Jill Fellows earned her PhD in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Alan Richardson. Her dissertation, entitled “Making Up Knowers: Objectivity and Categories of Epistemic Subjects” explored and defended the ideal of objectivity against those who see it as a useless and harmful ideal for seekers of knowledge to hold. She is currently researching issues of testimony and trust between scientists and non-scientists. She hopes to understand how to build trusting relationships between communities where knowledge cannot easily be shared.
She received her MA in Philosophy at the University of Calgary where she wrote a thesis on Personal Identity with reference to Alzheimer’s Disease and Dissociative Identity Disorder under the supervision of Dr. Brian Grant. Her BA was also in Philosophy, with a minor in Anthropology.
She comes to UBC’s Arts One program after teaching at Quest University in Squamish B.C. for three years as a visiting faculty member. Quest University designs all its courses on an interdisciplinary model. Jill enjoys teaching in an interdisciplinary environment. She welcomes the challenge of exploring other disciplines with students and the opportunity to learn from colleagues with diverse academic backgrounds.
When not preoccupied by philosophical questions, Jill enjoys hiking, yoga, playing three-chord songs on her guitar (badly), and reading Terry Pratchett novels.
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This Year's Texts
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Sr. Instructor, Philosophy and Arts One
PhD, University of Texas
Email: c.hendricks@ubc.ca
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I started teaching in the department of Philosophy at UBC in 2004, and am thrilled to be able to participate in the Arts One program. This program seems to be a great forum for doing the kind of intensive, interactive, and interdisplinary work that I feel is important for genuine critical inquiry and an engaged, active education.
Before coming to UBC I taught for four years at the University of Wisconsin-Rock County, a two-year transfer campus of the University of Wisconsin system – students would start their studies there, and move on to finish them at one of the larger universities. I found the small class sizes and the liberal arts focus on that campus to be a great atmosphere for students beginning their college careers, as it offered ample opportunity for discussion, for honing writing skills, and for integrating disciplines through close contact between professors and students in different departments. I believe the Arts One program offers Arts students at UBC a similar opportunity for starting their university studies off well, and I feel fortunate to be able to participate.
I earned my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, focusing my graduate studies on the work of feminist and Continental philosophers such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault. While in Texas, Wisconsin, and at UBC I have taught courses such as: Introduction to Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Aesthetics (Philosophy of Art), and Introductory Logic.
My research lately has been on the political role of philosophers and philosophy — what philosophers as intellectuals, and the study and practice of philosophy, can contribute to discussions about, and resolutions of, social and political questions/problems. Within this broad topic I consider issues such as relationships between theory and practice, questions of authority and autonomy (in traditional educational settings and in the public realm), and what it means to engage in “critical thinking.” I am particularly interested in delving more deeply into the philosophy of education in the coming years.
In addition, I try to spend as much time as I can enjoying the natural beauty of the fantastic landscape in and around Vancouver!
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Brandon Konoval DMA (UBC) joined the Arts One Programme in 1999, and has been on faculty at the School of Music since 1998. He has particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work with students from a wide variety of backgrounds and with diverse interests, and who share his interest in continually seeking new ideas to explore.
In addition to his research on the music of Béla Bartók, Dr. Konoval has presented papers that examine the relationships between music and the history of science for the Columbia History of Science Group, the History of Science Society, the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, and the American Musicological Society, and has published in the Annals of Science.
At UBC, Dr. Konoval has long been associated with the development of distance learning initiatives, co-authoring a music appreciation course with noted Canadian pianist, Dr. Robert Silverman, and creating his own online introduction to music theory. As a pianist, Dr. Konoval has appeared on local and national television, on CBC Radio (Arts National and West Coast Performance) and in concert in Austria and Japan, and performed an all-Liszt benefit concert for the Stephen Straker Arts One Bursary fund.
He enjoys exploring our coastal mountains and the Canadian Rockies on foot and on ski, especially in the enthusiastic company of his son. In 2009, Dr. Konoval received a UBC Killam Teaching Prize.
Areas of Interest: European intellectual and cultural history, history and philosophy of science, music theory and history
Current Projects: I am concluding a study devoted to the relationship between mathematics, acoustics and music theory as developed in the late discourses of Vincenzo Galilei, in light of the development of early modern mathematical philosophy of nature. I continue to develop a project on utopian narrative and conjectural history, with particular attention to Plato and More, and Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant. I have begun work on 19th century bodily discipline as it evolved in the context of Romanticism and the figure of the virtuoso pianist, with particular reference to the relationship between ‘method’ and ascetic values and practices. I am currently developing an online introduction to music history and appreciation, with the support of UBC Open Learning and Technology.
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Deanna Kreisel received her PhD in English from Northwestern University and was graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
She has been teaching in the English department at the University of British Columbia since 2006; before coming to UBC she taught in universities and colleges in North Carolina, Mississippi, and New Hampshire.
Her first book, Economic Woman: Political Economy and Gender in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, was published by University of Toronto Press in January 2012; it explores the relationship among the economic demand function, collective fears of capitalist stagnation, and images of feminized sexuality in the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. She also has published articles on George Eliot’s Adam Bede; on Rudyard Kipling and boredom; on Henry James and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore; and on Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Dracula.
