and practical relevance. Her knowledge of interpretive work was deep and she wrote provocatively and with passion about teaching and learning. Her rich knowledge of the history of Canadian academic places and spaces made a deep impression on my understanding of the context of my work as a teacher educator and educational researcher. I will always be grateful for the time we spent together dwelling over difficult texts and sharing excerpts of our writing back and forth as we each struggled to make sense of the tumultuous times of the past two decades in teacher education. I am thankful to have known her and honoured to have had the opportunity to learn from her. 

Hans Smits

Like all of us who knew and worked with Lisa, I was deeply shocked and saddened to learn of her untimely passing.  It is especially sad when we lose a friend and colleague who was in the prime of her life and who held the promise of ongoing rich contributions to her field of scholarship and to her academic community.  For me, Lisa represented an ideal of how to live the life of a university scholar and the acceptance of the responsibility such work entails.  She was not only deeply committed to great scholarship—in history, the ecology of place, the role of professors and teachers, and to the importance of arts in our lives—but in ways that reminded us of its application to our own lives and responsibilities.  In particular, I was deeply appreciative of her commitment to teacher education and our students, and the imperative. as echoed in the words of Hannah Arendt, “to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”  Such a commitment to the renewal—and enrichment—of a common world was reflected in how Lisa engaged with many of us in the experience of not only doing teacher education but also in encouraging us to think and write about such work.  Although the loss of a person can never be fully compensated by memory, we can be thankful for the gift of Lisa’s exceptional research and writing and her encouragement for us to work together to endow vibrant and enduring meaning to our scholarship and teaching.

My deepest sympathy and condolences to her husband Paul and her family and to her students past and present, and her colleagues and friends.

Ann Calvert

Lisa was a new colleague in the late 1990s when she came to assume a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Winchester. Working with Dr. Bosetti and me on a number of school based arts education projects, she proved to be a brilliant theorist with clear ideas and a very strong research ethic. We were thrilled to have her join our team. Her loss is a blow to education scholarship in Canada.

Dianne Gereluk

My first memory of Lisa was when I was a graduate student in the mid 1990s, and I was asked to work alongside Lisa with the Calgary Arts Partners in Education research project. As a new research assistant, Lisa guided and mentored me through the interviews and focus groups. However, this initial research project, and particularly the conversations we had in the car driving to and from schools collecting data, grew into a 20 year friendship. Quiet, yet observant, Lisa and I always seemed to have fantastic conversations about philosophy, history, and the foundations in education. I will miss her wisdom and friendship.

Christopher Klune

Lisa was my supervisor for a PURE award I had received this past year. Though I still feel in many ways I do not really know Lisa, the impact she had on me was one I will carry forever. In those few meetings I had with her the amount of support and her friendliness ignited my ambitions because I knew that no matter what difficulty I might come across in my research, Lisa would be there. I had no idea about the severity of her illness, and even so she still managed to communicate me via email and review my first ever research project. That is how I will remember Lisa, she brought a level of humanness and kindness to academia not found in many people. I still fondly remember my first meeting with her, going through research plans, and then she mentioned how she knew I was in the Education Students' Association, and suggested we do karaoke for one of our events. I remember leaving with a huge smile on my face because in that moment I could tell that Lisa was someone you could laugh with, and she was someone who cared and took interest in actual people beyond their work and research. Lisa dug deeper, and truly made an effort to know who I was as a person. I only wish that I would have had time to do the same. I'll forever remember the many lessons Lisa taught me in those brief moments, I will take them with me for the rest of my life. Thank you Lisa.