Brenna Bhandar
Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law
Email: bhandar@allard.ubc.ca
Prior to joining the Allard School of Law at UBC in 2021, Brenna Bhandar was a Reader in Law and Critical Theory at SOAS, University of London, and previously held faculty positions at Queen Mary School of Law, Kent Law School and the University of Reading Law School. She has also held visiting appointments at L’École des hautes études en science sociales (Paris) and the Stellenbosch University Faculty of Law (South Africa). She is the author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), and a research associate at the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London and a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.
Research Area:
Dr. Brenna Bhandar’s research and teaching lie within the fields of property law, critical theory, colonial legal history and critical race feminism. She is the author or editor of 4 volumes, including Colonial Lives of Property: Law Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership, published in 2018 with Duke University Press, and the co-authored book of interviews (with Rafeef Ziadah) Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought published in 2020 with Verso. Her work has been translated into Catalan, Spanish, German and Italian.
Dennis Britton
Associate Professor, Department of English Language & Literatures
Email: dennis.britton@ubc.ca
Dr. Britton researches and teaches early modern English literature, with a focus on the history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, and the history of emotion.
He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race.” He is currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Difference on the Early Modern English Stage and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England.
Research Area: Medieval and Early Modern Literatures, the History of Race, Critical Race Theory, Protestant Theology, the History of Emotion
T. Patrick Carrabré
Director, Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
Professor, Composition
Email: t.patrick.carrabre@ubc.ca
Dr. T. Patrick Carrabré is a Métis composer living in Vancouver. Construction of identity and community engagement are long-term themes in his compositions, concert and radio programming, and administrative activities. Recognition for his music has included two JUNO nominations, a recommendation at the International Rostrum of Composers, several WCMA nominations and one award (Best Classical Composition). For well over a decade he worked closely with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, including six seasons as composer-in-residence and co-curator of the Winnipeg New Music Festival. Dr. Carrabré also served two-seasons as the weekend host of CBC Radio 2’s contemporary music show The Signal.
Research Area: Community Engagement, Decolonization, Digital Strategies for Musicians, Music Composition
Dr. Carrabré’s current research-creation project is a musical work for the Harbourfront Centre’s Music in the Garden concert series. It will explore manifestations of Métis identity from the early 1800s to the present. Following the Red River Resistance (1869–1870) and the Battle of Batoche (1885), it was often dangerous to publicly identify as Métis. Beginning with a reworking of Pierre Falcon’s “Battle of Frog Plain”, through the years of hiding (“My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Louis Riel), this work will conclude with a setting of Gregory Scofield “Since When,” showing the ever changing face of the Métis. To realize this project, Dr. Carrabré is working with Métis mezzo-soprano Rebecca Cuddy, who already has a rich repertoire of Métis related material that will provide further context for our continued struggle to be recognized as a unique people and claim space wherever we might now live.
Christine D’Onofrio
Director, Digital Scholarship in Arts (DiSA)
Associate Professor of Teaching, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory
Email: christine.donofrio@ubc.ca
Prof. Christine D’Onofrio is a visual artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended York University in Toronto for her BFA, and completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia. D’Onofrio has held positions at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, University of Toledo, and the University of Windsor. She has exhibited her work extensively across Canada, at galleries such as: Eyelevel Gallery, Modern Fuel Gallery, Charles H Scott Gallery, Republic Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Gallery 44, La Centrale, and WARC Gallery. Prof. D’Onofrio has also given artist talks and served on panels in various institutions, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the prestigious “Art Now” lectures at the University of Lethbridge. Prof. D’Onofrio works in photography, video, digital media, interactive media, printmaking, sculpture, book works, and installation.
Research Area: Lens based imaging, digital media and interactivity, interested in feminism, social justice, humour, magic and practice based research pedagogies
Christina Laffin
Associate Professor of Classical Japanese, Department of Asian Studies
Email: christina.laffin@ubc.ca
Christina Laffin is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and a former Canada Research Chair in Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of British Columbia. She also serves as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Advisor in the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation.
Dr. Laffin researches women’s writing, travel literature, and the processes of education and socialization in premodern Japan. She has worked on equity and knowledge sharing for an eight-year project on East Asian religions, collaborated with graduate students to produce a video series on premodern Japan, and led a research cluster representing travel culture in early modern Japan through digital approaches to a seventeenth-century manuscript.
Research Area:
Medieval travel diaries; women’s education and socialization before 1600; poetic practices and waka culture; theories of travel, gender, and autobiography; noh theatre; and comparative approaches to medieval literature.
Shannon Leddy
Associate Professor, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Email: sleddy@mail.ubc.ca
Dr. Shannon Leddy (Métis) is a Vancouver based teacher and writer whose practice focuses on decolonizing education and Indigenous education within teacher education. She holds degrees in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Saskatchewan (1994), an MA in Art History (1997), and a BEd (2005) from the University of British Columbia. Her PhD research at Simon Fraser University focused on inviting pre-service teachers into dialogue with contemporary Indigenous art as a mechanism of decolonizing education and in order to help them become adept at delivering Indigenous education without reproducing colonial stereotypes. During her time as a public school teacher with the Vancouver School Board, Dr. Leddy worked at several high schools as a teacher of Art, Social Studies and English. After a two-year secondment to work as a Faculty Associate in SFU’s Professional Development Program in teacher education, she returned to the VSB to undertake the coordination of an arts-based mini-school. She has also worked as an Instructor in SFU’s Faculty of Education teaching courses in pedagogical foundations and Aboriginal education. In 2013 she was awarded SFU’s Aboriginal Graduate Entrance Scholarship and a SSHRC Bombardier Scholarship in 2015.
