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Upcoming & Past Defences
Oral examination
Thesis defences are open to the University Community and copies of the thesis abstract and candidate biography will be made available to all attendees.
At the start of the defence, the Thesis Defence Chair will introduce the candidate and all members of the Examining Committee and outline the procedures that are to be followed.
During the defence, the candidate will give an oral account of the research on which the thesis is based and defend the thesis itself. It is expected that this oral presentation will not exceed 20–25 minutes (a typical conference paper length). The candidate must be prepared to answer questions on the field of research and related fields.
Upcoming Defences
Examining Committee Members are from the Department of Global Humanities and Simon Fraser University unless otherwise stated.
Past Defences
Examining Committee Members are from the Department of Global Humanities (formerly the Department of Humanities) and Simon Fraser University unless otherwise stated.
2022
Elina Jin, Virtual Study Room on Social Media “Study with Me” videos on Bilibili Among Chinese University Students
“Study with me” is a phenomenal video topic on the Internet. In these videos, university students document their study process and share/livestream these videos online. Through ethnographic research on “study with me” videos and its virtual community within Bilibili, this project expects to understand why self-study videos perpetuate on the internet, evaluate the efficiency of this new study style, and examine the mentality and rationality behind this cyber self-study phenomenon. Based on investigations on Bilibili, SWM videos, and interactions within this virtual study space, this thesis concludes a manual grounded by student-initiated study habits that can be employed by educators and institutes to make online education more accessible and inclusive in the new normal of post-COVID.
Defence Date: August 18, 2022
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Eirini Kotsovili, Lecturer and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Shuyu Kong, Professor
- Committee Member: Stuart Poyntz, Professor, School of Communication
- Examiner: Michael Filimowicz, Senior Lecturer, School of Interactive Arts & Technology
2021
Laura Blaj, A Close Reading of Orderic Vitalis's Rhetorical Swan Song ('Lapsus ducis') for William the Conqueror
How do we re-politicise today in its correct, original, and medieval spirit Orderic Vitalis’s thousand-year-old investigation of the Conqueror’s crimes? The text where this exists in its most succinct, yet elusive form – the final pages of book VII in Orderic’s Historia Ecclesiastica (the ‘lapsus ducis’ episode) – displays rhetorical elements of discourse organisation only partly detectable today. Challenging for modern readers seeking to reveal Orderic’s hidden meanings is the reading of his Latin text in accordance with the laws that governed its writing. The present thesis looks at his Latin lexicon and textual organisation exploring any aspects rooted in ancient oratory. It examines Orderic’s engagement with qualifying William’s moral guilt and the textual strategies employed to suggest his unworthiness of divine pardon. The rhetorical techniques at play here evoke historical endeavours to unburden William of moral guilt, but they also reveal Orderic’s effort at exposing the fissures inherent in that process.
Defence Date: April 14, 2021
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Dimitris Krallis, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Paul Dutton, Professor Emeritus
- Committee Member: Emily O'Brien, Associate Professor
- Examiner: Matthew Hussey, Associate Professor, Department of English
Morgan Young, The Ground of Radical Fantasy: Imagining a Critical Theory of Fantastic Literature
To what extent can fantasy offer a radical critique of society? What does it take to imagine genuine alternate possibilities in modernity, while we remain under the hegemony of technocratic rationalization? This is not simply a question of what we think; it is a question of how we think, and in that context, fantasy may offer surprising insights. Ideas for a critical theory of fantasy should be concerned with how we imagine and how we can re-imagine ourselves in the world, constituting an approach toward possibility and potentiality. This thesis argues that radical fantasy is a way of looking to the past, to the margins of society, and to the human imaginative capacity to conceive of that which is not possible under the horizon of late capitalism.
