Faculty

Professor Ira Nadel says one of the trickiest parts about writing a person’s biography is deciding where to start. “Do you begin with the birth, the grandparents?” he asks.

Professor Ira Nadel, who teaches in the Dept. of English, says one of the trickiest parts about writing a person’s biography is deciding where to start. “Do you begin with the birth, the grandparents?” he asks from his orderly office in the Buchanan Tower, where he works as both biographer and English professor.

When that same question surfaced as Nadel was preparing to draft Leonard Cohen’s biography, Various Positions (Random House Canada: 1996), he found a unique way to frame a recurring emblem in the poet’s life — his search for a father. That is how Nadel settled upon the idea of beginning his account with something that the nine-year-old Cohen did the morning his father Nathan was to be buried in Montreal in 1943. “On the day of the funeral, he went up to his father’s room, found a bow-tie, cut it open, wrote his first poem, stuck it inside the bow-tie, and buried it in the back yard,” relates Nadel, whose biography, now in its second edition, has become one of the definitive accounts of Cohen’s life. “Now if that isn’t both a dramatic and revealing moment about his relationship to what he thought art might be able to do — poetry in particular — and his relationship to his father, I don’t know what is.”

To Nadel — who has spent years researching and teaching how narrative shapes in storytelling — that moment became a skeleton key for understanding Cohen’s life. It unlocked answers to relationships he formed with certain powerful male figures in his life, including Louis Dudek, an early professor at McGill University, poet Irving Layton, and Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, his Zen teacher.

Nadel’s uncanny ability to uncover patterns in the lives of others — including in his accounts of celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard and playwright-director David Mamet — has guided much of his academic career. It’s also earned him numerous awards: he’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a UBC Distinguished University Scholar and recipient of the 1996 Medal for Canadian Biography.

Yet his work encompasses more than the biographical genre; he’s also very interested in Victorian literature, and believes being deeply immersed in a subject is the source to being a great teacher. “I think someone must be engaged in their field. They have to be active. And by that I mean they are writing and they are researching and writing.”

Not to mention resorting to remarkable methods to get students forging new connections with the material at hand, which is something Nadel is known to do. He remembers the time he taught a course called “The Body in Literature,” which focused how the human body had been represented in a selection of English texts. “Coincidentally, I had a friend at the med school who was a professor of anatomy,” recalled Nadel, who arranged for interested students to observe a computerized dissection. “And we watched it — male body, female body, every angle, every part of the human body: dissected. Fantastic.” Then, students were toured through the museum of anatomy normally reserved for medical students. “Here you had body parts in formaldehyde, and it was astonishing,” he recalls. “When we finished and we met again — I don’t know how many days later — we approached the material differently.”

In addition to books on the art of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and a biography of American novelist Leon Uris, Nadel is wrote an article entitled Count Me In: Comedy in Dracula.

Dracula, he says, may also figure in an upcoming course he’s designing right now called “Beverages and Books.” So is a course on “Modernisms.”

“I don’t sit still,” he admits. “That’s one of my secrets.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA ’06), a former editor with The Ubyssey.

“Fast education is a lot like fast food,” Professor Allen Sens of Political Science analogizes. “You get it quickly, it didn’t taste like much, but it’ll do for now.”

Professor Allen Sens has spent his professional life chewing over the kind of big-world problems his students want to fix.

“Anyone can criticize,” says Sens, adopting the same dramatic, bass tone that makes him a favourite in the classroom. “You just get a soapbox, go down to Stanley Park, stand up, and start screaming. It’s a lot harder to say what you’d actually do to effect positive change.”

Sens believes a pinhole lens is inadequate for big-picture issues like global warming, sustainability, genetically modified foods, and AIDS. That’s why he is troubled that most first-year students are directed like fish into one of two streams, Arts or Science, and spend the next four, or five years narrowing in on one specific focus, never to turn back. “We can’t have a society that’s going to be capable of solving these problems without having this understanding of both the scientific basis for the problems and the social and humanities perspectives of the problems as well.”

Fusing the physical life sciences dimensions of something like climate change together with political and social aspects is the inspiration behind the Terry Project, which Sens co-coordinates with David Ng, director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory in the Michael Smith Labs. Terry brings renowned public speakers like Stephen Lewis to UBC and also publishes creative writing, mainly from undergraduates, on terry.ubc.ca, the project’s website.

This year, Sens and Ng unveiled a cross-disciplinary course they’ve been shaping, called “Global Issues in the Arts and Sciences.” “Our intent is to get students thinking in an interdisciplinary way, across Arts and Science, very early in their careers,” Sens explains. The professor has earned wide appreciation for his efforts, winning the 2003 Killam Teaching prize from fellow-faculty, plus two Just Dessert Awards, given on behalf of students by the Alma Mater Society.

