Faculty
Professor Leith Davis honoured with Royal Society of Canada Fellowship
Leith Davis is one of three Simon Fraser University professors who have been named to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) as Fellows this year. Membership in the RSC is Canada’s highest academic honour.
“You always do what you do, and you enjoy doing it, but having recognition like this is really an honour,” says Leith Davis about the Fellowship.
Professor Davis began teaching at SFU’s Department of English in 1990. As an instructor and researcher, Davis has focused on Scottish and Irish literature and culture, 18th-century literature, cultural memory studies, and media history.
Known for her long-held interest in Celtic culture, Davis has come to her classes wearing tartan, playing her fiddle, and on Robbie Burns Day, carrying haggis. However, even though her name “Leith”, is Scottish, her initial interest was in Wales.
“I was interested in Wales as another country that, like Canada, had a bilingual population and lived in the shadow of a dominant culture,” says Davis. “I had a Rotary scholarship as an undergraduate that enabled me to study Welsh and Anglo-Welsh literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.”
In graduate school, Davis went on to study 18th-century literature of the Celtic nations, which fueled her passion for this literary period.
“Honestly, 18th-century literature was my least favourite era until I started looking at it from the perspective of the peoples on the Celtic peripheries,” says Davis. “That led me back to a new appreciation of 18th-century English literature and of the 18th century as a crucial time period to investigate to understand our present moment.”
As well as being an internationally recognized author of texts like 2022’s Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland, Davis is also the director of SFU’s Research Centre for Scottish Studies. The centre collaborates on research projects with institutions in North America and the United Kingdom. It also hosts events, such as the annual St. Andrew’s and Caledonian Society talk, as well as participates in community events like the British Columbia Highland Games.
Davis is committed to decolonizing Scottish Studies too. She sees this as a natural evolution from her early interest in decolonizing English literature, which involved appreciating Scottish literature as a unique entity.
As Davis gained a greater understanding of Indigenous perspectives on research and teaching, she began decolonizing her own work. Then, in 2022, she had a pivotal experience. She was an official witness at a Nisga'a ceremony held at the National Museum of Scotland. SFU education professor Amy Parent, whose Nisga’a name is Sigidimnak Nox Ts’aawit, and her delegation from the House of Ni’isjoohl were at the museum to discuss the repatriation of a long-stolen memorial pole.
“Seeing the delegation in the context of the National Museum of Scotland in this room with their memorial pole, but also Inuit representations of so-called ‘ethnic others’, it became clear to me that there’s just so much that needs to be done to decolonize Scotland and the Scottish perspective,” says Davis.
An important step forward in this process for Davis is to bring Scottish and Indigenous scholars together, along with Indigenous and Scottish artists, performers, and community members. To help facilitate this, she is organizing a November 2024 conference, Unsettling Scottish Studies: Canons, Chronicles, Colonialism with public events and workshops.
Davis’ interest in decolonization also closely relates to her research on cultural memory, which focuses on how societies make sense of their past.
“Cultural memory is about the stories we tell, the events we remember, and how we pass those on to the next generation,” says Davis. “We select and amplify some events and forget and marginalize others,” she says. “This is an important issue we are dealing with in Canada, as well as globally, to move forward with reconciliation.”
Davis also researches media history, which looks at different mediums through which information is conveyed, with the understanding that the medium impacts the message. For example, in 2024, people see the dominance of digital mediums, whereas in the early 18th century, print became more widely disseminated. Because of her interest in media and print, Davis helped to found SFU English’s MA with Specialization in Print and Culture.
Currently, Davis has many projects on the go, including her upcoming book Jacobitism and Cultural Memory, 1688-1830, which will be published through Open Access with Cambridge University Press, making it available online. She is also completing a project on “National Roots and Transnational Routes of Early Circus”, a digital humanities project on The Lyon in Mourning, as well as finishing a co-edited collection of essays on Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present: Memory, Culture, Networks, and editing Ringan Gilhaize, a novel by John Galt concerning cultural memory.
Looking ahead, Davis simply says she plans to remain a lifelong learner.
“There is so much to learn still, and so many projects I want to embark on,” she says. “I feel that I am learning new things from my students and colleagues all the time that inspire me to explore new directions.”