Defence Date: April 15, 2021
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Dimitris Krallis, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Jerry Zaslove, Professor Emeritus, Department of English
- Examiner: Jaleh Mansoor, Associate Professor, Art History, University of British Columbia
2020
Amon Greene, A Global Dao: Diagnoses and Prescriptions for Artificial Reductive Binaries in The West and The East
The arbiters of the subject of Daoism have assumed authority to determine what does or does not merit inclusion through a few select means; either through a circumscribed scholastic lens or via cultural/religious authority typically predicated on established traditions. This thesis attempts to explain the ways in which both approaches tend to minimize relevant or qualifying contributions to a subject of Religious Studies such as Daoism. Deconstructing these reductive approaches requires first exploring them on their own terms, establishing how they narrow the aperture of consideration, and demonstrating their highly limited applicability in forming a more comprehensive understanding. Both the presuppositional tendencies of essentialism in Western academia and traditionalism in Eastern mores serve to create false binaries that can exclude many potential contributors to ongoing discourses. A tool borrowed from business models (the value-added proposition) is offered as a “perceived-value-added” model. It is intended to reopen that aperture, allowing for the inclusion of many otherwise disregarded contributors to ever-expanding world religions. This model allows for the intrinsic as well as extrinsic evaluations of a thought-tradition like Daoism (it only needs to establish the position of the perceiver). The precedence for importing models from outside the field of Religious Studies is well established; offering another is not intended as an entire usurpation of existent ones. The model can be applied alongside other Religious Studies approaches, but its applicability to a thought-tradition like Daoism, which has so permeated the substratum of Eastern cultures, shall become more evident throughout. What was treated once as the disingenuous “Dao of Western imagination” can, with this prescription, now be evaluated on an equal footing with the traditions from which it arose.
Defence Date: August 21, 2020
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Paul Crowe, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Luke Clossey, Associate Professor, Department of History
- Examiner: Stephen Duguid, Professor Emeritus, Graduate Liberal Studies
Christopher Hardcastle, Exposing the Corporate Myth: A Re-thinking of the Legal Conception of Corporate Personhood
This thesis provides a critical view of the way the Supreme Court of Canada (the “SCC”) has applied rights and freedoms under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the “Charter”) to corporations. I argue that a close reading of SCC cases involving corporations seeking protections under the Charter reveals that the SCC is bound by a conception of corporate personhood that binds judicial decision-making. This result seems to stem from the SCC’s unconscious use of language that is consistent with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This results in a slavish commitment to revealing the truth of corporations and applying the Charter accordingly. In place of this, I argue that Wittgenstein’s subsequent approach to language in the Philosophical Investigations helps reveal that corporations are not objects with internal states of affairs; rather, “corporation persons” is just another language game. Seeing language this way helps do away with a commitment to truth about corporations and frees the SCC to see them as economic tools that are subject to our control.
Defence Date: September 30, 2020
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Dimitris Krallis, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Paul Crowe, Associate Professor
- Examiner: Margot Young, Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia
Stephanie Yu, A Materialist Approach to Heideggerian Anxiety
Martin Heidegger’s radical conception of the ‘subject’ as Dasein (the human being, whose essence is Existence) was meant to deconstruct traditional Cartesian conceptions of the subject based purely on consciousness in the name of retrieving a fundamental ontology. For Heidegger, Dasein is the only entity that can grasp primordial Being, which only becomes accessible in a breakdown of the world in anxiety (Angst). Although Heidegger contends that consciousness is irrelevant to Dasein’s experience of anxiety, I argue that consciousness remains crucial to the concept. While this discovery results in what Theodor W. Adorno calls a pseudo-concrete (abstract and individualistic) ontology, I approach anxiety through a materialist lens via Georg Lukács’s social ontology of the proletariat and Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism to argue that consciousness of social being may emerge out of anxiety, which may lead to revolutionary social action. In doing so, I underscore the emancipatory potential of anxiety.
Defence Date: October 20, 2020
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Dimitris Krallis, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Andrew Feenberg, Professor, School of Communication
- Examiner: Surti Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, American University in Cairo
2019
Maggie Tsang, Chinese Medicine as Hermeneutic Knowledge? On the Role of Classical Works such as Huangdi Neijing Suwen in Chinese Medicine
The worldviews of Chinese and modern medicine are fundamentally different. Chinese medicine views the human body, not simply as a biological system, but as a holistic microcosm, whose health depends on maintaining harmonious function at the level of internal microcosm and in relation to the wider context understood as parallel macrocosm. Without denying the success of natural science, philosophers have developed alternative epistemological conceptions that aim to better capture the nature of knowledge specifically related to human phenomena. Wilhelm Dilthey draws a distinction between understanding (Verstehen) and explanation (Erklären) as the specific form of knowing in human and natural sciences respectively. In contrast to positivistic knowledge of natural sciences, knowledge in human sciences is essentially hermeneutic in nature, knowledge that involves interpretation and understanding that takes into account variant contexts and perspectives. The thesis applies the hermeneutic conception to Chinese medical knowledge with the aim to develop a promising framework for understanding the nature of Chinese medicine and explaining the role of Chinese medical classics.
