From left, Professors Laurel Brinton, Kate Sirluck, Nick Hudson, and Judy Segal.
As of July 1, 2023, beloved UBC English Language & Literatures faculty Professors Laurel Brinton, Kate Sirluck, Nick Hudson, and Judy Segal have retired after decades of commitment to inspiring students both in and out of the classroom. Their insights and contributions, honed by years of pedagogical and academic rigor, have changed the landscape of their fields and the department in profound and lasting ways.
“These four endlessly brilliant scholars have been foundational to the Department of English Language & Literatures. Their legacies will live on here as they move on to exciting new phases of their lives,” says Department Head Dr. Patsy Badir.
“Kate has an uncanny ability to summarize a tangled set of arguments in perfectly lucid prose. Her classes are the stuff of legend: there is magic in the web of her voice.
“Eighteenth-Century Studies is thriving at UBC because Nick has rightly insisted, over and over again, that we hold a place for it. While I hold his scholarship and teaching in the highest esteem, it is the conviction with which he defends his field that I will miss the most.
“Judy is a magnificent teacher and an exceptional scholar: she listens attentively, she thinks rigorously, and then she knows exactly the right questions to ask. It is incontestable that she has shaped the field of the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine in the Department but it is also the case that she has shaped EL&L and many of the people in it.
“Laurel has been a key defender of the Language Program. In quiet ways that often fly under the radar, she has promoted the well-being of the Department as a whole. I respect Laurel not only for her extraordinary scholarly accomplishments, but also for her tireless and ever collegial contributions to the workings of this Department.”
Though the Department of English Language & Literatures will look and feel very different next year without these four faculty members, we wish them all the best on their future endeavours. We will continue to celebrate the contributions and achievements of our newest emeriti faculty. Learn more about Drs. Brinton, Sirluck, Hudson, and Segal below, and see the remarks on their careers from department colleagues who know each of them best.
Laurel Brinton
Professor Laurel Brinton’s specialization within English historical linguistics include historical pragmatics (especially pragmatic markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies.
She received her Ph.D. in English with a Linguistics Emphasis from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been with the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures since 1981, and was promoted to Professor in 1995. During her time with the Department, she served as Associate Head for Graduate Studies (1997 – 1999). She was also chair of the English Language Program for many years.
Dr. Brinton has received numerous research grants and awards, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Izaak Walton Killam Research Prize in 1999 and the Izaak Walton Killam Faculty Research Fellowship in 2006 at UBC.
Dr. Brinton is decorated as she is prolific. She has published several monographs on aspect, pragmatic markers, comment clauses, lexicalization, and historical pragmatics. A full list of her publications can be found on her faculty profile as well as her personal website. She is currently the co-editor of English Language and Linguistics with Bernd Kortmann (Freiburg University), Warren McGuire (Edinburgh University), and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (Vigo University).
Laurel Brinton is internationally renowned for her work in historical pragmatics, discourse markers, corpus linguistics, and Modern English grammar. Her publication record is impressive by any measure – in addition to a wide-ranging collection of articles, she has written seven books in linguistics that have been influential in their fields, including textbooks and surveys in their 2nd or 3rd edition, has edited or co-edited 6 volumes in English historical linguistics, and continues to be an energetic participant in the field, publishing, attending meetings, and serving on editorial boards.
In the Department of English Language & Literatures, she has been a consistent voice and unwavering advocate for the English Language program, which was reshaped and grew substantially under her direction. Colleagues know her as an inspirational mentor to junior faculty, students, and post-doctoral fellows alike, a wise advisor whose door is always open, an extraordinary organizer and facilitator, a guiding force in the evolution of the Department’s English Language program, and a generous host of sushi socials.
In the forty years since starting her career in our Department, Laurel Brinton has made an outstanding contribution to the field of English Linguistics overall, and to its crucial subfields, such as Pragmatics, History of Language and Grammaticalization. She is one of the world’s leading scholars of the English Language and has been at the forefront of methodological and theoretical innovation throughout her career. Her international prestige is unmatched, and her publication record is a testament to life spent charting new horizons in the study of English. Under her helm, which she shares with other co-editors, the flagship journal English Language and Linguistics enjoys unparalleled prestige and trust.
At UBC, Laurel created a Language Program where there was none. She designed courses, structured and re-structured the Language Major, and wrote and revised two crucial textbooks, all of which contributed to creating a lasting foundation for the Language Program. The breadth and variety of Laurel’s accomplishments can seem intimidating, if not for her well-known warmth and collegiality. Never in a hurry and always ready to discuss the next step, she showed us what investing in a program can achieve. Laurel’s commitment to the Department’s future well-being is unwavering, and the Language Program will continue to grow and make her proud. We are truly fortunate to have had her expertise and guidance for all those years.
Kate Sirluck
Professor Kate Sirluck specializes in early modern literature and drama. She also has research interests in environmental humanities, feminism, animal studies, the history of ideas, and cultural anthropology. She has published on Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Professor Sirluck completed her Ph.D. on Jacobean tragedy at King’s College, University of London, and joined the Department of English Language & Literatures in 1982. Since joining the Department, Professor Sirluck has consistently taught transformative courses on Renaissance literature and drama that have been unfailingly popular with undergraduate students.
She served as the Chair of the Religion, Literature and the Arts Committee for several years, and has been a teacher, coordinator and advisor in the English Honours program throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Kate Sirluck has long been one of the most beloved professors in our department. A trained actor and Shakespeare specialist, Kate was also for many years the Chair of the English Honours program, in which role she mentored, encouraged, inspired, and challenged generations of our students. Her passionate, engaged teaching, her warm, compelling manner, her lively and (often) ruthless critiques all helped her students to become their best selves in the classroom and beyond.
