From one Visiting Professorship to the next – Ruth Phillips travels to two renowned universities

Ruth Phillips, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture and professor of Art History in the School for Studies in Art and Culture, will take a short summer break after leaving one Visiting Professorship at a prestigious university before heading to the next one. Dr. Ruth Phillips

Phillips is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge in England and will wrap up her term there on June 30, 2009. From there, she will go onto Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she will take on the role of the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies.

While in England, Phillips is delivering seminars and lectures in Cambridge, Oxford, and Aberdeen, along with studying collections of Great Lakes indigenous art in British museums, and working on a book called Museum Pieces: The Indigenous Reform of Canadian Museums.

The professor is also conducting research that will add to the database of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures, an international research collaboration and database she founded as the central project of her current appointment as Canada Research Chair.

“British museum collections are rich in Canadian indigenous material,” says Phillips. “[The] museums are also experimenting and innovating in the ways that they work with and represent world indigenous peoples and the opportunity to study what they are doing provides a very good context for work on my book project.”

While in Massachusetts for the 2009-10 academic year, Phillips will offer two courses in the history department: The Museum in Settler Society: Colony, Empire, Nation which focuses on a series of Canadian case studies, along with Visual Culture, Translation, and Indigeneity in the Great Lakes. She hopes to complete a second book while at Harvard.