Staff
Steering Committee
Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities. Samir Gandesha was a SSHRCC post-doctoral fellow at UC (Berkeley) in 1995-6 and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Potsdam in 2001-2, before joining the the Department of Humanities at SFU in 2003. He has sat on the Institute’s Steering Committee since 2004. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. His book (co-edited with Lars Rensmann) “Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations” is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2011. He is also the former director of SFU’s Prague Field School.
Stuart PoyntzAssistant Professor, School of Communications | spoyntz@sfu.ca Stuart Poyntz’ research interests include children, youth and media cultures, theories of the public sphere, with specific concern for the work of Hannah Arendt, and young people’s historical thinking, particularly in relation to digital media technologies. He has extensive background in the history of media literacy, nationally and internationally, and has written on Canadian cinema and the relationship between film and historical representation. He completed his Ph.D. with the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC.
Stuart’s work can be found in the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, the Canadian Journal of Education, Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, and various edited collections.
Currently, Stuart is completing a new book, Media Literacy: A Critical Introduction for Wiley-Blackwell, beginning a new research project (New Media Literacies – Mapping Media Production Affordances in Canadian Media Education Contexts), and continuing to work with the education community in BC, which he has done for more than a decade.
Carolyn Lesjak
Associate Professor, English | clesjak@sfu.ca
Carolyn Lesjak specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and also teaches courses in the theory of the novel and Marxist and feminist theory. She is the author of Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Duke 2006) as well as numerous articles and contributions to literary encyclopedias and studies of the Victorian novel, such as the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel and Novel Theory and The Cambridge History of the English Novel. Her work has appeared in ELH, Novel, Studies in the Literary Imagination, Utopian Studies, and a number of collected volumes of essays, including On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization and a forthcoming collection on twenty-first century Marxist literary criticism. Her current book project examines the character and ethics of Victorian object relations and reassesses the related critical paradigms of new historicism, thing theory, and studies in material culture. Other projects include work on Oscar Wilde and nineteenth-century atomic theory; ongoing contributions to debates concerning contemporary Marxist theory; and increasing involvement in questions regarding the status of theory and the university within the current neoliberal moment.
Ian AngusProfessor, Humanities Department | iangus@sfu.ca
Ian Angus teaches modern European thought and Canadian intellectual history. He teaches in both these areas in the Humanities Department. In 2007 and 2008 he was Director of the Prague Field School, which is based in the Humanities Department. His intellectual formation began with the 20th century European philosophies of phenomenology and the Frankfurt school of critical theory. His first book, Technique and Enlightenment (1984) probed the historical sources of the ‘instrumental reason’ that legitimates the modern advance of technology and argued for a form of technology assessment that is not only ethical but pertains also to the construction of human identity. A significant turn in Angus’ work occurred when he began a critical engagement with the history of English Canadian social and political thought, which resulted in A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness (1997), which was widely reviewed in both the academic and popular press. (Dis)figurations: Discourse/Critique/Ethics (2000), Primal Scenes of Communication: Communication, Consumerism, Social Movements (2000), and Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (2001)—have presented his positions with regard to contemporary political philosophy and communication theory. His most recent book Identity and Justice was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2008.
Eleanor StebnerJ.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities, 2005 | estebner@sfu.ca Eleanor Stebner teaches courses on religion, culture, and ideas; taught at the Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Winnipeg Faculty of Theology before coming to SFU. Publications focus on women and religion, Jane Addams, and movements for social change. She is currently pondering the texts and lives of select Nobel Peace laureates.
David Mirhady teaches courses on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, including Classical Mythology, an Introduction to the Ancient World, and courses on key moments and texts from ancient Athens and Rome. His research interests have mainly focused on ancient Athenian law and rhetoric and on the “School of Aristotle”. He published Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric in 2007.
Staff
Sandra holds a BA in Music and English from UBC. She has sung with the Vancouver Cantata singers for more than 20 years, and has served on the boards of professional music and theatre companies in Vancouver.