Barrett Hooper

The University of Toronto's Asian Institute will help more students conduct research abroad and expand its innovative teaching, research and engagement methods – all thanks to an anonymous gift.

“Students in our undergraduate major will benefit from a newly enhanced curriculum with a significant experiential component, allowing them to conduct primary research in Asia and on Asian topics closer to home,” Professor Joshua Barker said. “Graduate students will be integrated into a community of interdisciplinary scholars working on Asia, and will get new support for their Asia research endeavours.”

The former director of the Asian Institute and now vice-dean of graduate education and program reviews at the Faculty of Arts and Science, Barker made the comments at an event held to celebrate the anonymous gift. The $5 million donation will launch the Asian Pathways Research Lab and endow the Richard Charles Lee Directorship.

“The Munk School is delighted to welcome the Asian Pathways Research Lab and its mission to explore migration and mobility issues, which are of crucial importance in our globe today,” said Professor Stephen Toope, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, adding the donation “will enable the Munk School to strengthen its teaching, student experience and research in Asian studies.”

Opening up new opportunities for ��οstudents to study abroad is one of the goals President Meric Gertler described in the recently released Three Priorities: A Discussion Paper.

“The opportunity to live and study in a foreign setting is one of the widely acknowledged ways for students to develop and expand their horizons by deepening their understanding of and appreciation for other cultures and places,” Gertler wrote.

Joseph Wong champions 'audacious' innovation

sgupta — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:43:25 +0000

Joseph Wong champions 'audacious' innovation sgupta Thu, 05/09/2013 - 12:43

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Joe Wong is the first Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School’s Innovation Policy Lab at ��ο(photo by Rita Leistner)

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One of the first lessons Joe Wong teaches his students is that innovation doesn’t mean invention. It’s not about the coolest gadget, the newest smartphone or the next operating system for the latest iPad. “Innovation is not a fad. It’s about harnessing knowledge that can create an impact,” the ��οpolitical science professor explains.

It can be as simple as the Blue Box recycling program that’s become a part of daily life for many Canadians and has had a significant impact on waste disposal, or it can be as complicated as the question of how to deliver medicine to rural regions in the global south.

“Innovation has become a buzzword — you hear it everywhere from Singapore to Rwanda. But we need to disabuse people of the idea that it’s about the Next Big Thing,” Wong says. “Innovation is about finding ways to do good. And the Next Big Thing are the people who have the audacity to believe they can make a difference.”

Audacity is another of Wong’s favourite words, which he’s reclaimed from the negative connotation it’s acquired. “It bothers me that people think of it as a bad thing. Audacity is about being bold and having the courage of your convictions to do something about it.”

Audacious could just as easily describe Wong, who has spent more than a decade walking the walk when it comes to innovation policy and global health. He is the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and the Canada Research Chair in Democratization, Health and Development.

He has written extensively on biotechnology, political economy and social policy in East Asia, including the books Betting on Biotech: Innovation and the Limits of Asia's Development State and Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics In Taiwan and South Korea.

He was also recently named the first Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School’s Innovation Policy Lab. The professorship was established thanks to the generosity and forward thinking of two of U of T’s most ardent supporters.

Ralph Halbert said, “When I reflect on our support of higher education, one recurrent theme has been building academic bridges between institutions and countries. This is also a part of the Innovation Professorship.”

“We know that countries that lead in innovation become world leaders in every sphere and sector of study from business to the sciences,” Halbert said. “Ultimately, innovation is about creating. It is also about adapting to change to preserve our enduring ideals. It is said that creativity is thinking up new things; innovation is doing new things. With a foundation of innovation at U of T, today’s generation will increase Canada’s capacity to be competitive and realize advances for society across the spectrum.”

“This professorship offers a tremendous opportunity to shape an agenda,” said Wong. This agenda is focused around three core values that are essential to innovation: collaboration, doing good and transformation.

“Innovation cannot happen in isolation,” he added. “It requires people working together from all over the world toward a common goal, a common good with real and lasting impact.”

If there’s one area that Wong hopes to have a real and lasting impact on, it’s poverty. Not living-paycheque-to-paycheque poverty or even collecting-welfare poverty, but the poorest of the poor in countries around the world, the 1.3 billion people who live on less than $1.25 a day.

“How can we as a society, as governments, as corporations and organizations, and as individuals, how can we better service the very, very poor?” he said. “We need to look beyond the conventional welfare-state model, which doesn’t work to address the needs of the poorest of the poor. For example, how do you deliver medical vaccinations to people who live in slums? In Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, 99 per cent of the urban population lives in slums; they are itinerant, without addresses — how do you provide them with healthcare, with food, with water? And that’s just one example in one city.”

