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Research Fellows span art photography, chemistry, social theory and medicine 

Congratulations to the following faculty members, who have been named Concordia University Research Fellows for 2008.

Raymonde April, in the Department of Studio Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, has been given the award for established research in the humanities and social sciences category.

Winner of the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas (Prix du Québec) 2003, Quebec’s highest honour for a visual artist, she has been known since the late 1970s for her art photography. Her practice is minimalist, inspired by the day-to-day. It has been described as a meeting-point of documentary, autobiography and fiction.

Her works are in leading Canadian museums and many private collections, and are often exhibited in Canada and abroad. Her solo exhibitions have included Voyage dans le monde des choses, organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1986, Les Fleuves invisibles, produced by the Musée d’art de Joliette in 1997 and circulated in Canada and France until 2000, and Tout embrasser, presented at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery of Concordia University as part of Le Mois de la photo à Montréal 2001.

Currently, she is in Beijing, doing a residency project associated with the Grange Prize, for which she is a finalist with one other Canadian and three Chinese photographers. This prize has just been created by the Art Gallery of Ontario. It carries a $50,000 cash award, and is judged by the public, voting online. In an email from Beijing, April issued an open invitation to participate. Go to www.thegrangeprize.com.

Ann English, in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Faculty of Arts and Science, received an award for an established researcher in the science and engineering category.

She is one of Canada’s leading scientists in the field of bioinorganic chemistry, studying metal-catalyzed processes in cell signaling as mediated through small molecules. With her group, she has fostered important interdisciplinary research with the Department of Exercise Science and the Centre for Studies in Behavioural Neurobiology, as well as with the Montreal pharmaceutical company Merck Frosst.

She is the director of Concordia’s Centre for Biological Applications of Mass Spectrometry and holds a Concordia University Research Chair (Tier 1).

Erin Manning, an assistant professor cross-appointed in Studio Arts and Film Studies in the Faculty of Fine Arts, has been given an award for an emerging researcher in the category of the fine arts, humanities and social sciences.

She has a doctorate from the University of Hawaii in political theory. Her research interests include the body, the senses, movement, dance, art, cinema, philosophy and political theory.

Her books include Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (2006, Minneapolis: Minnesota UP) and Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (in press, MIT).

Manning is also the director of the Sense Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation environment for the exploration of new media arts, philosophy and movement.

The Sense Lab meets at SAT, the Society for the Technological Arts, on the second Thursday of each month to discuss ongoing readings and work in progress. It hosts a speaker series called Bodies-Bits/Corps-Données and an events series called Technologies of Lived Abstraction. In March, the Sense Lab will also launch the first issue of Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Simon L. Bacon, an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise Science, Faculty of Arts and Science, will receive an award for an emerging researcher in the science and engineering category.

He has a PhD from the University of Birmingham, an MSc from De Montfort University, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Warwick.

Bacon has won research awards from the Canadian Cardiovascular Society, the Canadian Hypertension Society, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, McGill University, the National Institutes of Health (U.S.), the European Society of Hypertension, and the International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Prior to joining Concordia, he did postdoctoral studies at the Duke University Medical Center, McGill University, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, and the Montreal Heart Institute. In addition to Concordia, Bacon holds adjunct positions at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal and the Montreal Heart Institute.

His research interests lie in behavioural interventions for chronic illnesses (specifically, heart disease and respiratory disease), the role of stress in the progression of chronic illnesses, and endothelial function.