English At 50 | University of Waterloo

A constellation of circumstances led to Dr. Marjorie Stone (MA 1974, MPHIL 1975) attending Waterloo's MA program in 1972. She was offered a scholarship to enter UW's MA in English; since her husband was a student at the University of Guelph at that point, and Marjorie could commute to UW every day, she was happy to take up the scholarship offer.

She enjoyed the program at Waterloo, and particularly the opportunity to take courses with Robert Martin (on the fiction of Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence), Helen Ellis (on Romantic poetry), Joseph Gold (on Charles Dickens), and Ken Ledbetter (on William Faulkner). She also made some very good friends at Waterloo, including Sally Melville, and especially enjoyed the Farmer's Market in Kitchener-Waterloo. She wrote her M. Phil. thesis on the representation of women in Faulkner's novels under Ken Ledbetter's supervision.

Thanks to the encouragement of her Waterloo professors, she applied for a doctoral fellowship and won a Canada Council grant (this was before the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council took over the funding of doctoral fellowships). With this support, she pursued her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, finding that she had had a strong foundation for this through her M.A. at Waterloo.

After successfully defending her dissertation (on the novels of Dickens), she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the support of a SSHRC postdoctoral studies grant, also at the University of Toronto, and was subsequently offered a tenure-track position at Dalhousie University. Now a tenured professor, she researches and teaches 19th century literature (especially Victorian literature), Women in Writing, Literature and Medicine, and Immigration and Citizenship studies. Today, Marjorie is the McCulloch Chair in English and Professor of Gender Studies at Dalhousie University. She has published on various authors including Dickens, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, Toni Morrison, Christina Rossetti and diverse subjects, including Victorian poetry and fiction, feminist ethics, citizenship studies and sex trafficking. In 1996-98, she served as President of the Association of College and University Teachers of English, and from 1999-2002, she was Dalhousie University's first Assistant Dean of Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences. From 2004-7, she was a Centre Director for the Atlantic Metropolis Centre, an interuniversity centre for research on immigration and diversity.