The achievements of four York University professors have been recognized by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), which has inducted them as Fellows. 

Professor Pat Armstrong, a distinguished research professor of sociology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS); Professor Isabella Bakker in the Department of Political Science in LA&PS; Professor Rishma Dunlop in the Faculty of Education and in the Department of English in LA&PS; and Professor Bernard Lightman in the Department of Humanities, LA&PS, have all been inducted into the society as Fellows.

“On behalf of the York University community, I would like to offer our sincere congratulations to four of our faculty members on being named as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,” said President & Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. “This prestigious recognition is well-deserved as Drs. Armstrong, Bakker, Dunlop and Lightman are leading scholars who have made outstanding contributions in research in their fields.”

The society has elected 78 new Fellows, including two Foreign Fellows, and one Honorary Fellow to its ranks for 2011. The newly elected Fellows will be officially inducted on Saturday, Nov. 26, during a ceremony at the Ottawa Convention Centre. 

Election to the academies of the Royal Society of Canada is one of the highest honours awarded to Canadian scholars in the arts, humanities and sciences.

Pat Armstrong (right) is an internationally renowned sociologist with expertise in health care and women’s health, social policy, and gender and work. She has co-authored numerous books on health policy, including They Deserve Better: The Long-Term Care Experience in Canada and Scandinavia, Women’s Health: Intersections of Policy, Research and Practice, and Critical to Care: The Invisible Women in Health Services, among others. Armstrong is the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation/Canadian Institutes of Health Research Chair in Health Services and Nursing Research and an executive member of both the York Institute for Health Research and the Graduate Program in Health Policy and Equity. She is the principal investigator for a major collaborative research initiative project titled “Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices,” which is funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Isabella Bakker (left) teaches International Political Economy, Women and Politics and Public Finance. A leading global expert in her field, Bakker’s research examines the interplay between feminist perspectives and international public policy, with a focus on how macroeconomics and fiscal policy affect questions of gender and social justice. Bakker’s published work includes: Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective, Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy, Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction and The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at York since 1986, and has held visiting professorships at the European University Institute in Florence, the University of California Santa Barbara and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, among other institutions. Bakker is a Trudeau Fellow and was named Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2004. She is the principal investigator of a SSHRC-funded project “Budgeting for Women’s Human Rights in Canada”.

Rishma Dunlop (right) is an award-winning Canadian poet, playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. She is founding editor of the international online literary journal Studio. Dunlop’s poetry collections include: White Album (2008), Metropolis (2005), Reading Like a Girl (2004) and The Body of My Garden (2002). Next month, her fifth book, Lover Through Departure: New and Selected Poems will be published.  Known for her innovative research that merges scholarly inquiry with artistic production, Dunlop has taught interdisciplinary seminars on research and artistic creation for over a decade.  In 2009 to 2010, she was awarded the prestigious Canada-US Fulbright Research Chair at the Virginia Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She won the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry in 2003, and her non-fiction and poetry have been short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards. She is currently principal investigator on the SSHRC research initiative on poetry of witness, human Rights and transitional justice. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, cross-appointed to York’s Faculty of Education and the Department of English, where she was coordinator of the Creative Writing program from 2007 to 2011.

Bernard Lightman (left) is an internationally renowned historian and currently the editor of Isis, the quarterly journal of the History of Science Society. He is also director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at York University. Lightman’s area of expertise is the cultural history of Victorian science. He is editor of the Pickering and Chatto Press monograph series, titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century”, in which 14 books have been published. His publications include: The Origins of Agnosticism, Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain and Victorian Science in Context, among others. Currently, Lightman is working on a biography of the physicist John Tyndall, and he is the founder of an international correspondence project to collect and publish Tyndall’s letters. The project is being funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

For more information on the 2011 Fellows, visit the Royal Society of Canada website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin.