Plenary Speakers

The International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities will feature plenary sessions by some of the world’s leading thinkers and innovators in the field, as well as numerous parallel presentations by researchers and practitioners.

Garden Conversations

Plenary Speakers will make formal 30-minute presentations. They will also participate in 60-minute Garden Conversations – unstructured sessions that allow delegates a chance to meet the speakers and talk with them informally about the issues arising from their presentation.

Please return to this page for regular updates.

The Speakers

Diana Brydon

Dr. Diana Brydon, PhD. FRSC is Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies and Director of the Research Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba. A specialist in postcolonial literary and cultural studies, she has published numerous articles and book chapters in these fields and books on Australian writer, Christina Stead (1987) and Canadian author, Timothy Findley (1995, 1998). She co-wrote Decolonising Fictions (1993, with Helen Tiffin) and edited a groundbreaking interdisciplinary, five volume anthology, Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2000). With Irena Makaryk, she co-edited Shakespeare in Canada (2002); with W.D. Coleman, Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts (2008) and with Marta Dvorak, Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (forthcoming 2012). She serves as deputy director of W. D. Coleman’s SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Grant on “Globalization and Autonomy” (2002-12). With Coleman and Louis Pauly, she is currently co-authoring Globalization and Autonomy: Conversing across Disciplines, the ninth, capstone volume in the project series, Since 2008, she has served as the North American representative on the interregional, interdisciplinary, transectoral convening group of the Building Global Democracy project: www.buildingglobaldemocracy.org

She currently holds a SSHRC partnership development grant for “Brazil/Canada Knowledge Exchange: developing transnational literacies” (2011-13). This project works with English teachers and teachers-in-training in Canada and Brazil to develop site-specific pedagogies and research production appropriate to the challenges of ethical cross-cultural engagement. Her team hopes to deepen understanding of what transnational literacy can mean in such circumstances while learning together how to make transnational, interdisciplinary partnerships work. Through these interdisciplinary team projects, she is helping to articulate what the humanities can bring to the analysis of global challenges in contemporary times. Recent publications include “Do the Humanities Need a New Humanism? in Retooling the Humanities: the Culture of Research in Canadian Universities (ed. D.Coleman and S,Kamboureli, 2011) and “Globalization and Higher Education: Working Toward Cognitive Justice,” in Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy (ed. R. Foshay, 2011).

Donna Palmateer Pennee

Educated at the University of Guelph, McGill University, and The School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, NH, Donna Palmateer Pennee was a faculty member in the School of English and Theatre Studies and the first Associate Dean, Academic, Arts and Social Sciences at Guelph before her appointment as Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Western University, Canada (formerly The University of Western Ontario).

An award-winning teacher, she is also known for service to the university community, most notably during two terms on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, as Vice-President for Women’s and Equity Issues. She has published monographs, articles, and book chapters on: English-Canadian fiction; cultural nationalism, postcolonialism, and policy under globalization; curriculum and pedagogy; and miscellaneous aspects of the profession.

Recent publications include “Taking it Personally and Politically: The Culture of Research in Canada after Cultural Nationalism” in Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities , ed. Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli (U Alberta P, 2011); “’I forgot the attachment’ and Other Casualties of Academic Labour at the Present Time” in Not Drowning But Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts, ed. Susan Brown, Jeanne Perreault, Jo-Ann Wallace, and Heather Zwicker (U Alberta P, 2011); “Federal Election 2011: An Open Letter on Post-Secondary Education” at http://blog.fedcan.ca/2011/04/22/federal-election-2011-an-open-letter-on-post-secondary-education/, and “’National’ Literature, Literary Citizenship, Civic Education: A Report on Theorizing and Teaching Minority Cultural Expression and/as ‘Canadian’ Literatures” in Embracing Otherness: Canadian Minority Discourses in Transcultural Perspectives, ed. Eugenia Sojka and Tomasz Sikora (Toru?: Adam Marsza?ek, 2010).

She is returning to a full-time appointment as Professor in the Department of English, and an affiliate member in the Department of Women’s Studies and Feminist Research at Western, in July 2012, where she will be teaching a graduate seminar in “The Cultures of University Governance.”