International Visiting Scholars Bring Range of Expertise to UVic

Every year, the University of Victoria hosts a considerable number of visiting scholars from a wide range of countries.In most cases, these arrangements are made between two professors with a common interest in a particular research topic. The visitors stay at UVic for varying periods of time, from one month up until one year.

During this time, they engage in a broad range of activities: carrying out joint research with a UVic professor; giving special guest lectures, and even co-teaching a course. Visiting international scholars are a win-win arrangement: both the visiting and the hosting professors are exposed to a range of perspectives and will learn and grow from looking at particular research areas and research questions through various cultural and social "lenses."
 

Don Brothwell and Keith Dobney - Roots and Effects of Animal Domestication

Don Brothwell is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, a founding editor of the Journal of Archaeological Science and a pioneer in the field of archaeological science. He has authored key books in the fields of paleopathology, vertebrate zooarchaeology and environmental archaeology, and was one of the earliest proponents of the "Out of Africa" theory of the development of man.

Keith Dobney is holder of the Wellcome Trust Bioarchaeological Fellowship at the University of Durham whose professional relationship with Dr. Brothwell stretches back to a research assistantship in the 1980s. UVic welcomed the two professors in the summer of 2004 to team-teach two courses in osteoarchaeology, the study of ancient bones.

They were hosted by Rebecca Wigen of the Department of Anthropology, who organized the conference for which Dr. Dobney originally visited the University in 1998 and at which he "fell in love with the place."

The courses, entitled "Case Studies in Domestication and Socioeconomic Aspects of Human Societies" and "The Zooarchaeology of Pests, Poultry and Pathology," focused on the past relationships of animals with human beings in terms of their domestication, their importance to human diet, and their roles as markers of prestige in early societies as well as spreaders of disease. Brothwell and Dobney have found the combination of perspectives and specialties they bring to the team-teaching method very effective in challenging and engaging their students.
 

Zhang Tingmin - Improving EFL teaching in China

 Tingmin is an English professor at the Kunming University of Science and Technology in Kunming, China . In her 16 years of teaching English as a foreign language, she has developed a special interest in teaching methodology and the difficulties involved in teaching students how to write. In China, university-level English is frequently taught by temporary staff from English-speaking countries, who may lack formal training and teaching or language skills, and often struggle with cultural issues. With Dr. Robert Anthony of UVic's Faculty of Education, who specializes in teaching Language Arts, Ms. Zhang is spending a year in Victoria as a visiting scholar analyzing information gathered from evaluations completed by her students in China and studying Canadian university and private English as a Foreign Language (EFL) programs. She hopes to develop a teaching methodology that fosters effective cooperation between Chinese and foreign teachers and better serves students, and says she will be "all ears and all eyes" as she studies the difficulties of foreign-language instruction and acquisition across a cultural divide while she gets first first-hand experience of an English-speaking culture.

María Amor Barros del Río - Irish Women Authors from a European and a North American Perspective

 Amor Barros is a lecturer in English at Miguel Cervantes European University (UEMC) in Valladolid, Spain. In 2001 she completed her PhD thesis on Irish author Edna O'Brien, and in the winter of 2004/05 she will publish a volume on Irish history and literature in relation to women. She visited UVic in the summer of 2004 as a guest of Christine St. Peter in the Department of Women's Studies to pursue their mutual interest in Irish women authors. When she came to UVic, Dr. Barros had not met Dr. St. Peter in person; she initially contacted the UVic professor to express admiration for her work on modern Irish women's writing, and from this conversation, arrangements were made for Dr. Barros to come to Victoria so the two scholars could "exchange our points of view." She says Dr. St. Peter "has been very kind to me," and calls her "one of the best scholars I have ever read." Dr. Barros is also UEMC's International Relations Office Coordinator, and hopes that from her research visit will spring formal, long-lasting ties between UVic and her institution.
 

Pornrat Damrhung - Introducing Southeast Asian Theatre to Canadian Students

Pornrat Damrhung is Associate Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of Dramatic Arts at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Her specialties include theatre for young people, cultural management, theatre design and the re-interpretation and re-invention of traditional Thai theatre and performance art.