Defence Date: July 30, 2019
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Paul Crowe, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Michael Hathaway, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
- Examiner: Heesoon Bai, Professor, Faculty of Education
Alexis Wolfe, Symbolic Collisions: Short-Circuits in the Libidinal Economy
The logic of late capitalism is a logic of deterritorialization, spurning demythologized, denarrativized and desacralized social relations that emanate from a collapsing symbolic order. Austere neoliberal political governance and the business ontology characterizing neoliberal ideology reduces all that exists on the symbolic plane to mere exchange value where the only subject position available is that of the consumer-spectator – libidinally mined for their addictive, and therefore highly profitable, disposition. At nearly every hour of the day, the debtor-addict subject experiences their attention solicited and short-circuited. In this process, the parasitical metaspectacle of platform capitalism short-circuits desire as well as reason, giving way to reactionary modes of thinking and acting. The dissolution of symbolic frameworks for sociality and total immersion in imaginary realms of relating seeds the soil of a fraught, fragmenting and therefore politically reactive social bond. This project traces, through a psychoanalytic lens, the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic emerging in an era dominated by rights discourse, where entitlements are contested, removed and granted at an accelerated cultural pace. It is within this tension that we find an increasing desire for representation as a victim in virtual spheres of competing symbolic orders. The central question of this project asks how economic antagonisms, issues of class, are continually inscribed, ignored and displaced into the realm of culture in a hyperperformative and informationally intoxicated social milieu.
Defence Date: September 19, 2019
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Paul Dutton, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Gary McCarron, Associate Professor, School of Communication
- Examiner: Svitlana Matviyenko, Assistant Professor, School of Communication
Tanya Tomasch, Musical dreams: Examining musical elements in Thomas Bernhard’s “Reunion” and "Goethe Dies”
This thesis provides a reading of Thomas Bernhard’s prose understood as prosaic music. Comparing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s struggle to write philosophy with Bernhard’s use of literary-musical elements, I shed light on how Bernhard’s disturbing stories, inhabited by unlikable characters and composed in a fragmented, alienating, figurative style, create not only a joyful, but meaningful experience, because Bernhard’s linguistic music-making illuminates the background of destructive and annihilated lives. Studies of Bernhard’s work that only focus on direct structural similarities between music and literature, or only on the historical or biographical narrative, neglect the intrinsic importance of the aesthetic of his musical prose and its comic, mocking musical form. People, places and memories are foregrounded as musical leitmotifs. Exaggerations, repetitions and comic authorship result in skilfully designed, intimate musical dreaming. Bernhard’s stories “Reunion” and “Goethe Dies” are examined with reference to other stories in Chapters entitled “Welcome to Bernhard’s World,” “Whereof One Cannot Speak: Catastrophes in Thomas Bernhard’s ‘Reunion’”, “Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Must Make Music,” “‘Goethe Dies’: A Wittgenstein Ensemble,” and conclude with “Composing Wittgenstein.”
Defence Date: November 18, 2019
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Paul Crowe, Associate Professor and Department Chair
- Senior Supervisor: David Mirhady, Professor
- Committee Member: Jerry Zaslove, Professor Emeritus, Department of English
- Examiner: Azadeh Yamini-Hamedani, Associate Professor, World Literature
2018
Oliver Baker, Herodotus: Historian, Proto-feminist, and Proto-biographer
Claims that Herodotus reveals himself as a proto-biographer are not yet widely accepted. To advance this claim, I have selected three women and four men from one side or the other of the Helleno-Persian Wars whose activities are recounted in his Histories. It is to a near contemporary, Heraclitus, to whom we attribute the maxim—character is human destiny. It is the truth of his maxim—which implies effective human agency—that makes Herodotus’ creation of historical narrative possible. Herodotus is often read for his off-topic vignettes, which colour-in the character of the individuals depicted without necessarily advancing his narrative. By hop scotching through the nine books of his Histories, we can assemble a largely continuous narrative for these seven remarkable individuals. This permits us to attribute both credit and moral responsibility for their actions. Arguably this implied causation demonstrates that Herodotus’ writings include much that amounts to proto-biography.
