Skip to main content
Glendon Campus Alumni Research Giving to York Media Careers International York U Lions Accessibility
Future Students Current Students Faculty and Staff
Faculties Libraries York U Organization Directory Site Index Campus Maps
Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Studies

Faculty

Executive Committee: Profiles and Publications

The Graduate program in Interdisciplinary Studies is unique in that it draws as necessary on all York University faculty members who are eligible to teach at the graduate level. This arrangement enables the program to utilize the expertise of scholars from the different Faculties. The program's Executive Committee is responsible for admission decisions and represents diverse disciplines across the University.

Program Director

jamie, s. SCOTT
B.A. (English Literature and Language), Cambridge University, U.K., 1972; MA (Religious Studies), Carleton University, Ottawa, 1979; MA (English Literature), Queens University, 1980; Ph.D. (Religion and Literature), The Divinity School, University of Chicago, 1990; Professor, English, Geography, Humanities & Interdisciplinary Studies; 029 McLaughl College, (416) 736-2100 ext. 77342, jscott@yorku.ca

Professor Scott teaches various courses in Religion and Culture, including “Introduction to the Study of Religion,” “Religion and Film,” “Religion and Television,” “Religion and Postcolonial Literatures” and “Christianity and Film.” He has recently completed a textbook, The Religions of Canadians (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010), and an essay, “Religions and Postcolonial Literatures,” for the Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010). He is currently working on a collection of essays examining the representation of mountains in literature, as well as a monograph on world religions and postcolonial literatures. Professor Scott serves as Director of the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies, and he is a member of the graduate programmes in Geography, English and Humanities as well.

                            
Recent Publications:

“‘You’re not only Drunk but Mad’: The Ironies of Islam in Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.” In Stella Borg Barthet, ed. A Sea for Encounters: Essays towards a Postcolonial Commonwealth. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. Pp. 205-215.

“Representing Sacred Space: Pilgrimage and Literature.” In T. Coomans, H. De Dijn, J. De Maeyer, R. Heynickx and B. Verschaffel, eds. Loci Sacri: Understanding Sacred Places. KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, 7. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Forthcoming, 2009.

“Missions and Film.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research.32.3 (2008): 115-20.

“Missions in Fiction.” Encyclopedia of Missions and Missionaries. Ed. Jonathan Bonk. London and New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. 159-63.

“Missions in Film.” Encyclopedia of Missions and Missionaries. Ed. Jonathan Bonk. London and New York: Routledge. 2007. Pp. 163-67.

“Postcolonial Cultures and the Jewish Imaginary,” in Axel Stähler, ed. Anglophone Jewish Literature. London: Routledge (2007): 51-64.

“Christianity and Literature.” In Douglas Killam and Alicia L. Kerfoot, eds. Student Encyclopedia of African Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. Pp. 257-68 (reprint of “Christianity and Literature.” In Douglas Killam and Ruth Rowe, eds. The Companion to African Literatures. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. 240-49).

 

“Writing Suffering: Trauma, Testimony and Transcendence in Canadian Literature,” Literature and Religion 10.2 (2005): 97-131.

 

Canadian Missions, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (edited with Alvyn Austen. 2005).

 

“Cultivating Christians in Colonial Canadian Missions,” in Jamie S. Scott and Alvyn Austen, eds. Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2005), 21-45.

 

Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (edited with Gareth Griffiths. 2005).

 

“Penitential and Penitentiary: Native Canadians and Mission Education,” in Jamie S. Scott and Gareth Griffiths, eds. Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions. New York: Palgrave (2005), 111-33.

 

“Residential Schools and Native Canadian Writers,” in Peter H. Marsden and Geoffrey V. Davis, ed. Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a ‘Post’-Colonial World. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi (2004), 237-46.

 

“Religion, Literature and Canadian Cultural Identities.” Literature and Theology 16.2 (2002): 1-14. Edited with Paul Simpson-Housley, Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Post-Colonial Literatures. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi (2001).

 

“Mapping the Sacred across Post-Colonial Literatures.” In Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley, eds. Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Post-Colonial Literatures. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi (2001), xv-xxxiii.

 

Executive Committee

robert ADOLPH
A.B. (Williams Coll.), A.M. (Mich.), Ph.D. (Harv.), Professor Emeritus, English; 232 Vanier College, (416) 736-5158 ext. 77087, adolph@yorku.ca.