Besides teaching in the Department of Political Science and being chair of the International Relations Program, Sens is probably best known for teaching “Introduction to Global Politics,” a must-take course that fills up quickly every time it is offered. “Let’s face it, content changes all the time, especially in international relations,” says Sens, referring to his own experience as a student. His PhD thesis on the possibility of a global nuclear war triggered in Europe changed “over the course of virtually an evening,” when the Cold War ended.

With this in mind, he tries to provide students with tools for lifelong learning so they can tackle those issues that frequently change in shape and size. “One of the things that troubles me about what I’ve seen particularly in recent undergraduates is they’re all in a great big rush. It’s as if our society has already imprinted onto them this image of where they need to be at a certain point in their lives, and what you need to have in order to advance, or be successful,” Sens says. “It may be more of a path to ulcers and premature graying.”

He advocates the five-year degree, and encourages students to submit their ideas to undergraduate journals, and get involved in policy debates and student governance — in other words, to allow time for thought, reflection, and analysis before graduating.

According to Sens, unless we slow down and think beyond our own personal areas of interest, we will not be equipped to address the global issues we face.

“Fast education is a lot like fast food,” he analogizes. “You get it quickly, it didn’t taste like much, but it’ll do for now. I’m a promoter of slow food and slow education. Savor it, develop the flavours, try new things, experiment.”

By Josephine Anderson, an English major at UBC.

In some ways, Professor Tina Loo wants to be the Al Gore of the history department.

“He’s a masterful teacher,” says Loo, who saw the former U.S. vice-president deliver his history-making slideshow in Calgary in 2007. “It’s not everybody who can speak for two-and-a-half hours about a bunch of really boring atmospheric science and make it seem interesting and be full of passion,” she adds.

Loo was impressed by how Gore handled a tough crowd: an auditorium filled with oil barons and top politicians in a province quickly becoming Canada’s biggest carbon producer.

Both Al Gore and his award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) figure in a first-year course on global warming that Loo, an environmental history expert, will teach this fall from the Dept. of History. Called “History 105: The Global Environment,” the course explores, among other things, why Gore received a standing ovation at the end of his Calgary presentation — a surprising finale for many. “Environmental issues are really shaping political engagement,” says Loo, who believes the current climate change debate is politicizing people beyond the existing categories of left and right.

By exploring that shift with students, Loo hopes to “get beyond the paralysis of that all of us seem to feel on the issue” of global warming.

That approach to a troubling topic echoes her work on other themes. As the Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Loo studies how government policies and social discourses impacted the environment in 19 and 20th century Canada.

Loo specializes in uncovering how past rationales have led to modern environmental dilemmas. Her research has focused the era of mega-projects and hydroelectric dams in BC, as well as Canada’s history of wildlife management, both subjects on which she has authored numerous books and articles. In her work on state power projects, for example, she explored how governments banked on public optimism and confidence in the state in the 1950s through 1970s. The belief that damming rivers for electricity could result in a better society for everyone helped shape the provincial landscape we know today, she says.

“That was a very particular historical moment that to a certain extent has passed,” she explains, adding that she thinks people now are quite cynical of the ability of government and suspicious of the notion of experts. “Partly because expertise has got us into a lot of trouble,” she says. “Science has not necessarily resulted in the better world that people hoped for.”

Loo’s work with First Nations has tried to show how emotional and anecdotal experiences of environmental change are just as important as the official research carried out by government scientists.

If there’s one thing she’s gleaned from her work digging through archives — which she likens to “an Indiana Jones experience” — it’s that individuals and local groups can impact outcomes, including global warming.

“I think that history tells you that things aren’t inevitable, and they could have been different,” she says.

By Bryan Zandberg (BA ’06), former editor with The Ubyssey.

Professor Ashok Kotwal’s career in economics has focused on the problems of absolute poverty and the inequality of incomes. His most current research has centred on the impacts of the recent economic reforms in India.

Professor Kotwal still remembers what induced him to become a development economist, even though that journey started three decades ago. Like many of his friends, Kotwal had recently emigrated from India to the United States working as an electrical engineer in the computer industry around Boston. Five years into his new life in Boston, however, he says he was still thinking of life back in Bombay. “There were people [in India] far smarter than I was, and just because I happened to be in the US, I had a much better standard of living and far fewer constraints on my freedom than they did.”