Defence Date: August 29, 2018
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Paul Dutton, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: David Mirhady, Professor
- Committee Member: Eirini Kotsovili, Lecturer, Hellenic Studies
- Examiner: Dimitris Krallis, Associate Professor, Hellenic Studies
2017
Emily Doyle, The Part Heloise and her Life Played in Shaping the Ethical Doctrine of Intentionality
Today, scholarship gives the credit for the medieval, ethical doctrine of intentionality to Abelard who late in his career wrote Ethica or Scito te ipsum (“Know Thyself”) where it received its fullest expression, but we see the roots of the doctrine in Heloise’s life, especially the crises she faced during and after the affair. A case can be made that Heloise herself invented the doctrine, with Abelard functioning as the philosophical mouthpiece.
Defence Date: May 5, 2017
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Paul Dutton, Professor
- Committee Member: Emily O'Brien, Associate Professor
- Examiner: Matthew Hussey, Associate Professor, Department of English
2016
Kavita Reddy, The Negativity of Place: Capital Accumulation and Ecological Limitations
Humanity has achieved planetary scale influence without planetary scale understanding. The historical conceptualization of space has created a rootless understanding of place to the extent that local concerns occurring within place are overruled by the concerns of those who are situated at a distance with an assumption of authority and the resources to dominate conflicts. The rationality of place is conceptualized abstractly to fulfill a particular objectivity that resembles more of an imposition rather than an understanding situated within the social and natural dynamics of a locality. The historical assumption of terra nullius, that land is uninhabited and available for exploitation, remains intact and in use despite many costly attempts by those who reside in that land to contradict this. Framed within the context of anthropogenic climate change, its perceptions, and the struggles surrounding it, this thesis examines, with the help of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Hannah Arendt’s politics of space, the relationship between the dynamics of capitalism and its inherent social and natural placed-based limitations. What the contemplation of these dominated places reveals is that another way of understanding the built environment is struggling to emerge.
Defence Date: April 22, 2016
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Ian Angus, Professor
- Examiner: Glen Coulthard, Assistant Professor, First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and Department of Political Studies, University of British Columbia
Jalissa Rodriguez, The Fame of Abelard
Abelard pushed the boundaries of group culture by establishing himself as a medieval celebrity, famous to a wider circle of people in medieval France. Fame in the Middle Ages was normally limited to the divine, the holy, and great rulers. But, with the arrival and adventures of Abelard, it came to include a new kind of scholar-celebrity from the minor nobility. This thesis examines how Abelard formed a new type of celebrity culture by adding new dimensions to the meanings, possibilities, and rewards of medieval fame. The complex nature of celebrity culture and Abelard’s life sparks interesting questions about how Abelard achieved fame and whether his fashioning of such was an intentional strategy, how people reacted to the emerging idea of individual fame, and the benefits and damages it brought in his case.
Defence Date: September 27, 2016
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Paul Dutton, Professor
- Committee Member: Emily O'Brien, Associate Professor
- Examiner: Matthew Hussey, Associate Professor, Department of English
Lorenzo Tomescu, The Labours of Heracles as Labours of Love
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Euripides’s unique place in the history of Greek thought. This thesis considers the implications of Nietzsche’s case by analyzing Euripides’s fifth-century tragedy Herakles. It argues that, for Euripides, the Heracles figure characterizes the shift from a mythic to a tragic worldview. As Heracles’s role in myth suggests the struggle of an individual repressed by society, Euripides’s use of allegory, which he sharply contrasts with tragic realism, reveals the consequences of an increase in self-consciousness. This shift from myth to tragedy suggests the importance of René Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and a scapegoat mechanism, the efficacy of which is shown by comparing Heracles and Job. Because an elevated figure is disgraced in both literary works, the comparison is illustrative of foundational anthropology. Job and Heracles, in their respective traditions, represent the central position of a virtual scapegoat onto whom communal violence is directed, displaced, and even transcended.
