2021 Fall DSR Newsletter

Message from the Chair

Dear DSR Members & Friends,

Welcome to our 2021 Newsletter. We’ve had a year of many changes and challenges, along with significant accomplishments worth celebration. As you’ll see below, we’ve had a banner year of research awards for faculty and graduate students, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Trudeau Foundation. The DSR is a leader among the Faculty of Arts & Science in the numbers of our Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, the latest of which you can read about below. And DSR members continue to win prizes and accolades for their excellent books and articles. We have gained three new faculty members this year, Suleyman Dost, Rory Lindsay, and Sarah Gallant, and look forward to welcoming three more in the coming months: Ronald Charles, Nyasha Junior, and Jeremy Schipper.

Our research achievements are only part of the story. We’re working on renewing our undergraduate curriculum and building our undergraduate enrolments, to ensure that as many A&S students as possible experience the benefits of a study of religion education. The fruits of this are already apparent in the growing numbers of students in many of our courses—for example, enrolments have doubled in both sections of our core second-year course and over 300 students have signed up for a new first-year course, “Happiness,” which Kevin O’Neill will teach with a team of TAs in the depths of winter! Our cohort of new PhD and MA students includes students from Canada and around the world—including India, Hong Kong, Nigeria—and happily we’ve been able to welcome them to in-person classes. We honoured 12 PhD and MA graduates during our November convocation celebration in an online gathering of faculty, students, family, and friends.

As we continue to work under the restrictions that COVID-19 has brought to our lives, I want to thank all the DSR faculty and teaching assistants for their commitment to students, whether teaching online or in-person. I also want to thank the student leaders from the Graduate Student Association and the Religion Undergraduate Student Association for their exceptional dedication. None of the achievements of the DSR could happen without our remarkable staff. As you can read below, over the past year we’ve gained four excellent new staff members, while also saying goodbye to our long-serving and beloved Undergraduate Coordinator, Marilyn Colaço, who retired last spring.

We look forward to the time when we can welcome alumni and friends back to the DSR to celebrate and catch up. The 50th anniversary of the establishment of the department is coming up in 2023-24, which seems like a great time for a party. In the shorter term, please be in touch if you have ideas for how to support the ongoing work of the DSR. As the recent gift from the Levman family in support of the study of Pali shows, DSR alumni and friends are key to generating new research initiatives and building community for students and faculty alike. Please send us your news and stay tuned for opportunities to engage with DSR events online. I’m always happy to hear from you!
 

— Pamela Klassen FRSC
Professor & Chair of the Department for the Study of Religion