York University professors Richard Hornsey, Andrew Dawson and Dayna Nadine Scott have earned Massey College appointments for the 2019-20 academic year. Hornsey, at the Lassonde School of Engineering, has been offered the position of York-Massey Fellowship; while Dawson, of Glendon, and Scott, of Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies, were awarded York-Massey Visiting Scholarships.
“We are very pleased that professors Hornsey, Dawson and Scott were awarded these honours,” says Rui Wang, interim vice-president research and innovation at York University. “The York-Massey Fellowships and Visiting Scholarships represent an important opportunity for our academics and researchers to expand their areas of scholarship and contribution to their various disciplines in a broader context.”
Massey College is an independent college situated on the University of Toronto St. George Campus. The fellowship provides the selected faculty member with prime office space in the college for the academic year and the status of a full senior resident of the college, with all privileges enjoyed by senior Fellows. The title “York Fellow of Massey College” remains for life or while mutually agreeable.
Visiting scholars will have a study space in the college and access to all the same privileges as the Massey College senior Fellows. Membership in the Massey Alumni Association is granted to visiting scholars at the completion of their program.
York-Massey Fellowship (2019-20): Richard Hornsey
Hornsey plans to use his sabbatical leave as a York-Massey scholar to explore new avenues of research, combining his interests in technology, engineering education and history. He will focus on the diaries, reminiscences and scientific publications of graduates from the Royal Indian Engineering College near London, U.K., established in 1871 to train engineers for British-ruled India.
His goals are to understand the lives of college graduates in India, their technical and administrative responsibilities and how their education prepared them for their positions. He will also explore the evolving nature of engineering education during its transition into a university discipline.
York-Massey Visiting Scholarship (2019-20): Andrew Dawson
Dawson will use his sabbatical leave to complete his book manuscript, provisionally titled The Political Culture-Violence Nexus: State Legitimacy and Homicide. The book will examine the relationship between state legitimacy and violence through an analysis of two pairs of matched historical case studies: Canada and the United States, and Jamaica and Barbados.
More specifically, the book will apply comparative historical methodological techniques to analyze long-term trends in violence from the mid- to late-18th century to the 21st century. The overarching goal of this research is to compare similarities and differences in the historical homicide rate trajectories of each country to identify factors driving trend divergences.
York-Massey Visiting Scholarship (2019-20): Dayna Nadine Scott
Scott, awarded York Research Chair (Environmental Law and Justice in the Green Economy) in 2018, plans to use her time to begin drafting the book manuscript that will be the centre of her sabbatical scholarship outputs. She is currently working on a book proposal tentatively titled Consent by Contract: Settler Law and Indigenous Self-Determination in Ontario’s Ring of Fire.
“We desperately need to develop some rigorous and principled analysis on the question of what to do when Indigenous governing authorities say no to a project that Canadian regulatory regimes have said yes to,” she says.
More about Massey College
Massey College consists of graduate student junior Fellows; senior Fellows, consisting primarily of faculty; journalism Fellows; members of the Quadrangle Society (leaders in business, the legal profession and philanthropy); and visiting scholars and alumni, of whom an increasing number come from York University. The college offers an extraordinary experience by providing a community that allows all members to expand their horizons academically, socially and culturally.
The York-Massey Fellowship and York-Massey Visiting Scholarships were open to full-time faculty members planning to go on sabbatical or other leave during 2019-20.