Research Area: Art Education Research, Arts Education, Cultural Studies, Environmental Education, Indigenous Education Research, Media, Semiotics, Text Studies, Museum Education Research, Non-Formal Learning, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Teacher Education Research, Ways of Knowing
The Situation of Education
Dr. Leddy developed a podcast on education that gives an opportunity for researchers, parents, teachers and students to discuss their experiences in education. As the facilitator/moderator, she brings a two-eyed seeing perspective to the production, looking at interviewee’s responses with both Western and Indigenous eyes. This podcast launched formally in January 2019, with the long-delayed second season anticipated in July of 2021.
Decolonizing Teaching Indigenizing Learning
In 2020 Dr. Leddy completed work on the Faculty of Education’s new website, Decolonizing Teaching Indigenizing Learning, which features Indigenous curriculum bundles developed by students in their third year of the NITEP program.
Renisa Mawani
Professor, Sociology
Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories Composition
Email: renisa@mail.ubc.ca
Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories and Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) peoples. From 2022-2025 she is a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London. Renisa is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020). With Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). With Antoinette Burton and Samantha Frost, she is co-editor of Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (forthcoming, 2024).
Research Area: Colonial Legal History; Critical Theory, Race and Racism; Affect; Time and Temporality; Oceans and Maritime Worlds; Settler Colonialism and Migration; Colonial India and the Diaspora; More-than-human Worlds
André Elias Mazawi
Head and Professor, Department of Educational Studies
Email: andre.mazawi@ubc.ca
Dr. André Elias Mazawi serves as Head, Professor, and Sociologist of Education, in the Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (BC), Canada. He is Affiliate Professor with the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research at the University of Malta, and an Affiliate Researcher with the Équipe de Recherche en Dimensions Internationales de l’Éducation (ERDIE) at the University of Geneva. His academic interests are in the areas of the cultural politics of schooling and higher education, the intersections between colonialism and education, with particular attention to the effects of privatization and geopolitics on schooling and educational policies, school governance, and school-higher education restructuring in the Arab region.
Research Area: Adult education, Citizenship and democracy, Higher Education, International Comparative Higher Education, International Development Education, Media and democracy, Policy, Post-colonial studies, Research methodologies, Sociology of Education, Sociology of Higher Education
Laura K. Nelson
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Director, Centre for Computational Social Science
Email: laura.k.nelson@ubc.ca
Dr. Nelson uses computational methods – principally text analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis techniques – to study social movements, culture, gender, and organizations and institutions. Substantively, her research has examined processes around the formation of collective identities and social movement strategy in feminist and environmental movements, continuities between cycles of activism and the role of place in shaping social movement activity, intersectionality in women’s movements and in the lived experiences during the 19th century in the U.S. South, gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship, the translation of academic ideas to practice in the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program (a program aimed at promoting women in STEM field in higher education), and gender inequality in emergency medicine departments. Methodologically, she has proposed frameworks to combine computational methods and machine learning with qualitative methods, including the computational grounded theory framework and leveraging the alignment between machine learning and the intersectionality research paradigm. She has developed and taught courses introducing social science and humanities students to computational methods and the scripting languages Python and R, data science courses, and graduate-level sociological theory. She is currently a co-PI on a million-dollar grant through the National Science Foundation to study the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through higher education networks, primarily in the United States.
Research Area: Social Movements, Culture, Gender, Organizations and Institutions
My current research projects include examining intersectionality in U.S. women’s movements; coverage of social movements in news media over time; ways in which history is recorded and remembered, particularly related to social movements; gender inequality in startups and entrepreneurship, emergency medicine, and other STEM fields; and the spread of gender-equity ideas related to STEM fields through networks in higher education (funded by a National Science Foundation grant).
Biz Nijdam
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies
Email: biz.nijdam@ubc.ca
Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Central, Eastern & Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she lives, works, and learns on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
Dr. Nijdam’s research and teaching examine the representation of history in comics, comics and new media on forced migration, intersections between Indigenous studies and German, European, and migration studies, and feminist methodologies in the graphic arts.
At UBC, she leads the Narratives Research Group in the UBC Centre for Migration Studies and founded and co-leads the recently established Comic Studies Research Cluster in UBC’s Public Humanities Hub.
Research Area: Comics Studies, German Studies, Media Studies
Dr. Nijdam’s research focuses on how new media and popular culture provide important entry points for engaging with complex discourses of human experience, illuminating systems of oppression, and interrogating issues of identity, gender, and sexuality.
Jasbir Puar
Professor, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice
Email: jpuar02@mail.ubc.ca
Jasbir K. Puar is a Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and Professor Emerita at Rutgers University where she was faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department for 23 years.
Dr. Puar is the author of the award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and is forthcoming in Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and translated into more than 20 languages.
Dr. Puar is also co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). In 2019 she received the Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.
Research Area:
Andrea Webb
Professor of Teaching, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Email: andrea.webb@ubc.ca
Dr. Andrea Webb spent a decade as a high school teacher before returning to higher education as a teacher educator. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education. Currently, Dr. Webb is part of a multinational SSHRC-funded project, Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education.
Research Area: teacher education, curriculum studies, scholarship of teaching and learning.