2024-2025 Plenary Sessions

Vic One Welcome Session

Date: Sep. 4, 2024

Join us for the Vic One Welcome Session! This event will include a few announcements about Vic One, followed by a meet and greet with your fellow Vic One students and stream mentors! This is a mandatory session, so please email vic.one@utoronto.ca if you cannot attend.

Writing as Process

Date: Sep. 11, 2024
Speaker: Maria Cichosz

Maria Cichosz is a writer and scholar of post-1945 literature, art, theory, and the history of ideas. She applies these frameworks to the study of drug histories and cultures. Her work has appeared in Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Puritan, and on the CBC Literary Awards shortlist, among other places, and received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is also the author of a novel, Cam & Beau (2020). Maria serves as Fiction and Reviews Editor at Broken Pencil magazine and Associate Book Reviews Editor at The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs journal and is committed to supporting student writing through her role as the Director of the Victoria College Writing Centre. She brings a process-based approach to her writing pedagogy in fiction and creative non-fiction, while her humanities seminars use broad critical frameworks to examine complex cultural formations by bringing together perspectives from art, literature, history, and science.  

Civil Discourse on Campus: A Panel Discussion

Date: Sep. 18, 2024
Speaker: Randy Boyagoda, Pamela Paul, Janice Stein, Ian Williams

Professor Randy Boyagoda serves as  Provostial Advisor on Civil Discourse. A Professor of English in the Faculty of Arts and Science, where he most recently served as Vice-Dean, Undergraduate and, previously, as Principal of St. Michael’s College where he also held the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts and Letter, Professor Boyagoda is a novelist and literary critic. He is author of six books, including four novels, most recently Dante’s Indiana and Original Prin. His research and writing has been supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, and his work has been nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. He contributes essays, reviews and opinions to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and The Financial Times (UK), regularly appears on CBC Radio, and hosts a literary podcast for the Toronto Public Library. Born in Oshawa to Sri Lankan immigrants, Professor Boyagoda received his BA from the University of Toronto and MA and PhD in English from Boston University and lives in the east end of the city with his wife and their four daughters.

Universities and Ways of Life: Time, Body and Presence in the Academy

Date: Sep. 25, 2024
Speaker: Alex Eric Hernandez

Alex Eric Hernandez is principal of Victoria College and and associate professor in the Department of English, where he specializes in 18th-century literature and culture. His scholarship aims at an interdisciplinary approach to the period, balancing an attention to historical detail alongside theoretical frames that privilege reparation, description and anthropological curiosity. 

His first book, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering, offers an innovative reading of how 18th-century tragedy developed in relation to the emotions of ordinary people. In it, he argues that a number of innovative tragic works concerned with the misfortunes of the middle class imagined a particularly modern form of suffering across page and stage. New research continues to explore interests in religion, affect, critique and Enlightenment and forms the basis for two current projects. One, tentatively titled, The Fabrics of Religion, concerns the productive ways in which readerly and religious practice are taken up in the materials of the long 18th century; another, Empire’s Prayerbook, considers how the Book of Common Prayer imagines a binding metaphysics across contested borders and amorphous spaces. Both projects have been supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 

His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Representations, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Modern Philology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022.

A former fellow with the Social Sciences Research Council, the Lewis Walpole Library and the Clark Library, he led an interdisciplinary working group on the theme of Postsecular or Postcritique?: New Approaches to Reading Religion for several years, which began as a working group funded through the Jackman Humanities Institute.

In 2021, he was awarded the Faculty of Arts & Science Outstanding Teaching Award.

