The Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations
The Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations is held on a rotating basis by an ICSLAC faculty member entrusted with making a leading contribution to the program. Building on an established record of interdisciplinary research, the Professorship holder creates synergies and engagement around a topic of specific relevance to the Cultural Mediations academic community. The Professorship revolves around the delivery of a special topic seminar enhanced throughout the academic year by a program of events. It is named in honour of Ruth and Mark Phillips, two emeritus ICSLAC faculty members whose lasting contributions helped shape the Cultural Mediations program and the Institute as a whole as a thriving academic environment for interdisciplinary doctoral research.
CURRENT PROFESSORSHIP HOLDER
2025-2027:
Traction, Flight, Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines
Dr. Malini Guha (Film Studies, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture)
Dr. Malini Guha (she/her) is the author of From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Elizabeth Evans) of London as Screen Gateway (Routledge University Press, 2023). Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, NECSUS, PUBLIC: Art \Culture| Ideas, Mediapolis, Screening the Past and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Screen and the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. Guha is currently working on a research project that revisits a number of longstanding questions and debates about cinema and reality by attending to the dynamics of traction, flight and becoming. She was awarded a FASS Mid-Career Research Grant (2021) for this project as well as a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2023-2025). As part of her SSHRC grant, she commissioned artist, curator and educator Neven Lochhead to produce Something Happened (2024), a residency and exhibition platform based in Tamworth, Ontario.
PAST PROFESSORSHIP HOLDERS
2023-2025:
Directions and Dead Ends in the Law and Literature Movement
Dr. Philip Kaisary (Law and Legal Studies, Department of English Literature)
Dr. Philip Kaisary is the author of The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014) and From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in Atlantic Studies, Law & Humanities, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), and Slavery & Abolition, among other publications. He has received fellowships and grants from organizations including the Fulbright Program and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor in Cultural Mediations and an Associate Professor in the Department of Law & Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His current research comprises a critique of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and a proposal for the field’s reconstruction along more globally inclusive and materialist lines.
2021-2023:
Towards a Multi-temporal Pluriverse of Art: Decolonizing Universalized Historiographic and Temporal Frameworks
Dr. Birgit Hopfener (Art History)
Dr. Birgit Hopfener is an art historian of contemporary art and theory in the global context. She is an Associate Professor in the School for the Study of Art and Culture at Carleton University, cross-appointed with the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her research and teaching are situated in the field of critical global art history with a regional expertise in Chinese art.