Partners in Fellowship

Ruth Phillips (School for Studies in Arts and Culture: Art History and ICSLAC) and Mark Phillips (Department of History and ICSLAC) have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada. The awards are made to Canadian scholars whose work is in keeping with the Society’s motto “different paths, one vision.”

The motto might be attributed to the Phillips themselves. Although both are cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture (ICSLAC), the husband and wife team pursue separate research interests. Mark Phillips, an intellectual historia, is currently completing a book that examines the concept of “historical distance” in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the late twentieth-century. Ruth Phillips, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture, is an art historian who specializes in Aboriginal art and in critical museology. She directs the Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Art and Culture (GRASAC), an international collaborative project involving researchers in universities, museums, and Aboriginal communities. She is currently president of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), the UNESCO-sponsored world association of art history.

Throughout their careers the Phillips have been fortunate to be able to pursue their separate research interests while working in the same academic environments – at Carleton, the University of British Columbia, and, most recently, as fellows at Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra.

While the Phillips are not the first couple to be elected to the Society, the honour is rarely bestowed on couples within the same year. “We both feel honoured to have been elected to the Royal Society,” Mark Phillips said, “but it is a particular pleasure to have received this recognition in the same year.”

In Canada, recognition in the Royal Society of Canada is the highest honour scholars, artists and scientists can achieve. The official induction ceremony will take place in Edmonton on November 17, 2007.