Christine Ramsay: “‘I Love Regina’… and its ‘Infinite Horizons’: The Art of the Small Prairie City”

Christine Ramsay is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies and Head of the Department of Media Production and Studies at the University of Regina.  Her research is in the areas of Canadian and Saskatchewan cinemas, masculinities in contemporary visual cultures, feminist film theory, philosophies of identity, and the culture of cities. She has written about these topics in several anthologies and journals, including Mind the Gap! Saskatchewan Cultural Spaces, Indigenous Screens, Expressions culturelles de la francophonie, Self Portrait II:  Cinema in Canada, Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture, North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980, Canada’s Greatest Films, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Post Script.  She is currently at work on two critical anthologies, Making It Like a Man! Canadian Masculinities in Practice for Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and Mind the Gap! for the Canadian Plains Research Centre.  Past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada, she currently serves as a member of the editorial boards of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. Also past Chair of the Regina Arts Commission, she is serving as Co-Chair of Regina’s ArtsAction Inc., a non-profit organization researching the role of arts and culture in downtown revitalization.

Ken Leyton-Brown:  “The Practice of Execution in Canada”

Ken Leyton-Brown is a member of the Department of History at the University of Regina, where he teaches Legal and Ancient History.  His research focuses on Canadian legal history, and emphasizes themes having to do with the role of law in society: what some have termed external legal history.  His most recent work, The Practice of Execution in Canada, examines the way in which capital sentences (i.e. the death penalty) were carried out in Canada, and suggests that practice theory is useful in understanding how execution was used by the authorities as a form of communication.  His current project looks at Chinese and the Law in early Saskatchewan.

Nicholas Ruddick: “Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities: Red Herring or Barmecide Feast?”

Nicholas Ruddick’s most recent books are The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel (Wesleyan University Press) and a new edition of Jack London’s classic dog story, The Call of the Wild, in the Broadview Editions series (both 2009). He’s currently working on chapters about science fiction novel-to-film adaptations for three different critical anthologies, the source texts being Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s cold war best-seller Fail-Safe, and J.G. Ballard’s most controversial novel, Crash.