The Department of Literatures in English at The UWI, Mona Campus presents the third lecture in the Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture Series on Sunday, November 29, 2009 at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts, beginning at 11.00 a.m.  The lecture will be delivered by Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba and Director of the Research Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies, Professor Diana Brydon. Her lecture is entitled "Metaphors that disturb and inspire: the challenge of reading across cultures". 

The lecture series honours critically acclaimed poet, Edward Baugh, who is Professor Emeritus of English at the UWI, Mona. Baugh has garnered an international reputation as an authority on Anglophone Caribbean poetry in general, and on the work of Derek Walcott in particular. His distinguished record of academic, administrative, and public service includes a lengthy stint as the Public Orator of UWI, Mona (1985-2002), three terms as Head of the Department of English, and Dean and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and General Studies. He has figured prominently as a leader in national, regional, and international literary and academic associations such as Jamaica P.E.N Club, West Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, and the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He has adjudicated regional and international literary competitions and prizes such as the Guyana Prize for Literature, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Dr. Diana Brydon has been Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at the University of Manitoba and Director of the Research Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies since 2006. She was the first Robert and Ruth Lumsden Chair of English at the University of Western Ontario from 1999 to 2006 and has taught at universities in Australia, Brazil and Canada.  Several of her articles have been translated into Chinese, Portuguese and Polish.

A specialist in postcolonial cultural studies and Australian, Canadian and Caribbean literary studies, she has published numerous articles and book chapters in these fields and books on Christina Stead (1987) and Timothy Findley (1995, 1998). She co-wrote Decolonising Fictions (1993, with Helen Tiffin, and edited a groundbreaking interdisciplinary, five volume anthology, Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2000). Her co-edited book with Irena Makaryk, Shakespeare in Canada (2002), crosses theatre, literary and cultural studies, Canadian and postcolonial studies, to provide the first book on this important topic.

Her current research examines the cluster of meanings attached to concepts of home under the pressures of globalizing processes within the contexts of postcolonial cultural studies and discourses around globalization. Recently, she co-edited a special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature on “Poetics and Public Culture in Canada” (2007) and a special issue of New Literatures Review (in press 2009) on biculturalism and multiculturalism in settler-colony contexts. In 2010, she will be a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.

Brydon has served or serves on the editorial boards of several internationally known academic journals in postcolonial and cultural studies. She has been President of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (1989-1992), editor of the journal World Literature Written in English (1990-1994), chair of the management board of the Aid to Scholarly Publications Committee (2001-2003), and International Administrator of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (1991 & 1992).