McMicken College Dean Wins Canadian Studies Award

Karen Gould, dean of the University of Cincinnati’s McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, received the Governor General's International Award for Canadian Studies on May 26. The award recognizes a scholar who has made an outstanding contribution to scholarship and to the development of Canadian Studies internationally.

In addition to receiving her award during a special recognition banquet at the Hotel Governeur in Montreal, Gould gave a speech.  The Governor General’s International Award for Canadian Studies is given annually, every other year to a Canadianist working outside Canada, and in alternate years to a Canadianist working inside Canada.

Gould has been a leading scholar of Quebec feminist writing and a major figure in both the national and international Canadian Studies communities for more than two decades. The publication of her book, “Writing in the Feminine,” in 1990 by the Southern Illinois Press, was a major event in Canadian feminist literary studies. This book made the works of Quebec’s most important experimental women writers accessible to all students of francophone literature. Currently, she is completing a book project on contemporary women’s writing, “Women Mapping Culture in Quebec, 1980-2000.”

In addition to her path-breaking article in Signs on a new generation of contemporary Quebec women writers, Gould has published articles and essays on most of Quebec's major women writers of the past three decades. She began her scholarly career with two books on French novelist Claude Simon.

Recently, Gould served as president of the International Council for Canadian Studies. She has also served as editor of Quebec Studies, an interdisciplinary journal, as well as vice-president and president of the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States.

One other international female scholar has won this award previously.  Two other scholars in the United States have won it – Robin Winks, an historian at Yale, and Charles Doran, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins.

More information about the award is available on the Web at www.iccs-ciec.ca/pages/6_prizes/a_govgenaw.html.