Ringers

Dr. Allan Antliff (history in art) has been renewed as holder of the Canada Research Chair in Modern Art for a second five-year term. In addition to bringing $100,000 per annum to the Faculty of Fine Arts, he has also been awarded a Canada Infrastructure Grant to equip a web-based virtual anarchist archive in MacPherson Library’s Special Collections. His highly acclaimed books include: Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001), Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004), and Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (2007). He has hosted several radio programs for CBC “Ideas” and published numerous articles, essays and art reviews.

Dr. Sara Beam (history) has won the 2008 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize by the Sixteenth Century Society for Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France. The society, which awards three prizes annually for books in English, selected Beam’s work as the best book in the area of history/theology. The prize is named in honour of the long-time Yale professor and 20th-century church historian. Winners demonstrate quality and originality of research, methodological skill and/or innovation, development of fresh and stimulating interpretations and literary quality.

Dr. Francis Nano (biochemistry and microbiology) and his research team are one of only six Canadian research groups out of more than 100 international teams receiving a coveted Grand Challenges Exploration grant of $100,000 US each from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The awards are meant to fund bold new ideas for tackling the world’s toughest health issues. Nano—by taking genes from cold-loving Arctic bacteria and “inserting” them into disease-causing bacteria—hopes to make the pathogenic bacteria unable to grow at normal body temperature. This in turn could allow the bacteria to be used in immunization without causing disease itself, useful for making vaccines but also in preventative therapy for allergy and asthma.