Encountering Disability, Rethinking Normalcy

Date: Oct. 2, 2024
Speaker: Tanya Titchkosky

Dr. Tanya Titchkosky is Professor of Disability Studies in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, U of T. She is recognized globally for her leading work in the field of disability studies and social justice. Her graduate teaching includes courses such as “Disability Studies and the Human Imaginary” and “Encounters in Disability Studies.” In research, teaching and activism, Tanya regards the experience of disability as a good way to enhance conversations about marginality alongside Black, Queer and Critical Indigenous theorists.  This is how she works to reveal how our lives are made meaningful in relation unquestioned versions of normalcy as this impacts everyday interactions,  education, and health. This approach is reflected in her most recent co-edited with three new PhDs DisAppearing: Encounters in Disability Studies (2022) as well as in Rethinking Normalcy (2009) a disability studies reader co-edited with Dr. Rod Michalko. Her exploration of the power of normalcy to diminish disability-concerns in everyday life not only animates her many papers and books* but also animates her desire to build a less exclusive University by, for example, making the OISE washrooms and signage, the St. George Subway entrance, and University technological infrastructure (SLATE student admissions platform), as well as courses more welcoming toward a disability and other marginalized people. Her current work is funded, in part, by an Insight SSHRC grant, “Reimaging the Dis/Appearance of Disability in the Academy.” Tanya is also part of a major 6 year international research project, Disability Matters, and holds an Institute for Pandemics (U of T) research award focusing on educational and health archives as they make disability meaningful (usually only as disease). Tanya is recipient of the OISE 2019 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award. She is also a founding member of the Doing Disability in Everyday Life Research and Activist group and the Toronto Disability Circle. 

*Books include Disability, Self, and Society (2003); Reading and Writing Disability Differently (2007); The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (2011).  Other paper length publications can be found here OISE Faculty Research  - Titchkosky   

Date: Oct. 16, 2024
Speaker: Kim Shannon

Kim Shannon Vic 8T0 founded Sionna, one of the largest independent investment firms led by a woman, in 2002. She joined the industry in 1983 and has received numerous awards, including IIAC Investment Industry Hall of Fame, Morningstar Fund Manager of the Year (2005), the RBC Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Award, Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Award and the Rotman Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award. Kim is active in supporting her community and serves on many boards and investment committees including United Corp, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Foundation as well as the Rotman Dean’s Advisory Board. 

Pelham Edgar Distinguished Visitor in the Humanities

Date: Oct. 23, 2024
Speaker: Waubgeshig Rice

Waubgeshig Rice grew up in Wasauksing First Nation on the shores of Georgian Bay, in the southeast of Robinson-Huron Treaty territory. He’s a writer, listener, speaker, language learner, and a martial artist, holding a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He is the author of the short story collection Midnight Sweatlodge and the novels Legacy, Moon of the Crusted Snow, and Moon of the Turning Leaves. He appreciates loud music and the four seasons. He lives in N’Swakamok - also known as Sudbury, Ontario - with his wife and three sons. 

The US Presidential Election

Date: Nov. 6, 2024
Speaker: David Wright with the Honourable Chris Alexander, P.C., Ikran Jama Vic 2T1, and James Janeiro Vic 1T0

Professor Wright will be moderating a panel discussion featuring the Honourable Chris Alexander, P.C., and Vic One alumni Ikran Jama and James Janeiro.

David Wright is the Kenneth and Patricia Taylor Distinguished Professor of Foreign Affairs at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Prior to coming to Vic, he was Canada’s Ambassador to NATO for six years, during the conflicts in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. As Assistant Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for Europe he dealt with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Professor Wright also served as Canadian Ambassador to Spain and in postings in Paris, Tokyo, Rome and the UN in New York. 

 She Got Game: The Rise of Woman in Basketball

Date: Nov. 13, 2024
Speaker: Lisa Ferkul (Chief Revenue Officer, WNBA Toronto) and Stephanie Withall (Vice President, Partnerships & Operations, Canada Basketball), moderated by Tim Hutzul (Senior Vice President, Legal & General Counsel, Shawcor)

Join us for a panel discussion on the business of sport.

Trust in institutions/media re: healthcare

Date: Nov. 20, 2024
Speaker: Robert Steiner (moderator), Megan Ogilvie, Hannah Hoag