Kotwal’s Journey: Ethics and Economics

Casting about for what he could do about the disparity, Kotwal says his mind kept turning to his politically engaged family, and especially to his brother-in-law, who taught economics at a college, but spent most of the time working in the slums of Bombay. He decided to study economics to understand better what kept some countries poor. A doctoral degree from Boston University and nearly 30 years at UBC later, Kotwal has a distinguished career in development economics. Though applicable across borders and cultures, much of his research has focused on the problems of development within the Indian experience.

The West, he notes, is well aware that the world’s two most populous nations — China and India — are rising. However, fewer people know the story of the effect of the massive economic changes for the poor in these countries. “They’re both growing fast over the last 20 years, but what’s happening in China is much different than what’s happening in India,” Kotwal says. While absolute poverty has fallen dramatically in China, it has been much less so in India. Twenty-five per cent of the population, or approximately 250 million people — that is, about eight times the population of Canada — still live on less than one dollar a day, Kotwal explains.

Unearthing the causes of that dynamic — why wealth in India fails to trickle down — is the subject of his recent study conducted jointly with colleague Mukesh Eswaran and two scholars from India. Organizational structures and institutions, labour and credit markets, social capital, and the interaction between agriculture and industry are some of the topics he researched. His book Why Poverty Persists in India, published in 1994, and a significant part of his research in development economics was done jointly with Mukesh Eswaran.

Tied to his academic inquiries is a deep desire for his work to be applicable. In fact, some of the research questions he studies are generated from NGOs working in India. “They want something concrete, and not just academic abracadabra,” Kotwal says.

Teaching About Poverty

But when you’re dealing with a problem as pervasive as the causes of a sub-continent’s poverty, questions can be more forthcoming than answers, he admits. “Sometimes it’s frustrating to students,” Kotwal says. “They say, ‘If you don’t know, nobody knows. Then why should we study it?’”

Perplexing as poverty may be sometimes, the journey of economic development around the world means the work never gets dull. Neither do Kotwal’s first-hand stories. To teach, he draws from his frontline research in India to talk to students about economic development, international development and other world issues. He also teaches a second-year course called “Understanding Globalization.”

“I came into economics quite late,” he says.

“Basically I ended up doing research on the real questions that motivated me.”

By Bryan Zandberg (BA, 2006, in French and Spanish). Bryan is a former editor with The Ubyssey.

Discovering where ideas come from.

Ever since he joined the Department of Geography in 1983, Professor Trevor Barnes has tried to do more than expand the minds of his students. He has tried to expand the narrow focus of his own discipline. “I always want to say to my students, ‘Where do ideas come from?’” Barnes explains. “They don’t just come like lightning out of the blue sky, but they come from particular kinds of practices, which are bound up with culture, with politics, with cultural division.”

Origins of Geography

Barnes says we need to look no further than the first geographers for an example of what he means. During the 19^th century, when the colonial powers were scrambling to lay claim to vast swaths of Africa, rulers turned to geographers to survey and understand the wealth of the land — and more often than not to fight wars over their respective empires. “That’s where the discipline gets going,” says Barnes, who started out as an economist — a field he says he found too “narrow, purified and abstract” — before going into economic geography.

“Geography is so much about variety, diversity and context that it just doesn’t fit with the notion that there are these essences, that there are these unimpeachable cores,” he says.

Research and Recognition

Beyond the classroom, Barnes has been a leading figure in re-theorizing economic geography through a close analysis of its underlying values. He has shown how dominant social attitudes have influenced the work of geographers just as much as rational scientific practices. The results have earned Barnes many distinctions, including the Presidential Award of the Association of American Geographers in 2006.

These days, his research focus on the topic of creative cities — urban centres such as Vancouver that are moving beyond an industrial economy. He is especially interested in how they vie with each other to lure an educated workforce in the information age. Aside from his interest in modern cities as a subject of research, he says it’s also a subject he likes to teach. “I think that’s the course that students enjoy most, because it’s about them and their lives; they can step out of the classroom and they’re there.”

Challenging Students

But Barnes also likes to leverage the shock value of the dramatic changes he sees unfolding in the world’s economy.To get his students thinking about globalization and consumer culture, for example, he tells them how Wal-Mart imports about 15 per cent of China’s total manufactured output. China, he reminds his students, is the biggest manufacturing country in the world.“You almost hear this collective sucking in of breath, when you say a fact that they didn’t know before.”

Still, facts by themselves don’t make a good course, nor are they going to help students understand a complex, changing world. “They have to be placed within a larger context,” he says, which is where his particular perspective comes into play.

“My stories tend to be critical. I mean, I’m on the left, politically, so I’m suspicious of what goes on in the name of capitalism. And so I try to raise those issues about some theme below the surface.”