Not Drowning But Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts Conference
University of Alberta
October 12-14, 2006
Patricia Clements grew up and went to school in the farming community of Wilkie, Saskatchewan. She attended Teachers' College in Saskatoon and taught elementary school for a year in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, then took her honours BA in English at the University of Alberta, graduating in 1964 with the Governor General's Gold Medal and the Rutherford Gold Medal in English. She studied for a summer at the McGill French Summer School and for a year, as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, at the University of Toronto. Following a year in France as an Assistante de langue anglaise, she went on a Commonwealth Scholarship and a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship to St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she earned her DPhil degree.
She joined the English Department at the University of Alberta in 1970. Here she has taught a wide range of courses in topics related to modernism and the history of women's writing. A member of the Vice-President's committee on Women's Studies, she presented to Arts Faculty Council the motion to establish the Women's Studies Program at the University of Alberta. She team-taught (with Shirley Neuman) the first English Department course in women's writing. At present she is Professor of English and director of the interdisciplinary and collaborative Orlando Project. Conceived and created with Susan Brown and Isobel Grundy, this is both a history of women's writing and an exciting experiment in the use of computers in literary and historical studies. It was the subject of Grundy's and Clements's McKenzie Lecture on Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts ("Women's Literary History by Electronic Means") at Oxford in 2001. The electronic history, provisionally scheduled for first release in early 2006, will be followed by and linked to three print volumes, including Freewoman: a History of Modern Women's Writing. Volume III of the Orlando History co-authored with Jo-Ann Wallace and Rebecca Cameron.
She worked with Virginia Blain, of Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and Isobel Grundy, then of the University of London, and with many other feminist scholars, to produce the first reference book to international women's writing in English -- The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Other books include Baudelaire and the English Tradition, a study of the emergence of international modernism, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (critical essays, ed., with Juliet Grindle), Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays (ed., with Isobel Grundy). Her recent publications, with members of the Orlando team, have been about computing and the work of the humanities.
In 1989, Clements was appointed Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, and her career took a new direction. She became an advocate for the liberal arts, arguing for the power and value of a liberal education both to students and to society at large. Employment equity was a priority of her deanship: in this the Faculty of Arts led the University. She worked with students, colleagues, and the broader community to expand opportunities for Arts students and for arts research. Some developments during her deanship were the establishment of the Canadian Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies, the University of Alberta School in Cortona, Italy, the Parkland Institute (a public policy think tank), the Centre for the Study of Japanese Language and Culture, and of research institutes in Public Economics, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Research Computing in Arts.
In 1999, Clements was elected President of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which speaks for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences community on behalf of 73 member universities and colleges and 70 Canadian scholarly organizations. During a time when governments were bringing heavy pressure to bear on the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts in Canadian universities by both cutting overall university budgets and targeting large increases in research support to the applied sciences, Clements worked with colleagues to strengthen the voice of these human sciences in Canadian education and research and to heighten awareness in government and the broader public of the critical role of these disciplines in Canadian education, cultures, and economies. In 2001, as Broadus Lecturer at the University of Alberta, she gave three lectures on The Politics of Knowledge: the Liberal Arts in a Science Society.
At the University of Alberta, she has served on a wide range of committees and councils at the Department, Faculty, and University levels, including the Vice-President's Committee on Women's Studies, Deans' Council (and executive), the Senate, the General Faculties Council (and Executive Committee), a selection committee for a Vice-President (Academic) and a search committee for President of the University.
Outside of the University, she has served on the Boards of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Canadian Research Knowledge Networks, the Edmonton Symphony Society, the Edmonton Concert Hall Foundation. A member of the ministerial working group that developed the proposal for establishment of The Canadian Academies, she also sat on the Science Advisory Board of Health Canada.
She has been a McCalla Research Professor at the University of Alberta and a Visiting Research Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1991. In 1996, she was recipient of the AWAward (Academic Women's Association). In 2003 Lieutenant Governor Lois Hole awarded her the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal. In June 2005 Brock University conferred on her the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters for "outstanding leadership of the Humanities and Social Science community in Canada."