American Renaissance and the history of English prose style in the Renaissance and seventeenth cetnury . Critical theory, Romanticism, and the history of ideas of love in the western world.

carole CARPENTER
B.Sc. (Dal.), A.M., Ph.D. (Penn.), Associate Professor, Humanities, Music; 244 Vanier College, (416) 736-2100  ext. 66984, carolec@yorku.ca.

Professor Carpenter specializes in children's literature and culture, childhood in Canada, multiculturalism and folklore as a discourse of identity.  She has published three important Canadian folklore resources, Many Voices: A Study of Folklore Activities in Canada and their Role in Canadian Culture, A Bibliography of Canadian Folklore in English and Explorations in Canadian Folklore in English, as well as numerous articles on folklore and multiculturalism in Canada, children's lore and, most recently, folklore in Canadian literature and in/as children's literature. She founded and now coordinates York’s unique Children’s Studies Program. Her current research concerns the personal experiences of child migrants to Canada and how their experiences impact on their sense of identity and belonging. Her first children’s book will appear in Spring 2010 from Second Story Press.

matthew CLARK
Ph.D. ( Harv.), Associate Professor, Humanities, 251 Vanier College, (416) 736-2100 ext. 77396, mathewc@yorku.ca

Professor Clark teaches ancient Greek culture and literature. Courses he has taught include HUMA1105 "Myth and Imagination in Ancient Greece and Rome", HUMA3115 "Myth in Ancient Greece: Texts & Theories", HUMA 4100 "Persuasion and Eloquence: The Rhetorical Tradition", as well as Intermediate and Advanced Ancient Greek. Professor Clark was the winner of the University-Wide Teaching Award in 2002.

Professor Clark's research interests include Archaic Greece, Homeric Epic, Rhetoric, and the Classical Tradition. He has published two books: Out of Line: Homeric Composition Beyond the Hexameter (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), which combines the analysis of meter and formulas to present a new theory of oral-formulaic composition, and A Matter of Style (Oxford, 2002), a study of prose composition. Two books are forthcoming: a study of narrative theory and the self (Ohio State University Press 2010) and an intermediate to advanced myth textbook (Blackwell 2011). He has also published fiction, verse, book reviews, and articles on music and politics.

Recent Publications:

“Hektor and Poulydamas”; College Literature, Vol. 34.2 (Spring 2007), pp. 85-106.

"Formulas, Metre, and Type-Scenes". In The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Ed. Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

"Enjambment and Binding in Homeric Hexameter". In The Oral Traditional Background of Ancient Greek Literature. Ed. Gregory Nagy. London: Routledge, 2002.

A Matter of Style: Writing and Technique. Oxford, 2002.

"Fighting Words: How Heroes Argue". Arethusa, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2002).

"Was Telemachus Rude to his Mother? Od.1.356-359". Classical Philology, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Oct. 2001), pp. 335-354.

"The Concept of Plot and the Plot of the Iliad". Phoenix, Vol. 55 (2001)

"Chryses' Supplication: Speech-Act and Mythological Allusion." Classical Antiquity, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1998).

Out of Line: Homeric Composition Beyond the Hexameter. Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.

 

douglas FREAKE,
B.A. (McG ), MA, PhD (Toronto) Associate Professor, Humanities, English 212 Vanier College, (416) 736-2100 ext. 60498, dfreake@yorku.ca

Canadian and Early Modern English literatures, gender studies, the body, ecology and literature

christopher  INNES
B.A., B.Phil., D.Phil.(Oxon), Canada Research Chair in Performance and Culture, Distinguished Research Professor of English;F.R.S.C. , Killam Fellow, 123 Winters College, (416) 736-2100 ext. 77461, cdinness@hotmai.com

Professor Innes has published widely on twentieth-century drama and theatre history, in particular the development of political and avant-garde theatrical movements in Germany and France, including Brecht and Artaud; and on the work of stage directors.  He is general editor of the Cambridge Directors in Perspective series, co-editor of the Lives of the Theatre series, and a past editor of Modern Drama.  He is currently researching the music theatre of Murray Schafer, and editing a book on Carnival:  Theory and Practise which came out of the international conference he organized in 2008 on “Carnival:  ‘A People’s Art’ and ‘Taking Back the Streets’.”  He teaches graduate courses in Visual Culture, Arts and the City, Shakespeare, Contemporary British and American Drama, Modernism.

Selected Publications:

Directors/Directing:  Conversations on Theatre.  Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Designing Modern America:  Broadway to Main Street.  Yale, 2005.

