About Us: Popular Culture Niagara is a group of eight faculty who, with the help of several graduate students, are documenting and studying several aspects of the rich and diverse popular culture of the Niagara region. In the initial phase (3 years), we will be studying three specific aspects of the area's popular culture: music (Sounds and Scenes), movies (Movies and Theatres) and heritage sites ( Memories and Heritage). Our research will document these largely neglected aspects of local popular culture in Niagara, chronicle an important part of Canada's cultural history, develop appreciation and understanding of the popular arts, and ensure that important documents and artifacts are preserved for regional heritage and tourism. The initial phase of the Popular Culture Niagara project (2003-2006) is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC file #02-343), whose support is gratefully acknowledged. PARTICIPATING
FACULTY: NICK BAXTER-MOORE - Associate Professor of Communication and Popular Culture Nick Baxter-Moore's main areas of teaching and research in the field of popular culture focus on relationships between politics and popular culture, especially popular music. This includes the political "uses" of popular culture and the role of politics and public policy in shaping the environment within which popular culture forms are produced, disseminated and consumed. He designed and teaches an undergraduate course on Politics and Popular Music and also teaches courses on politics and the mass media in Canada and elsewhere. He has co-authored or co-edited six books on elections, Canadian politics and research methods, and is currently working on a book on the politics of popular music. He is director-elect of the interdisciplinary M.A. Program in Popular Culture. MARIAN BREDIN - Assistant Professor of Communication and
Popular Culture Marian Bredin's research interests focus on how Aboriginal people and other minority groups are represented as ambivalent objects of both fear and desire in popular culture and on the role of the mass media and influence of federal cultural policy in the production of contemporary Canadian popular culture. Publications in the Canadian Journal of Communication and elsewhere have shown how popular stereotypes of racial and cultural minorities circulate alongside anthropological and historical discourses of cultural difference. TERRANCE COX - Adjunct Faculty, Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film Terrance Cox is a writer of poems and non-fiction and a "general practitioner" in the arts and humanities at Brock University . His columns and articles appear in regional periodicals such as the St. Catharines Standard and Niagara Current . Published collections include a "spoken word with music" CD, Local Scores (2000), and the Niagara Book Prize-winning Radio & Other Miracles (2001). BARRY KEITH GRANT - Professor of Popular Culture and Film Barry Keith Grant's main areas of research and teaching have been in popular cinema, with an emphasis on genres (science fiction, horror, westerns, musicals) and popular music. He has published widely in these areas, and several of his books are commonly used as textbooks in film studies courses. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of five scholarly film journals, and is currently series editor for Cambridge University Press (Genres in American Cinema) and Wayne State University Press (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television). Professor Grant's weekly column on cinema and culture appears every Thursday in the St. Catharines Standard . Winner of the Brock Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity in 2000, Grant designed and taught Brock's first course in Popular Culture in 1980 and was the founding director of the Interdisciplinary M.A. Program in Popular Culture. RUSSELL JOHNSTON - Assistant Professor of Communication and Popular Culture Russell Johnston's research concentrates on the early history of the mass media in Canada . In particular, he has documented the emergence of the modern advertising industry by examining its social, intellectual, and professional development. Closely allied with this work are on-going studies of the press, magazines, and early radio broadcasting which trace the effects that advertising practices have had upon the integrity of the public sphere and the diversity of voices heard within civil society. He has developed courses reflecting these interests on the economics and culture of sport media coverage, and on the history of modern advertising. His research has been recognized by Advertising Standards Canada, Marketing Magazine , and the Mackenzie Heritage Printery Museum . JOAN NICKS - Adjunct Professor, Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film Joan Nicks's teaching areas have included documentary and Canadian film, and courses she developed on international women's cinema, Canadian popular culture, and gender and popular culture forms. She is co-editor of Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture , and has contributed chapters on women's filmmaking and documentary cinema to the anthologies Gendering The Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema , Documenting the Documentary , and Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries . Her writing on Canadian film, gender and film, and popular culture has appeared in the journals Cinema Canada , Canadian Journal of Film Studies , and Post Script , and in encyclopedias on television and popular culture. She is a founding co-director of the Niagara Indie Film Festival (NIFF) and a co-director of the Brock University Film Society (BUFS). MIKE RIPMEESTER - Associate Professor of Geography Michael Ripmeester's research has focused mainly on First Nation/ Euro-Canadian relationships in the nineteenth century. He is currently extending this work into the twentieth century in a project exploring the relationships between identity and landscape in a First Nation community. He has also worked on a project involving the cultural naturalization of the lawn as the most appropriate landscape form for private green space, and he has published several articles in both of these areas. JEANNETTE SLONIOWSKI - Associate Professor of Communications, Popular Culture and Film Jeannette Sloniowski's main areas of research and teaching have been in Canadian detective fiction, television, and film, with an emphasis on documentary and docudrama. She has co-edited Canadian Communications: Issues in Media and Culture , Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries , and Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture , and has published essays in several journals. Prof. Sloniowski is currently co-editor of the TV Milestones series for Wayne State University Press, and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Canadian Communications . |
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