Twenty-one projects from around the province have been named as successful recipients of the 2011 B.C. History Digitization Program (BCHDP) funding awards.
The digitization program, an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, was launched in 2006. It provides matching funds that help libraries, archives, museums and other organizations digitize unique historical items, including images, print and sound materials.
Learning Centre funding totalled nearly $180,000 for the 2011 round. Altogether, BCHDP funding has totalled more than $820,000 for 98 projects throughout British Columbia.
This year’s wide range of projects includes the digitization of First Nations materials, historic photographs and oral histories of BC communities, pressed plants specimens and entomological collections, items chronicling Vancouver’s punk rock scene, material highlighting the feminist movement in the West Kootenays, archival maps and newspapers, and more.
Congratulations to this year’s recipients! You can view a complete list of grant recipients and project descriptions here.
UBC Continuing Studies collaborates with other members of the UBC community to provide an ongoing series of free lectures, dialogues and debates on topics of interest to the general public – locally, nationally and internationally.
The Lifelong Learning Series is held in the fall and winter terms at UBC Robson Square and is sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre as part of its webcast collection. In its second series of talks, UBC Continuing Studies partnered with the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Laurier Institution in presenting the Global Islam: Past, Present and Future, public lectures delivered by some of the world’s most renowned scholars in Islamic studies.
Islam and the Contest of Faculties in Iran by Dr. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
The Meaning of Global Jihad by Dr. Faisal Devji
Indonesian Islam: The Modern, Global Shapings of a National Tradition? by Dr. Michael Laffan
Described by the Boston Globe as “the nation’s leading environmentalist,” Professor McKibben is the author of more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, he writes often for Harper’s, National Geographic, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global warming awareness campaign that in October 2009 coordinated what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.”
Location: Woodward Instructional Resource Centre, Lecture Theatre #2. Directions are available here. Doors open at 7:30pm.
Vancouver Institute Lectures are free and open to the public.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and presented by the Global Civic Policy Society and the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC. David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, prior to that, a senior writer at Harper’s. He is also a contributing editor at Golf Digest. He is the author of more than a dozen books: High School, about the four months he spent pretending to be a high-school student; None of the Above, an exposé of the standardized-testing industry; The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, a collection of his pieces from Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly; The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works; Around the House, a collection of essays about domestic life; The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money; Copies in Seconds, about the invention of the Xerox machine; and Sheetrock & Shellac, a sequel to The Walls Around Us. In addition, he has written four books about golf—My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness, and Hit & Hope—and he co-edited a collection of golf stories entitled Lure of the Links. His most recent book is Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, which grew out of a widely discussed 2004 New Yorker essay called “Green Manhattan.” He lives in Washington, Connecticut, with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman.
Global Islam: Past, Present and Future is presented by UBC Continuing Studies, the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Laurier Institution. It is part of UBC Continuing Studies’ Lifelong Learning Series. Laffan is a Professor of History at Princeton University where he studies the history of Southeast Asia, focusing at present on Islam, nationalism, Dutch colonialism and orientalism. He earned his B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). He came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (2003), he argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite. His forthcoming book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam, looks at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy. The next project, will use Sri Lanka as a lens to discuss a history of Indian Ocean mobilities and religious exchange. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Laffan, M. F. (2011). The makings of Indonesian Islam: Orientalism and the narration of a Sufi past. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
Laffan, M., & Ebrary Academic Complete (Canada) Subscription Collection. (1999). The resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin party, 1916-1923. Cambridge, UK; New York, N.Y: Cambridge University Press. [Link]
Laffan, M. F. (2003). Islamic nationhood and colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the winds. New York; London: RoutledgeCurzon. doi:10.4324/9780203222577. [Link]
Laffan, M. (2007). “Another Andalusia”: Images of colonial southeast Asia in Arabic newspapers. The Journal of Asian Studies, 66(3), 689-722. doi:10.1017/S0021911807000939. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Wat Endowment and hosted by the Department of Asian Studies. Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture. David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies at Harvard University. The world’s leading scholar of modern Chinese fiction, his research specialties include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing fiction and drama, and comparative literary theory. Wang received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and has taught at National Taiwan University and Columbia University. His many honors include an honorary doctorate from Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and his appointments as an Academician of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and as a Yangtze River Scholar affiliated with Fudan University (Shanghai). Writing at a time when History has collapsed and Revolution has lost its mandate, writers cannot take up the two subjects without pondering their inherent intelligibility. Drawing upon theories on “post-history” as developed by scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, and contemporary fictional works as created by writers such as Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Wang Anyi, this lecture will address the following three issues: History after Post-History, Enlightenment versus Enchantment and Socialist Utopia and “the Best of all Best Possible Worlds”.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by UBC’s Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program. This lecture is made possible by the generous support of The Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute of Asian Research and Department of Asian Studies. Venerable Sik Yin Kit, Head Nun, Po Lam Buddhist Assoc. of Chilliwack, BC. This lecture examines how a non-sectarian meditative practice brings peace and calmness to the disturbed and imprisoned, and reflects on experiences as a meditation teacher working with prisoners in the Fraser Valley.