The English undergraduate journal The Garden Statuary is memorably named after an unforgettable comment she wrote on a student’s paper: “this paragraph is like a garden statuary: pretty, distracting, and useless.” Thus is she rightly immortalized – as the best kind of challenging, incisive, and delightful university professor. She will be missed!
When I entered the English Honours program in the fall of 1995, Kate Sirluck was already a legend and a force to be reckoned with. She had – and continues to have – a fierce intellect and an undefinably potent classroom charisma, a combination that has entranced UBC English students for decades. Kate has always been an eloquently unapologetic Feminist. The students in her Honours section in my year used to tease her about her name – "is 'Sirluck' a masculine Dame Fortune?" and I know this is a joke she enjoyed.
Generations of UBC English students have benefited enormously from Kate's deep and thorough knowledge of Shakespeare and the English Renaissance. They left her classes edified, but perhaps more importantly, they left with their lives a bit more enchanted than they were before. Teachers of Kate’s calibre are rare, indeed. Thank you, Kate Sirluck.
Nick Hudson
Professor Nicholas Hudson is an expert in the “long” eighteenth-century (1660 – 1800). He specializes in the relationship between literature and cultural, economic and political developments during this pivotal era in the creation of modernity.
Professor Hudson obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. He joined the Department of English Language & Literatures in 1985 and was promoted to Professor in 1995. Dr. Hudson’s teaching has been reflective of his interdisciplinary expertise as a scholar. His courses have focussed on eighteenth-century British texts that illuminate the rise of early capitalist culture; travel literature in relation to the rise of the British empire and evolving perceptions of the non-European “Other;” and issues of race, colonialism, and historical concepts of the “Enlightenment.”
Professor Hudson’s three books on Samuel Johnson focus on the author’s connections with the ideological and political transformations of his time. His most recent work concerns relationships between literature and the emergent social hierarchy of eighteenth-century Britain, particularly the role of literary production in the ascendance of a “middle-class” cultural, economic and political hegemony.
Professor Hudson is at work on a monograph on the emergence of the category of “literature” during the eighteenth-century and the rise of English studies. His selected publications can be found on his faculty website.
I have been an admirer of Nick’s work since I was a graduate student at Cornell. He is a preeminent scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, and his three books on Samuel Johnson are acknowledged classics in the field. Nick’s 1996 Eighteenth-Century Studies essay, “From Nation to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” inspired a generation of scholars, and continues to be among three most frequently downloaded articles on JSTOR and Project MUSE. As an Editorial Board member of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Nick has provided unstinting guidance and generous feedback to scholars during the peer review process. Last but not least, Nick has been an incomparably kind mentor to me since I arrived at UBC in 2021, and has introduced me to the best places to eat on Commercial Drive! It’s a privilege to be his colleague.
Nick Hudson has been a giant of eighteenth-century studies for years, writing towering, meticulous, and influential books across the field. He is a brilliant teacher who brought studies of women writers and of the racialized eighteenth century into classrooms decades before they became widely recognized as essential reading. I know Nick will continue to write and I will continue to read and teach his work, but both our students and I will miss his capacious knowledge of all things eighteenth century and his always generous willingness to share it.
The first time I ever set foot on UBC, as a brand new Ph.D., Nick invited me that day to coffee at Kits Beach. I didn’t drink coffee then, and had never been to Kits, but I felt welcome and included and engaged as an equal by this very influential figure in my field, and I am forever grateful for Nick as a colleague.
Judy Segal
Professor Judy Segal is a force in the fields of history and theory of rhetoric, rhetoric of science and technology, and rhetoric of health and medicine. Her primary research, which is in rhetoric of health and medicine, has focussed especially on persuasive elements in professional and public discourses on pain; pharmaceuticals; breast cancer; “female sexual dysfunction”; mental health; and age/ageism.
Professor Segal received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1988. She joined the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures in 1991 and was promoted to Professor in 2007. She is also a faculty member in the Science and Technology Graduate Studies Program.
Her essays appear in rhetoric journals, interdisciplinary health and STS journals, medical journals, and in essay collections across disciplines. She is the author of Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). A selection of her publications can be found in her faculty profile.
Professor Segal has been a member of the President’s International Advisory Committee of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. At UBC, she has been a Distinguished Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and a recipient of a Killam Teaching Prize.
What I will miss most about Judy's presence in our Department is her ability to create intellectual community. When I first arrived here, more than twenty years ago, I felt most welcomed by the Science and Technology Studies crowd. The incredible speaker series that Judy ran with Alan Richardson featured the world's most renowned scholars in the field. In retrospect, it's clear that it was her generosity and good humour, her open mind and open house, that made possible a kind of incisive intellectual exchange and vitality that, I have since discovered, is too rare in professional, university settings. Judy likes to pose hard questions, another kind of generosity that brings everyone together in thought. I am grateful to have been her colleague here.
Dr. Judy Segal’s scholarship, including the book Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine, provided the foundation for this subfield of rhetorical studies as well as influencing the latest generation of researchers. Rhetoric of health and medicine scholars continue to foreground her impressive corpus, with everyone citing her as the primary disciplinary figure. In our department, Judy is a friendly, enthusiastic, and deft mentor to her colleagues and many admiring students. Invariably, if students show an interest in rhetoric, that interest was sparked by her Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine course.
