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A national science leader, a Coast Salish linguist, a journalist, and an art historian will become honorary graduates of the University of Victoria this fall.
The four honorary degrees will be presented during fall convocation ceremonies Nov. 14-15 in the University Centre Farquhar Auditorium.
A visionary in terms of Canada’s role in international scientific collaboration, Dr. Arthur Carty has been national science advisor to the federal government since 2004. In this role, he has been instrumental in promoting the development of science and technology clusters within Canada that build on established research strengths and foster synergy among researchers, governments and private sector partners.
From 1994 to 2004, Carty served as president of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), the federal government’s leading knowledge and innovation agency. He helped to lead the country’s advances in international research, particularly with his strong support of Canadian scientists engaged in astronomy, particle physics and nanotechnology.
Much of Carty’s academic career was spent at the University of Waterloo, where he was a teacher, researcher and administrator for 27 years. He still maintains an active research group at NRC and continues to publish in his field of synthetic chemistry and metallic clusters. The holder of five patents, he has more than 285 publications in refereed journals, in addition to book chapters and review articles.
Earl Claxton Sr. is a lifeline for the preservation and revitalization of the Sencoten language of the Coast Salish peoples of Saanich, whose traditional territory includes the lands on which UVic is situated.
Without the benefit of formal training, Claxton has become an extremely talented linguist whose efforts to share his knowledge of his ancestral language—currently spoken fluently by fewer than a dozen elders—have been vital.
Through his work with UVic linguists, teaching materials are being developed that are easily comprehensible and explain all of the properties of the Sencoten language, so that future generations will have the ability to learn the language in a way that is grounded in a native Sencoten linguistic understanding.
Claxton is also considered the authority on matters of English/Sencoten translation and is a major source of knowledge and inspiration for many members of the Saanich Nation.
A staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1961, Edith Iglauer became one of her generation’s most adventurous and astute observers of the Canadian way of life. She wrote the quintessential portrait of Pierre Trudeau after he became prime minister in 1968.
Iglauer moved to B.C. in 1974 and married Pender Harbour salmon fisherman John Daly. Their relationship, and her introduction to the rigours of commercial fishing, became the basis of her 1988 memoir Fishing with John. A New York Times review called the book “an elegantly understated love story, as well as a quiet account of personal metamorphosis.”
Before joining the New Yorker, Iglauer was one of the few female correspondents to cover World War II, in Italy and Yugoslavia. She resides in Garden Bay, B.C.
Art historian Dr. Maria Tippett recently returned to her hometown of Victoria after several years as a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. She’s the author of 11 books, including biographies of two B.C. icons: Bill Reid: The Making of an Indian and Emily Carr: A Biography, for which she won a 1980 Governor General’s Award.
Tippett is one of Canada’s most prolific scholars and writers on the history and the role of the arts in society. Her By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Canadian Women Artists is considered the single best survey of the work of women artists in the country. She’s one of a very small group of art historians to be elected to the Royal Society of Canada.
On her return to Victoria, Tippett began a weekly column in the Times Colonist called “Women of a Certain Age,” which is to be the genesis of her next book, co-authored with a former Cambridge colleague.
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