Select Articles and Books from UBC Library
Chaudhary, A. (2009). Aspects of buddha-dhamma. Delhi: Eastern Book Linkers.
Nyanaponika, T., & Bodhi, B. (1986). The vision of dhamma. London: Rider.
Sonaṭakke, Y. (2010). The Buddha: Dhamma and doctrine. Delhi, India: Abhishek Prakashan.
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by St. John’s College. Michael Church is a Professor Emeritus at UBC. Church’s research interests focus on the morphodynamics of rivers at all scales from steepland streams to large rivers. He is currently involved in long-term studies of sediment transport and stability in Fraser, Peace and Mackenzie rivers. The Fraser River Study is concerned with finding a way to manage the river to maintain or improve the existing flood protection while maintaining the ecological character of the river. The Sediment transport is also studied in an experimental program conducted in our environmental hydraulics laboratory. Church has been recognized as a world leader in fluvial sediment transport and the interpretation of river channel changes. In addition, he is interested in fluvial landscape evolution over intermediate time scales (order 10,000 years), history, and methodology of geomorphology.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Church, M., & Moore, D. (1989). Appreciation. Atmospheric Environment (1967), 23(6), i-i. doi:10.1016/0004-6981(89)90143-1 [Link]
Jakob, M., & Church, M. (2011). The trouble with floods. Canadian Water Resources Journal, 36(4), 287-292. doi:10.4296/cwrj3604928 [Link]
Dugmore, A., Borthwick, D. M., & Church, M. J. (2007). The role of climate in settlement and landscape change in the north atlantic islands: An assessment of cumulative deviations in high-resolution proxy climate records. Human Ecology [H.W.Wilson – SSA], 35(2), 169. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and presented by the Global Civic Policy Society and the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC. David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, prior to that, a senior writer at Harper’s. He is also a contributing editor at Golf Digest. He is the author of more than a dozen books: High School, about the four months he spent pretending to be a high-school student; None of the Above, an exposé of the standardized-testing industry; The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, a collection of his pieces from Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly; The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works; Around the House, a collection of essays about domestic life; The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money; Copies in Seconds, about the invention of the Xerox machine; and Sheetrock & Shellac, a sequel to The Walls Around Us. In addition, he has written four books about golf—My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness, and Hit & Hope—and he co-edited a collection of golf stories entitled Lure of the Links. His most recent book is Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, which grew out of a widely discussed 2004 New Yorker essay called “Green Manhattan.” He lives in Washington, Connecticut, with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Response strong to new, green Manhattan project. (2006). Waste News, 11(27), 5. [Link]
Berenholtz, R., & Reynolds, D. M. (1988). Manhattan architecture (1st ed.). New York; London; Toronto: Prentice Hall Press.
Macdonald, E. C. (1994). Manhattan oasis. Architectural Review, 194(1170), 45-47. [Link]
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and UBC Woodward Library as part of the “Health Information Series.” Dr. Larry Goldenberg is an award-winning Canadian researcher, pioneer in the treatment of prostate cancer and world-renowned advocate of patient education. Dr. Goldenberg authored one of the first books to explain prostate cancer treatment options in layman’s terms. Prostate Cancer: All You Need to Know to Take an Active Part in Your Treatment, now in its third edition, is widely considered to be one of the best resources available to men diagnosed with the disease. Dr. Goldenberg talks about how the 21st century will be a century of aging, and how the Men’s Health Initiative will help people not only live long, but live healthy.
