Professor receives rare honour
Monday, 09 August 2010
Professor Coral Howells with her Cambridge History of Canadian Literature
Professor Emerita Coral Ann Howells (Department of English and American Literature) has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a rare honour for a foreign scholar.
"After all my years teaching Canadian Literature in the University of Reading's English and American Literature department, it is a flattering recognition not only of my own work but of the University's innovative support for Canadian literary studies;" said Coral.
The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, co-edited by her and Professor Eva-Marie Kroller of the University of British Columbia was published in 2009.
Coral Howells taught in the English Department for many years till her retirement in 2006; she established the first courses on women's writing, and after her year as a Visiting Professor at the University of Guelph, Ontario, in the early 1980s she has specialised in teaching and writing about Canadian literature, particularly contemporary Canadian women writers, including Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.
In 1996 she was appointed Professor of English and Canadian Literature, the only named Canadian studies chair in Britain. She has lectured extensively on Canadian literature in Europe, North America, India, and Australia. Editor of the Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (2006) and author of Margaret Atwood (1996, 2nd revised edition 2005) she has twice been the recipient of the Margaret Atwood Society Best Book Prize. She is now working on a new project, co-editing Volume 12 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, which covers fiction writing since 1950 in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.
Professor Howells is now a Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London.