Defence Date: October 27, 2016
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Senior Supervisor: David Mirhady, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Committee Member: Ian Angus, Professor
- Examiner: Eirini Kotsovili, Lecturer, Hellen Studies
2015
Elliot Sorban, A Pragmatic Examination of A Secular Age
Inspired by William James’ description of pragmatism, this thesis investigates some conceivable effects of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is argued that Taylor’s articulation of a shared pre-ontological outlook, referred to as the immanent frame, is pragmatically valuable because it exposes and invalidates a pervasive entrenchment between people of varied metaphysical outlooks. This thesis begins by recapitulating Taylor’s grand narrative explaining the origins and conditions of the immanent frame. It then analyzes selected works and social organizations created by Karen Armstrong and Paul Kurtz, which exemplify typical open and closed perspectives within the immanent frame. This analysis demonstrates how disparate agendas become appreciable as structurally opposed when recognized as typical orientations in the immanent frame, and how this recognition challenges each polemic. Finally, the Quebec Charter of Values is exposed as an attack on those who frame their lives in relation to something that transcends the immanent frame.
Defence Date: January 28, 2015
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Eleanor Stebner, Associate Professor and J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities
- Committee Member: Ian Angus, Professor
- Examiner: Christine Jones, President, Pacific Redeemer College
Devon Field, An Incomplete Story: Luigi Giussani and his Encounter with Modernity
Luigi Giussani (1922–2005) was an Italian Catholic philosopher and educator. He founded the lay movement Comunione e Liberazione and produced a large written body of work, including The Religious Sense. Particularly in that text, he developed a critique of contemporary culture intended to elucidate a religious attitude to reality that is natural to humanity and a range of contingent social conditions that obstruct that attitude. He presented those conditions as limiting the horizons of human possibility and rendering the Catholic proposal obscure. My concern is with Giussani as a figure in confrontation with modernity and liberalism, and this essay builds to an examination of his work as a critique of liberalism. It argues that this critique lacks the specificity and detail to be successful, and that this has serious consequences for his attempts to advance Catholicism as a liveable possibility.
Defence Date: February 20, 2015
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Christine Jones, Senior Lecturer
- Committee Member: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Professor
- Examiner: John Zucchi, Professor, History and Classical Studies, McGill University
Daniel Gladstone, The Font of Well-Being: Fitted Dynamics in Avicenna's Natural Philosophy
This thesis reads Avicenna’s (d. 1037) treatise, The Canon of Medicine, alongside his philosophical and esoteric works to uncover the material conditions of human well-being. For Avicenna, well-being is complex; it is not only a state of being, but also an activity. For Avicenna, in order for a person to flourish, he/she must exercise the uniquely human part of his/her psyche, viz. the rational soul. Framing Avicenna’s perspective: a doctor cannot be considered a good doctor if he/she does not perform the activities of a doctor and a person cannot be considered a good person if he/she does not perform the activities of a person. In order for these potential activities to become actualized they must occur within fields of action that are fitted to humanity’s unique nature. This thesis argues that Avicenna’s Canon is philosophically relevant, offering insights into the most intimate of these fields: the human body.
Defence Date: May 28, 2015
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Ian Angus, Professor
- Committee Member: Paul Dutton, Professor
- Examiner: Derryl McLean, Associate Professor, Department of History
Glenn Deefholts, Character and the Art of Memory: Interpreting Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past"
The thesis examines Virginia Woolf's memoir, "A Sketch of the Past," in relation to her statement that in 1910, human character changed. A Freudian theoretical framework, Woolf's essays on character, and her novel, To the Lighthouse, are used to interpret and analyze the first thirty pages of the memoir, which cover the period from Woolf's first memories to the death of her mother, when Woolf was thirteen. The main character in this part is Woolf's mother, and the thesis argues for the centrality of Woolf's mother in shaping Woolf's later belief that character is the most important aspect of a work of fiction. The difficulty Woolf had in describing her mother is shown to relate to the challenge that her generation of writers faced in creating character, representing memory and existence, and capturing truth, either in a memoir or in a finished work of art, such as a novel.
Defence Date: September 18, 2015
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Stephen Duguid, Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Professor
- Committee Member: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Examiner: June Sturrock, Professor Emeritus, Department of English
2014
Huyen Pham, Breaking the Gaze: Ressentiment, Bad Faith, and the Struggle for Individual Freedom
Taking on a relatively unexplored topic, this thesis investigates the connection between Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre by revisiting both philosophers’ focus on individual choice and freedom. To do so, it first outlines the restraints placed on the individual by the gaze of the other. From there, it lays out the necessary steps towards liberation, emphasizing individual authenticity and responsibility, and the burden attached to the constant tasks of self-becoming and self-overcoming. This subsequently leads to an analysis of creative action and aesthetics, more specifically, of music and prose-writing’s ability to generate meaning. Through these discussions, this thesis aims to renew interest in Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s philosophies, and prove that an existential reading of their thoughts is still relevant to contemporary societies and can, therefore, offer some possible solutions to the current and ongoing issues of human rights and freedom.
