RDC instructors launch latest books

A trio of Red Deer College faculty members celebrated the release of their latest books on Thursday.
 
Between them, the three have now published 14 books.
 
Dr. Jenna Butler, an English instructor at RDC for the past five years, wrote her book Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard following an intense residency aboard a sailing vessel which took her throughout the Norwegian Arctic for two weeks in 2014.
 
“In a nutshell, I want readers thinking about environments under threat. We got to see the the glaciers receding,” she explains. “Also, they should be thinking about women’s narratives in the north and why some narratives get privileged over others. A lot of the explorer narratives are male, so where are the women’s stories; and also thinking about endangered landscapes back home. How do we live in those places?”
 
Butler describes the amount of debris observed on the excursion as brutal, noting that what is left in the Arctic stays there.
 
“To see the environmental breakdown, the glaciers peeled back from the rock; it’s the first time rock is showing there in recorded history,” she adds.
 
Dr. Laura Davis, also an English instructor and chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences department, wrote her latest on an area of Canadian literary history she says is important to reflect on.
 
Margaret Laurence and Jack McClelland, Letters is about the relationship between Laurence, a writer, and her publisher, McClelland during a period of vast change in arts and letters in Canada, Davis says.
 
“It shows a time period when Canadian literature was sort of becoming important and growing,” she says. “It was a time period when Canadian literature wasn’t really being taught in universities, in the 1950s and 60s.”
 
The third book launched Thursday is called All Souls College, Oxford in the Early Eighteenth Century: Piety, Political Imposition and Legacy of the Glorious Revolution. It is written by history instructor Dr. Jeff Wigelsworth who’s been at the college since 2010.
 
He says at its core, the book is about governmental pressure on the school to produce more lawyers and doctors, rather than mostly theologians.
 
“This got me thinking about historical parallels between that and modern events because there’s always pressure on universities now to produce people with job relevant skills. So I tried to see how this affected a college in the 18th century,” he says. “Any time you’re able to bring research like this to fruition — it took seven years to bring together with many research trips to England and to Oxford — is quite satisfying.”

The books are available at RDC’s library. The public can access book there by using a regular RDPL library card or by getting a free RDC library card.