Students

Professor Margery Fee completed her PhD on Canadian literary history at a time when the topic was not as popular as it is today. “People just laughed and said, ‘You want to do a thesis on Canadian literature? Is there any?” Fee says of her years as a graduate student. Since then, Canadian literature has become a legitimate area of study, and Fee has remained committed to giving students “subject matter that they are interested in.”

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.

James Enns wants to discover the relationship between what the eye offers up and what the mind is expecting. Enn’s research delves into what he calls the “zombie within,” or the unconscious visual system we use when internalizing visual information. He is the director of the UBC Vision Lab.

According to his biography, his research “includes studies of how the visual world is represented inside and outside of focused attention, how attention changes the contents of consciousness, how perception changes with development, and how to design visual displays for optimal human performance.”

He has served as Associate Editor for the journals Psychological Science and Visual Cognition. His research has been supported by grants from NSERC, BC Health & NATO. He has edited two research volumes on the Development of Attention, coauthored a textbook on perception and published numerous scientific articles on vision, attention and cognitive science. His book, “The Thinking Eye, The Seeing Brain” was recently released by W.W. Norton (NY). His PhD is from Princeton University and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

He was the recipient of the UBC’s Robert Knox Master Teaching Award in 2004.

[Photo courtesy CASS]