Professor Emerita Jo-Ann Wallace to be Honoured with Lowering of the University Banner

A popular, and enormously celebrated professor of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Dr. Jo-Ann Wallace chaired her home Department during a time of intellectual reorientation, curriculum overhaul, and graduate program expansion. When the University's Woman Studies program fell under threat of cancellation, she took on the role of Chair, and then worked to transform the program into a full, independent Department. She edited the scholarly journal English Studies in Canada, in the process reshaping its look, its content, its professional impact, and its social relevance.

Her scholarship, always feminist in approach, focused on early British modernism, and especially on women whose lives and works did not fit easily into accepted literary critical moulds. With Bridget Elliot she published a monograph on women writers and visual artists at the intersection of their art forms. Her work on the overlooked novelist and polemicist Edith Ellis, one of the founders of the Fellowship of the New Life in the 1880s, made an argument for a different way of writing the history of modernist socialism, feminism, and sexology. Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway accompanied her through most of her professional life, which resulted, among other achievements, in the publication of a new, scholarly edition of the novel, with Broadview Press, in 2012.

After her retirement, Jo-Ann participated in the creation of a memoir-writing group, which included, among others, the late Margaret Ann Armour, Pat Clements, Isobel Grundy, Margaret Mackay, and Jeanne Perreault. From her writing for that group, Jo-Ann produced a book-length memoir, entitled A Life in Pieces. It will be published by Thistledown Press in August, 2024.

She is deeply mourned by friends and colleagues in two departments, and across the Faculty of Arts. To honour Jo-Ann's life, work, and contributions to the university, the University Banner will be flown at half-mast for the week of August 12-16, 2024.