Arts alumna takes leading role at University of Toronto
Alumna Professor Alexandra Gillespie, an internationally renowned humanities researcher, has been appointed the new Vice-President of the University of Toronto (U of T), and Principal, University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).
Professor Gillespie is from Wellington, and completed her BA (Hons) in English at Victoria University of Wellington. She holds a DPhil and MSt in English from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
“I would like to congratulate Professor Alexandra Gillespie on her appointment to this vital position of leadership, both at UTM and the wider U of T,” said Meric Gertler, president of the University of Toronto. “Professor Gillespie is an accomplished and innovative researcher and an outstanding teacher and mentor. She is also a talented administrator. I look forward to working with her in the advancement of UTM and U of T as a whole.”
Professor Gillespie said she is incredibly proud to be a part of the UTM community and thrilled with the opportunity to lead the campus. “This is a challenging time for folks at UTM, as it is for everyone,” she noted. “But our community is resilient, and our outstanding students, teachers and researchers are poised to transform Canada and the world. I am hugely hopeful about the future, and honoured to work with UTM’s dedicated staff to lead our vibrant and exceptional institution.”
Professor Gillespie is a scholar of 14th century writer Geoffrey Chaucer and principal investigator of U of T’s new Institutional Strategic Initiative on Global Book Science. Her 2006 book, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, showed that pre-modern ideas about authorship shaped Western printing technologies while her forthcoming monograph, Chaucer’s Books, explores the literary history and philosophy of the book sciences.
Professor Gillespie’s interdisciplinary work in medieval literary studies and book history has given her extensive experience building international scholarly networks. As director of the U of T Old Books New Science Lab, she and her team have received the equivalent of around $3 million (NZD) in funding, much of it in partnership with U of T Libraries. Their international research initiative uses non-destructive analytic techniques to investigate the origins and development of books in their project, The Book and the Silk Roads.
Prior to joining UTM, Gillespie worked as a management consultant in the education sector in New Zealand. She was a Bradley-Maxwell Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College in Oxford, and a Munby Fellow at Cambridge University Library.