Carleton Professor Receives Premier’s Discovery Award

Ruth Phillips, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture is this year’s recipient of the Premier’s Discovery Award in the category of Arts and Humanities.  The award comes with a $250,000 grant to further Dr. Phillips’ research.

Phillips received her award at a ceremony in Toronto on May 18.

“This is truly an outstanding achievement,” says Kim Matheson, vice-president (Research and International).  “It is an excellent demonstration of the depth and importance of the research being conducted at Carleton and it is an excellent example of our research strength in global identities.”

Phillips is an art historian, curator and former museum director specializing in Aboriginal art of the Great Lakes region.  Trained at Harvard, the University of Toronto and the University of London, she initially researched African women’s masquerades. Since beginning her teaching career at Carleton University in 1979, she has contributed to establishing non-Western arts within art history.

As a member of the Task Force on Museums and First Nations in the early 1990s, she helped develop new models of partnership between Canadian Museums and Aboriginal peoples. In 1997, Phillips was appointed director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology (MoA) and taught there in anthropology and art history. She was awarded a $43-million grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to support the expansion and redesign of the MoA’s research infrastructure and the creation of an innovative virtual research network. 

After returning to Carleton as Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture in 2003, Phillips founded the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) with support from CFI, the Ontario Innovation Trust, SSHRC and Carleton. GRASAC’s researchers, based in museums, universities and Aboriginal communities in Europe and North America, have collaborated on an unprecedented interdisciplinary database and research repository for Great Lakes indigenous cultural heritage.

In 2004, Phillips was elected president of the UNESCO-sponsored International Committee on the History of Art (CIHA) and initiated a global expansion of its membership to include China, South Africa and several other countries.

Phillips’ work is widely read, assigned to students outside Canada and reprinted in important anthologies. It has led to invitations to speak and consult at museums and universities in the U.S., Europe, India and Africa.

Her visiting professorships include the University of Cambridge (2009) and Harvard University (2009-10).  She has served as external examiner for PhD theses at Griffiths University and the University of Melbourne in Australia, the University of London and Oxford University.