Faculty of Arts
Culture
A complicated legacy
Pete Rose has more hits than any player in Major League Baseball history, but he isn’t in its Hall of Fame because he bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds. Jeffrey Lenkov, BA’87, co-created a recent TV series about the controversial baseball legend.
Society
Telling the whole story
Yale historian Ned Blackhawk, BA’92, believes that too many accounts of U.S. history pay little attention to the pivotal role that the country’s Native Americans played in that history. His recent book, The Rediscovery of America, winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, serves as a corrective.
Health
Why microplastics could pose a big threat
In her unnerving new documentary about microplastics, science journalist Ziya Tong points to the growing evidence that these tiny pollutants are turning up almost everywhere – even inside our bodies.
Discovery
Exploring queer and feminist food culture
In her research on feminist restaurants and queer cuisine, Alex Ketchum, MA’13, PhD’18, an assistant professor at McGill’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, examines underexplored areas of culinary history and food culture.
People
When she’s not studying economic policy, she helps shape it
Adriana Kugler is an award-winning economics professor at Georgetown University – but she is often not there. Her academic career has been interrupted by appointments from the White House. In her current role, she is serving as a governor for the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Culture
An accomplishment worth kvelling about
While working on a master’s degree at McGill, Aaron Lansky, MA’80, launched a rescue mission, one that would play a significant role in the preservation of a culture facing serious peril. As the driving force behind the Yiddish Book Center, Lansky has helped save 1.5 million books and built a one-of-a-kind collection.
Culture
How Michel Tremblay became a Scottish sensation
Playwright Michel Tremblay is one of Quebec’s most revered artists, but his works have also been celebrated in Scotland, thanks to the Scots translations of his plays by Martin Bowman, BA’67, MA’69, and Bill Findlay. Those translations were recently collected in the two-volume Michel Tremblay: Plays in Scots.
Society
‘A million dimensions of inequality’
In her podcast series In/Equality, Debra Thompson, an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Political Science, interviews leading academic experts about different aspects of inequality. She wants to ‘create shortcuts’ to provide her audience with nuanced and accessible information about complicated issues.
Culture
An unconventional path to literary stardom
As an undergraduate, Kai Thomas, BA’16, examined old newspaper ads in the McGill Library about runaway slaves. That research helped inform In the Upper Country, his first novel, which won one of Canada’s top literary prizes last year.
Society
A new face for Canada’s top justice job
Canada’s justice minister and attorney general Arif Virani on tackling online hate, the importance of diversity in the judiciary, and how kicking around a soccer ball can break through partisan divisions even in a deeply polarized Parliament.
Discovery
Exploring the roots of the war in Ukraine
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Maria Popova became one of the media’s most popular go-to experts for providing context for the conflict. The McGill associate professor of political science has a new book out that examines the factors that led to the war.
Discovery
Taking stock of the state of English in Canada
Do English-speaking Canadians still say “chesterfield”? Are we more likely to opt for “Zee” or Zed”? These are some of the questions that McGill associate professor of linguistics Charles Boberg hopes to answer with a national survey that is looking at how English is being spoken in different parts of the country.