Director, Scholars, & Affiliates

Meet the Director

Dr. Leith Davis, Professor, English

Dr. Leith Davis is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation; Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish Identity, 1724–1874; Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising' and Jacobitism and Cultural Memory (available as Open Access from Cambridge University Press), as well as numerous articles on 18th- and 19th-century British culture. She is also co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism ; Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture; The International Companion to Scottish Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century and Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present: Memory, Culture, Networks and Principal Investigator of the digital humanities projects Reconstructing Early Circus and The Lyon in Mourning (Digital Edition). See more about Leith's research HERE

Steering Committee Members

Dr. Tina Adcock, Assistant Professor, History

Dr. Tina Adcock: I am a cultural and environmental historian who draws inspiration from the cognate fields of historical geography and the history of science and technology. My research examines the relationship between colonialism, modernity and the production of knowledge about Canada, with a special focus on the North. I am finishing a book-length cultural history of northern Canadian exploration between 1920 and 1965. Related research interests include the history of northern field science, travel, and tourism; American military attempts to understand northern environments in the 1940s and 1950s; and fur trapping by sojourners in northwestern Canada during the twentieth century. I have co-edited a volume on science and technology in Canadian history and have done a substantial amount of digital historical work as an editor and executive member of the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). Some day soon I hope to begin a new project on the environmental history of the wine industry in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

Dr. David Coley, Associate Professor, English

David Coley’s most recent book, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Ohio State, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for best book in medieval studies by the Canadian Society of Medievalists. The book considers submerged discourses of plague in fourteenth-century English poetry, especially the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x. David’s earlier monograph, The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse, 2012), posits the representation of the spoken word within later medieval English poetry as a powerful and efficacious act that both critiqued and created social, political, and religious realities. David’s articles have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, Glossator, and Florilegium, and he is a contributor to several edited volumes, including Chaucer and Trauma (Penn State, forthcoming 2025), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2020), Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto, 2019), and Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2018). In collaboration with Dr. Matthew Hussey, David is co-creator of The Canterbury Fails, a biweekly podcast dedicated to reading marginal, minor, and absolutely unread Old and Middle English literature (and pairing that literature with thematically appropriate cocktails).

Dr. Diana Solomon, Associate Professor, English

My research focuses on 17th- and 18th-century literature, particularly theatre, gender, comedy, and print culture. I also work on issues concerning contemporary comedy. Currently I’m at work on two books: I’m finishing a book on “troubling comedy” on the Restoration and 18th-century English stage, and I’m beginning a biography of Restoration actress Anne Bracegirdle. My work has been supported by fellowships from the Clark, Folger, Huntington, and Noel Libraries and the Harry Ransom Center, and by grants from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

I teach courses on 17th- and 18th-century literature, drama, comedy, and print culture; from time to time I also teach a role-playing games class using Reacting to the Past pedagogy. In 2014, I received the SFU Excellence in Teaching Award.

Distinguished Affiliates

Mike Chisholm is the executive director of the United Scottish Cultural Society in Vancouver, B.C. The Society is an amalgamation of Scottish societies in Vancouver. It was formed in the 1950’s and today continues to perpetuate Scottish culture in all its forms, including language, music, dance, and education.

The most prominent activity is ScotFestBC: The British Columbia Highland Games, which celebrated its 88^th year in 2019. As executive director, Mike is responsible for overall coordination of the Games, including a 40-person organizing committee and a volunteer corps of close to 200. Born in Antigonish, the heart of an early Highland settlement in Nova Scotia in the 19^th century, Mike’s Highland roots run deep as the fourth generation of his Chisholm family in Nova Scotia.

Mike is the official piper to Rocky Mountaineer Rail Tours in Vancouver, is a director with the BC Pipers’ Association, and is a retired member of a number of BC pipe bands. He also works in the B.C. film industry and is a former news reporter with the CBC, CTV, Global BC, and the Vancouver Observer.

(William) Rex Davidson was born in Vancouver, B.C. to a Scottish father and an English mother. He was educated in Canada, Scotland and England. His eclectic working life included jobs as:

a history and archeology writer for a prominent English newspaper
a researcher for a Scottish journalist in Vancouver
a public affairs director for a Canadian energy company
an owner/operator of two restaurants and an inn in B.C.
a farmer with 4000 hogs in Ireland

Davidson has now retired to his home, gardens, dogs and wood/metal-working shop on the Sunshine Coast, and to his second home in Tomatin, Scotland. He is a director and secretary of the St. Andrews Society of the City of Vancouver and a 40-year elected member of the Council of the Clan Chattan Association in Scotland, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland.

Dr. Kevin James is Scottish Studies Foundation Chair & Professor of History at the University of Guelph. Kevin studied for his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, working with Professor R. J. Morris in the Department of Economic and Social History.

He is the author of:

Histories, Meanings and Representations of the Modern Hotel. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2018
Tourism, Land and Landscape in Ireland: The Commodification of Culture. New York & London: Routledge, 2014
Handloom Weavers in Ulster’s Linen Industry, 1815-1914. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007.

His teaching and research focuses on Ireland and Britain during the long 19th century, and also encompasses trans-national themes, such as travel, tourism and the history of the modern hospitality sector. He focuses on the experiences of Scotland and Ireland, and interactions and comparisons between them.

His current research, drawing on old hotel books, explores the social and cultural history of the inn and hotel in Victorian Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England and the Isle of Man. It extends his previous research programme, which examined "tourist development" projects in 19th-century Ireland and the intersections of gendered, racial and class identities in Irish travel writing. He has longstanding interests in comparative modern Scottish and Irish social history and connections between them through tourism.

In Memoriam

John Allen Fraser

Hon. John Allen Fraser, PC, OC, OBC, CD, QC, was the former Member of Parliament for Vancouver South (1972–1993) and former Speaker of the House of Commons (1986–1993). During his 21 years in Parliament, Mr Fraser served in key government positions, including Minister of the Environment (1979–80) and Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (1984–85), prior to his election as Speaker (1986 and 1988). He was the first person in Canadian history to be elected Speaker of the House of Commons by his parliamentary peers, a practice first instituted in 1986. He was Honorary Chair of the Fundraising Council of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies after its creation.

Ronald MacLeod

Ronald MacLeod was a retired Director General of the Pacific and Freshwater Fisheries and an Officer of the Order of Canada. His father and mother were Gaelic-speaking émigrés from the Island of Raasay, Scotland. He was one of the community founders of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies and, in 2000, received the Chancellor's Distinguished Service Award for service to SFU.

Ian Ross

Ian Ross was an extremely accomplished scholar and founder of the international Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society. His major work was a biography of Adam Smith that was published by Oxford University Press (2nd ed., 2010). He was also a gifted teacher, a kind and generous colleague, and an inspiration to those who knew him.

Ronald Sutherland

Ronald Sutherland was an associate member and one of the community founders of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies. He spent his working career in the international shipping industry and retired as President of the Empire Shipping Company. He was active for many years with the Scots community in British Columbia and, especially, with the BC Pipers Association and the Centre for Scottish Studies.