Dr. Miranda Burgess (she/they). ALT: Miranda Burgess is smiling at the camera. They have light brown hair that passes the shoulders. They are wearing a white t-shirt with blue stripes and a black cardigan.
Dr. Miranda Burgess (she/they) has won a Killam Teaching Prize, awarded in recognition of their excellence in teaching. The Killam Teaching Prize is presented annually to faculty who are nominated by students, alumni, and their colleagues.
Dr. Burgess is a literary and media history scholar of the Romantic period (c. 1780-1830) in Britain and the Atlantic world. She specializes in migration and mobility studies, history of sensation, and history of form and figuration.
In their 25 years at UBC, Dr. Burgess continues to develop workshop-based courses with hands-on learning in literary and media history. Her work is guided by the goal to build on students’ individual inquiry and collaboration with “guided, mentored research and writing projects in order to develop term-long intellectual contributions that add to community knowledge.”
“This prestigious prize is fit recognition for Miranda, who is a brilliant scholar, a brave and committed teacher, and an inspiring mentor,” writes Department Head Dr. Patricia Badir.
Dr. Burgess teaches courses that challenge students to think intersectionally and across time and geography. In ENGL 355 Romantic-period Literature: Mapping Romantic Vancouver, she works with students to examine the sedimented history of British Romanticism in settler colonial place-making on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ peoples.
They also teach ENGL 555 Literature and the Other Arts: Remediating Print in History and Theory, a graduate seminar on the media ecology of eighteenth-century and long-Romantic-period print. In this course, she encourages students to practice at the same time as they consider the description and discussion of manuscript writing, ink-making, papermaking and bookbinding, engraving, and letterpress printing from the early modern period through the mid-nineteenth century. Students also research and produce a collaborative online exhibition on the modalities, objects, and networks of early print that draws on the resources of UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections.
“I’ve worked hard to grow as a teacher over the course of my career,” writes Dr. Burgess. “Early on I sought to understand the changing learning processes of students and, more recently, I’ve focused on helping students to develop collaborative, supportive, and especially anti-racist practices and classroom spaces. I’m delighted and humbled to win the Killam Teaching Prize, and grateful to those I’ve taught, and taught with, for the brilliant examples they’ve set and for what must have been kind letters.”
Congratulations, Dr. Burgess!