She is currently at work on a new book project on configurations of interiority in the late Victorian and early Modernist periods, with a focus on architecture, psychology, and aesthetic theory.
As evidence of her deep commitment to all things Victorian, she notes that she has named her cats Alice and Harriet, without realizing at the time that they are both characters in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son.
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Associate Professor, Sociology
PhD, University of Toronto
Email: renisa@mail.ubc.ca
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Looking Forward?
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Renisa’s teaching areas include Law and Society / Criminology, Social and Cultural Theory, Sociology of Knowledge and Culture, Political Philosophies of Law and Justice.
Her research interests include Historical/Comparative Sociologies of Empire, Sociologies of Modernity, Law and Nature, Postcolonial Theory, Biopolitics and Racisms, Cosmopolitanism, Affect, Law and Society in South Asia.
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Brian McIlroy is Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film. His background straddles English Literature, Drama and Theatre studies, and Film Studies. He obtained his MA in Drama and Theatre Studies from Leeds University in England in 1982 and his PhD in English Literature from UBC in 1991.
He created the BA in Film Studies at UBC in 2002 and normally teaches a wide range of film studies courses, from first year introductory courses to fourth year seminars on such film directors as Akira Kurosawa, Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier.
In 2011-12, he received the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring.
He enjoys the interdisciplinary nature of Arts One and engaging with first year students as they navigate a fascinating and challenging reading list.
When not doing research (currently exploring early cinema exhibition and cinemagoing in Vancouver in 1914), and teaching, his main extracurricular activity seems to be chauffeuring his teenaged daughter to circus training. He has promised himself one day to have a golden labrador as a pet, but for the moment he occasionally dog-sits for friends.
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Associate Professor, English
PhD, Queen’s University
Email: kevin.mcneilly@ubc.ca
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Kevin McNeilly has taught cultural studies, critical theory and contemporary literatures in the Department of English at UBC. He has been interested in poetics and philosophy since graduate school: he wrote his Master’s thesis on the poetry of Robert Bringhurst, and his doctoral dissertation on the later work of William Butler Yeats. He has written and published scholarship and critical essays on a variety of literature, media and music, including work by writers, thinkers and performers such as John Zorn, Charles Mingus, Franz Boas, Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Zwicky, Tom Raworth, Steve Lacy, T. S. Eliot, Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Robert Creeley, and Theodor Adorno, as well as on television programs including The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is a member of the “Improvisation, Community and Social Practice” research initiative. His book of poetry, Embouchure, was published by Nightwood Editions in April, 2011.
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Instructor, Arts One
PhD, University of British Columbia
Email: gavin.paul@ubc.ca
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Gavin Paul’s research interests centre on Shakespeare and early modern drama. His work on the intersections of editorial practice, textual theory, and performance history has appeared in The Review of English Studies, Shakespeare: The Journal of the British Shakespeare Association, The Bulletin for the Society of Renaissance Studies, Comitatus, The Upstart Crow, and Literature Compass (where he is the three-time winner of Blackwell Publishing’s Essay Prize). He has recently contributed a chapter to Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, a collection of essays forthcoming from Palgrave. His doctoral thesis analyzing the history of Shakespearean editors’ engagements with performance won the Paul G. Stanwood Prize from UBC and the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America—this international prize is awarded in recognition of the year’s outstanding work in Shakespeare studies. His current project is a book-length study of the performance history of Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens (Manchester University Press).
He is also interested in comic book literature and literary responses to 9/11; his work in these fields has appeared in American Periodicals, European Comic Art, and The Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels.
Gavin taught in Arts One from 2010-2012; he is thrilled to be returning to a program that he finds immensely rewarding. He has previously held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and a limited-term Assistant Professorship in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University.
He loves being a husband and a father, and he is only slightly embarrassed to admit that he is regularly distracted by Downton Abbey and conversations regarding the convoluted history of the Marvel Universe.
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Medieval legal and social history; history of women and the family, world history to 1500. Program Advisor for History, Medieval Studies, and the Law and Society Minor.
For her publications, see her History department homepage.
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Having trained in Classics, Museum Studies and Classical Archaeology at the University of Toronto and at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, I spent many enjoyable and productive years living and working in Greece and Turkey.
I have taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at McMaster University and at UBC on a wide range of subjects dealing with antiquity, art history and archaeological method. I have published a book and articles in my areas of special archaeological interest, ancient ceramics and architectural history.
More recently I have been privileged to teach for over a decade in the Arts One program. This unique learning environment has provided me with a wonderful opportunity to encourage the potential in each of my seminar students for reading closely, for critical thinking, for powerful skills in argumentation and for logical, clear writing. Each year has been a journey of discovery taken together as we navigate the course syllabus and I look forward to each September as I embark with my seminar on the Arts One adventure!
I enjoy other challenges too and each day face one of a different type as I train for and ride in dressage competitions on my large, feisty equine partners, Con Brio and Rossini.
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