For our second episode of the Global Conversations series we move our attention to Canada and we welcome two enthusiastic arts and humanities advocates from the Royal Society of Canada: Professor Julia Wright and Professor Karly Kehoe. This is a wide-ranging conversation on the complex role of arts and humanities as people-centred disciplines. Julia and Karly highlight their important role in advancing work on EDI and addressing the problems of the past such as colonisation. They also address the importance of advocating for arts and humanities and reflect on the value of international cooperation.

Professor Julia M. Wright, FRSC, is George Munro Chair of Literature and Rhetoric at Dalhousie University and the President of the Academy of the Arts and Humanities in the Royal Society of Canada (2019-2022). She works primarily on British and Irish Romanticism, but has also extended her work on the Gothic into television studies. She is the author of four monographs, including Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism, and the editor or co-editor of a further eleven volumes, including Irish Literature, 1750-1900: An Anthology and three novels for Broadview Press. She also co-edited the Ashgate Series in Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Studies and is currently a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s Task Force on COVID-19.

Dr. S. Karly Kehoe is a Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Communities. Her current research considers settler colonialism and how religious minority migrants acquired and exercised colonial privilege in the north Atlantic world between c. 1750 and c. 1850. Underpinning this research is the pioneering work she has been doing for more than a decade on the complex links between Catholic colonialism in the Caribbean and what would become Atlantic Canada. Her most recent book, Empire and Emancipation: Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2022. She is an advocate of science diplomacy and is the president of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, a member of the Internationa Science Council’s Freedom and Responsibility in Science committee, and a member InterAcademy Partnership’s (IAP) Policy Advice Development Committee. She also sits on the steering committee of Science in Exile (a partnership of UNESCO-TWAS, the International Science Council, and the IAP). Dr. Kehoe has worked extensively to support academic researchers around the world whose work has been disrupted or threatened by war, conflict, and threats of violence. In response to threats against research, she co-founded the At-Risk and Academic Refugee Membership programme (Young Academy of Scotland); the At-Risk Scholar Initiative (Global Young Academy); and the At-Risk and Displaced Academics and Artists program (Royal Society of Canada).

Show notes:

Royal Society of Canada

The RSC Task-force on Covid-19

The Importance of Languages in Global Context: An International Call to Action

At-Risk and Displaced Academics and Artists