Defence Date: January 23, 2014
Examining Committee:
- Chair: David Mirhady, Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Ian Angus, Professor
- Examiner: Jerry Zaslove, Professor Emeritus, Department of English
Yang Tang, Between Fantasy and Reality: Time-Travel Romance and Media Fandom in Chinese Cyberspace
The popularity of time-travel romance genre in Chinese cyberspace has become a phenomenon in recent years. Between Fantasy and Reality examines the most-read time-travel romance texts, fans’ participation and the affective space between the texts and their fans at Jinjiang Literature City. Going beyond traditional literary studies, this thesis analyzes fans’ interpretations, responses and discussions to reveal how much this literary practice has meant for young Chinese women on communicational, cultural and social levels. I argue that there exists a motive of utopian realism behind their daily practices. Focusing on Web-based romance reading and writing, my thesis also reveals the new trends of Chinese popular literature.
Defence Date: May 1, 2014
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Shuyu Kong, Associate Professor
- Committee Member: Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
- Examiner: Lena Henningsen, Junior Professor, Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Freiburg
Margaret (Meg) Penner, Herodotus: The Greek Struggle for Freedom
The narrative that Herodotus offers in the Histories relates how and why Persia and Greece clashed in mighty conflicts over power. Throughout his narrative, Herodotus includes descriptions of clashes over freedom in societies in the ancient known world. Herodotus approaches the conflicts between political systems in autonomy and autocracy with a measured and objective tone. He illustrates how geography, climate, and culture affect the various political systems. The present analysis is based on M.H. Hansen’s nine principles of freedom in the classical Greek world and shows how Herodotus weaves the motif of freedom into his narrative in writing the Histories. Herodotus states that he makes a “display” of his “history” (research) to show the deeds of both Greeks and non-Greeks and to explain how they gain, maintain, and lose freedom, and why they wage war. The reason they clash turns out largely to do with their different approaches to freedom.
Defence Date: December 12, 2014
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: David Mirhady, Professor
- Committee Member: Paul Dutton, Professor
- Examiner: Dimitris Krallis, Associate Professor, Hellenic Studies and Department of History
2013
Gordon Gray, Restoring knowledge: John of Salisbury’s “Return to the Tree”
In 1159 CE, the English diplomat and ecclesiastic John of Salisbury published two books, the Policraticus and the Metalogicon, the former a treatise on the nature of good governance, and the latter a defence of classical education. Believing that political leadership should be based on moral precepts, John observed that moral judgment seemed to have been largely replaced in both church and state by personal ambition for wealth and power. Believing further that the knowledge required for moral judgment should be gained through proper education, John reasoned that knowledge itself had become fractured, and that it was necessary to return to that point and rebuild knowledge anew. Concluding that the fracture occurred with Adam’s expulsion from paradise for eating from the tree of knowledge, John reasoned that mankind must ‘return to the tree.” This thesis analyzes John’s “return to the tree” within the intellectual context of the twelfth-century renaissance.
Defence Date: April 24, 2013
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Associate Professor and Graduate Chair
- Senior Supervisor: Paul Dutton, Professor
- Committee Member: Christine Jones, Senior Lecturer
- Examiner: Emily O'Brien, Assistant Professor, Department of History
Cameron Duncan, Modernity or Capitalism? Technology in Heidegger and Marx
Modernity or Capitalism? explores a parallelism that can be found in the work of Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx. The two share a similar ontology of labour that forms the basis of their distinct understandings of the technological world. I first outline the respective critiques of technology by Heidegger and Marx, then argue that the global system comprises both modern techno-scientific representation and capitalism. Everything must fall within the system’s self-enclosed logic. Abstraction, thus, becomes the structuring force. I argue that the system cannot account for the concrete character of human labour. Through a close reading of Heidegger and Marx I explore the possibility of concrete practical activity as a potential structuring force of the system.
Defence Date: November 20, 2013
Examining Committee:
- Chair: Samir Gandesha, Associate Professor
- Senior Supervisor: Ian Angus, Professor
- Committee Member: Andrew Feenberg, Professor, School of Communication
- Examiner: Claudia Ruitenberg, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia