The Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies is pleased to welcome Professor Alison Conway, who joined English (FCCS) and Gender and Women’s Studies (IKBSAS) this past January, after twenty-three years at The University of Western Ontario.
Professor Conway has been the recipient of a number of teaching awards throughout her career and is the author of two books, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 (2001) and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750 (2010), and co-editor, with Mary Helen McMurran, of Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives (2016).
To find out about Professor Conway’s current research project, listen to the podcast recently produced as part of a new season of UBCO’s Library’s Frequencies series, “Faith and Relationships: Novel Reflections”. In this podcast, she explores how issues of interfaith marriage can be understood and contemporized through the 18th-century novel.
Alison Conway with colleague and running partner, Karis Shearer (left)
In addition to being a scholar and teacher, Alison is an active member of Kelowna’s running community and completed her first marathon this April, with a Boston-qualifying time. Academic and running lives are not as separate as they might seem. In her most recent contribution as a guest-writer to the blog, Fit is a Feminist Issue, Alison considers the relationship between reading and running, with reference to Haruki Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
Alison Conway at the Toledo Marathon
“I came back to running at age 50 with all the enthusiasm that anyone setting out after years of double-shifting full-time work and childcare brings to her new hobby. Which is to say, a lot. Reading about running is almost as much fun as running itself, with hearing about other people’s running following close behind. Murakami’s prose reads like running shoes hitting the pavement, carefully measured in its pacing, but also graceful, poetic.”
Listen to Alison talk about running, reading, and kinship here:
Previous seasons of Frequencies explored the open access movement and the relationship between science and society. Check out previous podcasts now!