Arts and Humanities at Western

05/01/2026

Join our team! We're currently recruiting for an Employer Relationship Specialist to support our Arts and Humanities Internship Program (AHIP). Check out the Working at Western website (recruit.uwo.ca) posting 42866. Closing date of May 5, 2026.

04/20/2026

🐝 Join us for Nathan TeBokkel's Woodman Lecture, "What Is It Like to Be a Bee? Phenomenology and Romantic Forms of Estrangement," on May 21 at 4PM in Conron Hall. Register here: https://www.uwo.ca/events/2026/05/woodman-tebokkel.html

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel transformed phenomenology with his landmark essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" In this lecture, TeBokkel reimagines that question by replacing "bat" with "bee," shifting phenomenological inquiry into the intertwined histories of labour, environment, agriculture and romantic poetry. TeBokkel draws on his lived experience as a beekeeper, managing hives in a world where insect pollination supports roughly one-third of global food crops. The result is a compelling reflection on how the humanities respond to economic and environmental crises.

Nathan TeBokkel is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at Western and a recipient of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Killam Memorial Doctoral Scholarship. His upcoming book, Whistling at the Plough, examines the relationship between agricultural capitalism and romanticism. His current Banting project, Working Feeling, explores labour history, lived experience and romantic poetics.

In addition to his academic work, TeBokkel is training as a master beekeeper on his family farm and researches honeybee queen replacement as a method to improve overwinter survival. His recent publications include essays in New Literary History and The Alchemy of Stories.

The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism features enagaging lectures that will showcase the movement's enduring power in the belief that human emotion, creativity and connection to nature are essential to understanding our world. 🐝

04/15/2026

'O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me': Join us this week for "Tennyson's Errors," a lecture by English Professor Matthew Rowlinson, on April 16th from 4-5 PM in Conron Hall (University College Room 3110, reception to follow). This lecture is part of the Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism. Register here: https://www.uwo.ca/events/2026/04/woodman-rowlinson.html

This paper explores how errors of date, address, and occasion haunt Tennyson’s poetry. Tennyson’s great elegy "In Memoriam" can be understood as a rectification of error, but even in "In Memoriam," some errors and contingencies prove hard to dispel. And they persist in other poems, like the late “In the Valley of Cauteretz,” where a mistake in the year reveals a q***r, melancholy ambivalence to the commemorative and anniversary modes as such.

In his teaching and research, Dr. Matthew Rowlinson studies nineteenth-century British literature and culture. He has particular interests in the writings of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, John Keats, and Walter Scott. His work aims to understand the way literature describes or resists the material, embodied world in which it is made. His most recent book is Biopolitics and Animal Species in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press); current research focuses on literary allegory as a form of anachronism.

The Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism invites intellectual exploration of this movement's powerful legacy to the Humanities and beyond. Romanticism continues to cast a long shadow on our experience, especially our present time of various crises that require Romanticism's ceaseless mental flight more than ever.

02/10/2026

Yan Zhou, Western's curator-in-residence, is eager to connect, engage and develop new ideas with the help of the campus community. She also runs a small library in her office, what she calls her “Diaspora Climate bookshelf."

Learn more about Zhou's research and upcoming exhibition Diaspora Climate, opening Feb. 12 at Department of Visual Arts & ArtLab Gallery:

https://news.westernu.ca/2026/02/meet-westerns-inaugural-curator-in-residence-yan-zhou/

02/04/2026

Undergraduate Summer Research Internships are now open! Spend your summer working on exciting projects, exhibitions, or conducting unique research in an area of interest! Students must be enrolled at Western in an undergraduate program in Winter 2026, and preference will be given to students entering their fourth year of study in Fall 2026. LEARN MORE & APPLY TODAY: https://uwo.ca/arts/research/research_internship.html

10/31/2025

02/27/2025

New course focused on ‘Black Geographies’ taught by Professor Cornel Grey in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western, is one of more than 50 courses offered in the new Major in Black Studies at Western University. Learn more in News:

Black studies, introduced at Western in 2022 as a minor, will be offered as a major starting in September 2025 with more than 50 courses on offer.

01/16/2025

Five undergraduate students were awarded for their use of Western Libraries scholarly and archival resources, including Karen Wen (right), second-year Western English and Writing Studies student in the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities. Learn more about their research through the News story below:

Nicole Bussey, Victoria Chechulina, Joel Friesen Waldner, Olivia Holland, and Karen Wen won the 2024 Western Libraries Undergraduate Research Awards.

12/19/2024

As part of the Western News Our Warming Planet series, Arts and Humanities professors Joshua Schuster and Kirsty Robertson discuss the role that art and literature plays in spurring action on climate change:

To have any success toward a more sustainable future, there has to be a cultural shift. Western profs explore how art and literature play a role.

10/21/2024

Join us Friday, October 25 at 6 PM for the annual Hanny & Najet Hassan Lecture presented by Dr. Fahmida Suleman, Senior Curator of the Islamic World collections at the Royal Ontario Museum. This richly illustrated talk challenges the assumption that globalization is unique to modernity, focusing on art and visual culture from medieval Islamic Egypt. REGISTER NOW!

October 25, 2024 - Globalization in the Medieval World: Chinese and Central Asian Artistic Inspirations in the Islamic Mediterranean The annual Hanny & Najet Hassan Lecture in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities - Events Calendar - Western University