Professor Rich Watts, Department of French and Italian Studies, signs off after five years of service to the Center and Jackson School of International Studies. — As my five-year term as faculty director of the Canadian Studies Center in UW’s Jackson School of International Studies draws to a close, my thoughts are mostly with those

Patrick Christie, a professor in the Jackson School and School Marine and Environmental Affairs, was appointed faculty director of the Canadian Studies Center effective July 1, 2022. Christie has a strong interest in and commitment to justice and sustainability. He works at the interface of oceans and coastal communities, but also works in other environments.

The Center welcomes David Butman, associate professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, as a new affiliate to the Center. David Butman is an associate professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences as well as the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His research focuses on the ecology and biogeochemistry of freshwater ecosystems

Yoshitaka Ota served as director of the Nereus Program, a global interdisciplinary initiative between the Nippon Foundation and the University of British Columbia to further knowledge about how to best attain sustainability for the world’s oceans, between 2011 and 2019. During that time, he identified a capacity and knowledge gap in addressing the widening inequality in

Maya Angela Smith, an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian Studies, focuses on the intersection of racial and linguistic identity formations among marginalized groups in the African diaspora, particularly in the francophone world. She also researches how Blackness is constructed in francophone regions as well as how French studies can diversify and

Andy Meyer, a newly appointed assistant teaching professor in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, focuses on Norwegian and North American language and literature, with an emphasis on ecocriticism, poetry and poetics, and Arctic studies. His work and much of his teaching is engaged in questions about the relationship between literary imagination and the concept of

P. Joshua Griffin is an environmental anthropologist working at the intersections of Indigenous studies, political ecology, critical social science, and climate change. His community-engaged research focuses on Arctic Indigenous ecologies, climate change, environmental health, food sovereignty, hunting and fishing governance/rights, and environmental planning. More broadly, he is interested in approaches to “climate adaptation” that center

Mia Bennett is beginning at UW this fall as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, through fieldwork and remote sensing, Mia researches the geopolitics of development in northern frontiers, namely the Arctic, Russian Far East, and the more remote corridors of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Richard Watts, faculty director of the Center and associate professor in French and Italian Studies, was recently awarded two grants for translation studies. The first grant constitutes the third year of support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW for the activities of the Translation Studies Hub, a project Watts co-directs with Heekyoung

Professor Richard Watts, faculty director of the Canadian Studies Center, has received the Simpson Center for the Humanities’ Society of Scholars Fellowship for academic year 2021-2022, which will allow him to complete his book manuscript titled Reclaimed Waters: Literary History, Translation, and Resource Decolonization in the Francophone Post/colonial World, which includes a chapter on Indigenous literary responses to