Fortunately, Wong is already hard at work recruiting the audacious young people he says are the key to true innovation. He’s a leader at the Global Ideas Institute, a joint venture between the University of Toronto Schools and the Asian Institute to provide intensive research and mentoring opportunities for top students in select Toronto-area high schools with a focus on studying real-world problems. And his summer abroad course in Shanghai and Beijing provides a particularly innovative experiential learning format designed to bring together ��οand Fudan University students in an environment that fosters cross-cultural dialogue on global politics.

A group of his students were so inspired by his classes that immediately after graduating they launched a social innovation research group (SIRG) in Taiwan that is becoming the go-to think tank on social entrepreneurship in the region. “SIRG Taiwan is a start,” he says. “I’m looking forward to seeing SIRG Shanghai, Mumbai, Jerusalem, São Paulo, Cape Town. All we need are the people with the audacity to make it happen. That would be true innovation.”

Barrett Hooper writes for the Faculty of Arts & Science.

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Dictionary of Old English: "a great Canadian enterprise"

sgupta — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:50:29 +0000

Dictionary of Old English: "a great Canadian enterprise" sgupta Tue, 01/22/2013 - 05:50

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Professor Antonette diPaolo Healey edits the Dictionary of Old English (photo courtesy the Faculty of Arts & Science)

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Goldfinger: the word conjures up images of gold-smothered women, razor-hatted henchmen and giant lasers.

It’s the title of the quintessential James Bond story and reflects perfectly the villain’s obsession with the precious metal. But it’s unlikely that Bond creator Ian Fleming was aware of the fanciful title’s rather pedestrian etymology.

The word dates back to the Middle Ages and “refers to the fourth or ring finger,” explains Antonette diPaolo Healey, lexicographer extraordinaire and editor of the Dictionary of Old English (DOE).

Professor Healey’s office is tucked away in a warren of rooms on the 14th floor of Robarts Library, the shelves around her are overstuffed with copies of manuscripts, texts and tomes of varying description representing the entirety of the Old English language.

Sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies, the DOE is a decades-long project to identify and define every word in the English language as it was written from CE 600-1150. This will result in some 33,000 to 35,000 individual dictionary entries.

The DOE was started in the ’70s by the late Professor Angus Cameron and exists entirely in electronic form. What sets it apart, however, is its comprehensiveness — the DOE is based on at least one copy of every surviving Old English piece of writing, from Beowulf to the Bible, legal documents to royal records — pretty much anything ever written on parchment, carved in stone or inscribed in jewelry during the Anglo-Saxon period.

“The corpus contains about four-million words, which amounts to about five times the size of the collected works of William Shakespeare,” says Healey, who holds the Angus Cameron Professorship in Old English. She and her team have completed writing more than 60 per cent of the DOE, or roughly 22,000 entries.

When finished, the DOE will join the Middle English Dictionary (CE 1100-1500) and the contemporary Oxford English Dictionary to provide a complete vocabulary of the English language.

If she had a trained staff of four editors, Healey anticipates they can finish writing the DOE in about 11 to 13 years — for the sake of comparison, the completion of the Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan) took 71 years. As with many scholarly endeavours, funding is a key factor in its progress, and so the Centre for Medieval Studies is in the midst of an ambitious $10-million campaign to complete the DOE.

In this regard, the DOE is coming off a stellar 2012. The project had already received a $500,000 Challenge Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which required the DOE to raise a 1:1 match to release funds to the project. This was achieved in December thanks to a generous donation from the Honourable Hal Jackman, a former chancellor of U of T, on behalf of his wife, Maruja. The Jackman gift is the largest single donation the project has ever received.

“As a language major at ��οin the ’50s, Anglo-Saxon was an obligatory course,” says Maruja Jackman, explaining her passion for the DOE. “Most hated it — it was very hard work — but I loved it. I loved the language, the poetry and the prose. However, doing the translations was difficult because the dictionaries at the time were so inadequate for my undergraduate needs. To have had access to something like the DOE would have been a dream come true.”

In a book of essays on the DOE's research, Eric Stanley, the now-retired holder of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, called the DOE “a great Canadian enterprise,” proclaiming that “the New World has come to the aid of the Old” and that the DOE “has the backing of Old English scholars world-wide.”

But the question remains: Why do we need a dictionary of Old English?

It’s a question Healey has encountered countless times, yet she never tires of answering.

“Certainly, the DOE is of interest to scholars of Old and Middle English, to linguists and historians,” she begins. “But most importantly, it catalogues the beginning of the English language, our own language. What the Periodic Table of Elements is to chemistry or the human genome project is to biology, dictionaries are to the humanities. We are mapping our language and our culture. People excitedly go to museums to see the artifacts and relics of our ancestors. The words of Old English are not merely a museum collection of the ‘old bones’ of our vocabulary — they are a part of the living tissue of the language we speak today.”

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Barrett Hooper

Undergrad education, innovative research at U of T's Asian Institute get boost from anonymous donor

Read more about the Three Priorities

Joseph Wong champions 'audacious' innovation

Dictionary of Old English: "a great Canadian enterprise"