She has an extensive background in production and costume design, and is an organizer of Bangkok 's annual Theatre Season festival. She is also a researcher of theatre arts in schools for Thailand 's Ministry of Education. Ms. Damrhung has been invited by Ann Tanner of the UVic Department of Theatre to teach a course in fall 2004 on the "Theatre of Southeast Asia," in which she will "provide insight into the peoples and lands of Southeast Asia" by looking at the live theatre traditions of the region. The course examines how issues faced by Southeast Asian people in everyday life inform and influence an artistic sensibility, and how traditional culture is adapted to contemporary artistic visions.
 

Moshe Carmeli - Re-Envisioning Relativity

Astrophysicist Moshe Carmeli is Albert Einstein Professor of Theoretical Physics at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva, Israel. He has also done important work at the University of Maryland and for the US Department of Defense as well as being involved in the nomination process for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Re-envisioning Einstein's theories of Special and General Relativity and building on the work of Edwin Hubble, Dr. Carmeli has suggested that the universe's expansion must be constantly accelerating, and that time is therefore relative; in other words, it can only be measured relative to the position and velocity of the measurer. This also means that time must have moved more slowly in the past when the universe was smaller and moving more slowly. Carmeli's work has posed an intriguing set of problems for theoretical physicists and has even been investigated by scholars for its philosophical and religious implications. He is currently on sabbatical at UVic doing research on subatomic particles with UVic physicist Fred Cooperstock, with whom Dr. Carmeli has a longstanding personal and professional relationship.
 

Ralph Becker - Research Abroad Builds International Scientific Ties

Ralph S. Becker is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Houston, Texas and an Institute of International Education Fulbright Scholar who has been a visiting and plenary scholar at universities in 24 countries and has spent the bulk of his academic career abroad. One of his diverse research interests is photochemistry, the science of how chemical compounds react to light, and he has patented photochromic materials that are now used widely in the manufacture of sunglasses. Dr. Becker spent the summer of 2004 at UVic doing research with the Department of Chemistry's Dr. Peter Wan into methods of energizing photosensitive compounds with lasers that have the potential to do everything from revolutionizing fungicides and pesticides to making it possible to store information in a glass of water. He will also be teaching a graduate seminar entitled "New Ways of Thinking about Relativity in Photochemistry and Molecules." Dr. Becker sees his extensive international teaching and research experience as the natural complement to his scientific work: both, for him, are about learning new ways to understand the world and perpetuate principles of collaboration, communication and enquiry.

Jeon Sang-Gil - Human Resources Management in Korea and Canada

Jeon Sang-Gil is a Professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at Hanyang University in Ansan, Korea . His interests include developing leadership and creativity in business management, and the relationship between leadership in business and national culture. He has also done extensive consulting for Korean firms. Dr. Jeon is spending a year at UVic to work on a book on Asian and Western human resource development and management in comparative perspective. He cites UVic's innovative, flexible human resources practices as one reason why he wanted to do his research here. He also notes that the international perspective offered by the intensive global marketing and entrepreneurship programs in the Faculty of Business' International Summer Institute for Business Management (ISIBM) are arousing a great deal of interest at Korean universities. He hopes to be able to act as a liaison between UVic and Korean companies whose employees wish to take advantage of these training opportunities in international business management.

Thomas Risse and Tanja A. Börzel - European Integration and Intergovernmental Relations

Thomas Risse is holder of the Chair in International Politics at the Center for Transatlantic Foreign and Security Policy of the Freie Universität Berlin, and has published extensively on international relations and European integration. Tanja A. Börzel, is a Professor in the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft at the Universität Heidelberg. She is also interested in the implications of integration as well as intergovernmental relations in the European Union. Professors Risse and Börzel spent the month of August 2004 at UVic as guests of Amy Verdun, who holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration Studies and is head of the Department of Political Science's European Studies Program. Their relationship with Dr. Verdun dates back to their time at the European University Institute in Florence in the late 1990s. While at UVic, Dr. Risse will be doing research and writing on European identity and the problem of governance in failed states. Dr. Börzel will be looking at compliance with EU law in light of expansion. They will also be giving some lectures on these topics. This will be the couple's second research stay at UVic as guests of Dr. Verdun; they visited once before in 1999.