Modern British Drama:  The Twentieth Century.  Cambridge, 2002.

Avant Garde Theatre.  Routledge, 1993.

 

Politics and the Playwright:  George Ryga.  Simon & Pierre, 1986.

marlene KADAR,
B.A. (Trent), MA (Waterloo), Ph.D (Alta), Associate Professor, Humanities, English, Women’s Studies, 311 Founders, (416) 736-2100 ext. 66926, mkadar@yorku.ca.

Professor Kadar's research interests include feminist life writing theory and contemporary Canadian autobiographical literature. Her current work focuses on narratives of migration and immigration, especially from Central Europe, and on historical tropes of loss and belonging.  Her collection of life writing theory, Essays On Life Writing: From Genre To Critical Practice (UTP) won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in 1993. She compiled a variety of life writing texts in Reading Life Writing (Oxford 1993) and co-edited (with Helen Buss) Working in Women's Archives: Researching Women's Private Literature and Archival Documents (WLUP 2001). Kadar is the Editor of the Life Writing Series for Wilfrid Laurier University Press, where she has published five Holocaust/Shoah memoirs. She is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, and Literary Editor of Canadian Woman Studies. With Jeanne Perreault, Linda Warley and Susanna Egan she published Tracing the Autobiographical (2005) which includes a chapter on a Roma Holocaust lament. Kadar recently co-edited a special double issue of ARIEL with Linda Warley and Jeanne Perreault (2008), “Life Writing in International Contexts.” Forthcoming is a co-edited illustrated collection, Photographs, Histories and Meanings (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). Her current research focuses on the life and career of a former concentration camp guard, and on the memoir of a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust who spent the most difficult years in the former Yugoslavia.

yvonne SINGER,
B.A., B.Ed. (McG.), M.F.A. (York, Can.), Associate Professor, Visual Arts; Faculty of Fine Arts, Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts, (416) 736-2100 ext. 55187, ysinger@yorku.ca.

Professor Singer is a practicing artist with an active national and international exhibition record. Her installation works employ multimedia techniques, often with cryptic texts to articulate cultural issues of disjuncture and perception. She is particularly interested in the intersection of public and private histories.

 

Exhibitions include sometimes I like a happy ending; sometimes I like a sad ending (Kiwi Sculpture Garden, Perth Ontario), random objects:random thoughts (Akau gallery, Toronto), Signs of Life: an intimate portrait of someone I don't know (Loop Gallery, Toronto), The Trouble with Translation (tour - Germany, France, Canada), Alphabets (Stewart Hall, Montreal), Crossroad (Visual Art Centre, Clarington), Staging Memory (Montreal Holocaust Centre), The Veiled Room (ACC Galerie, Weimar, Germany), Images of Girlhood (McCord Museum, Montreal).

She has received several public art commissions and her work is found in many private collections. She has served on the boards of the Koffler centre for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and C Magazine.

Professor Singer is tenured faculty in the Department of visual arts and was Graduate Program Director in Visual Arts from 2003-2009. She is currently on sabbatical.

 

harry SMALLER,
B.Sc., M.Ed., Ph.D (Toronto) Associate Professor, Emeritus, Education

(416) 536-0414, hsmaller@edu.yorku.ca

Teachers work; teachers' unions; history of education; school cultures; cross-cultural and comparative education.

patrick TAYLOR,

Ph.D. York University (1985), Associate Professor, Chair, Department of Humanities, 206 Vanier College, (416) 736-2100 ext. 77015, taylorp@yorku.ca

Professor Taylor does research and teaches in the areas of Post-Colonial Thought and Caribbean Religion, Culture, and Literature in the Department  of Humanities and the Graduate Programmes in Interdisciplinary Studies, Social and Political Thought, and Humanities.  He was director of the Caribbean Religions Project, an international, collaborative, research and editorial project based at the Centre for Research on Latin American and the Caribbean (CERLAC) and is co-editing an encyclopaedia of Caribbean Religions.  His earlier publications include The Narrative of Liberation: Perspectives on Afro-Caribbean Literature, Popular Culture and Politics and Nation Dance: Religion, Identity and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean. Professor Taylor has been active in the University of the West Indies Exchange Program and has organized study abroad programmes in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. He is currently Chair of the Department of Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.

 

Link to Caribbean Religions Project:  http://www.yorku.ca/cerlac/crp/home.htm

Student Representatives (see Student Executive)

john MORDEN jmorden@yorku.ca
david WALKER dwalker@yorku.ca