Athena Becomes a Swallow and Other Voices from The Odyssey by Brent MacLaine (English) is a collection of 27 monologues spoken by minor characters from Homer's Odyssey. The poems demonstrate how the shine of the gods falls on the common folk as well as the nobility. MacLaine creates a world as real and immediate to us today as it may have been 3,000 years ago. (Goose Lane Editions)

The Master of Arts in Island Studies (MAIS) at the University of Prince Edward Island is a unique, interdisciplinary, and policy-driven graduate course that critiques islands on their own terms.

The program is open to students from around the world. They come out of undergraduate programs from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and diverse degrees, or with professional workplace experience in the public, private, or resource sectors, and they study a myriad of islands.

Faculty in the MAIS program come from a wide range of departments, ranging from Environmental and Political Studies to English, Education, and Economics.

Search "Master of Arts in Island Studies" to find out what some of our students and professors are doing.

Students are required to take six courses and write a thesis. The three Compulsory Courses, offered annually, are

* Themes...

The Trans-Canada Writer, edited by Mark Connelly (Milwaukee Area Technical College), Greg Doran, and Wendy Shilton (English) is a composition text that includes a full reader, rhetoric, research skills and a handbook. Its blend of concepts and practical strategies, intellectual rigour and readability, critical thinking and emphasis on writing for the "Real World" makes it a flexible learning tool and helps student strengthen their writing skills. (Nelson Canada)

In Shades of Green, the English Department’s Brent MacLaine brings his artist’s eye to the poetic form, exploring the chromatic complexity of experience. Whether emerging from the local landscapes of memoir or the present-day streetscapes of Manhattan, these poems are at once personal and speculative, capturing modulations of tone and hue of the Prince Edward Island landscape. This is Brent’s third book. (Acorn Press)

Why have birth rates in most developed countries plunged to all-time lows in the last century? In The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century, Ian Dowbiggin (History) draws on a wide variety of archival records, revealing how these revolutionary events can be traced to the efforts of a small group who tried mightily to convince governments that birth rates needed to be cut and that sterilization was the best way to do it. (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Jerusalem on the Amur by Dr. Henry Srebrnik (Political Studies) describes the involvement of Canadian Jewish Communists in the development of Birobidzhan, a Jewish autonomous region in the far east of the Soviet Union, from the 1920s to the 1950s. (McGill-Queen's University Press)

Storm and Dissonance: L. M. Montgomery and Conflict is a collection of essays edited and with an introduction by Jean Mitchell (Anthropology). Montgomery’s work is generally known for her pastoral sensibility. However, in this volume, scholars explore the undercurrents of anger and violence, obsession and gossip, bringing a rich perspective to Montgomery’s artistry. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing)

Terminal Damage: The Politics of VLTs in Atlantic Canada by Peter McKenna (Political Studies)looks at the critical aspect of social harm caused by VLTs, and examines just how enveloped VLTs are in Atlantic Canadian politics and policy. The author explains VLT gaming decisions in a political context one province at a time — bringing in electoral, economic, personal, bureaucratic and cultural factors to shed some much-needed light on these public policy outcomes. (Fernwood Books)

A Magnificent Gift Declined: The Dalton Sanatorium of Prince Edward Island, 1913-1923 by Leonard Cusack (History), tells of the rise and fall of the state-of-the-art sanatorium donated by Charles Dalton to the Province of PEI. Built in 1913 on an isolated hilltop in Emyvale, the hospital was demolished in 1923. Cusack skilfully portrays the political manoeuvring and social context surrounding PEI's first TB hospital. (Island Studies Press)

Athena Becomes a Swallow and Other Voices from The Odyssey by Brent MacLaine (English). These 27 finely crafted monologues spoken by minor characters from Homer’s The Odyssey demonstrate how the shine of the gods falls on the common folk as well as the nobility. MacLaine creates a world as real and immediate to us today as it may have been 3,000 years ago. (Goose Lane Editions)

Afternoon Horses by Deirdre Kessler (English): poetry that reflects the poet’s bond with island landscapes—particularly those of Prince Edward Island and Tasmania—and with childhood and family—the sinews that hold families together through distance, aging, and death. (Acorn Press)

Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology by Gil Germain (Political Studies) uses an analysis of four French philosophers to illuminate our implication in technology and our tenuous hold on reality. Germain provocatively argues that humans are fast becoming disembodied or spirit-like creatures, and gives reasons why this inclination towards spiritization ought to be resisted. (Lexington Books)

Romantic Cosmopolitanism by Esther Wohlgemut (English) shows how cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century offers a non-unified formulation of the nation, in sharp contrast to more unified models such as Edmund Burke's, which found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood, and geography. (Palgrave Macmillan)

Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, edited by Catherine Innes-Parker (English) and Cate Gunn (author/ed), explores the growth of pastoral and devotional literature that flourished throughout the middle ages. Ranging from Anglo-Saxon pastoral texts to the reading of women in late-medieval England, the essays reveal a transformation into the literature of vernacular spirituality. (York Medieval Press)

Civility: A History by Benet Davetian (Sociology) explores a core concept of our social life: civility, from the Middle Ages to the present, in France, England, and the US. The book not only historicizes the development of civility but also locates the concept in today’s society and offers a renewed perspective on crucial issues such as multiculturalism. (University of Toronto Press)

Shannon Murray (English) has written a children's picture book, Bounce and Beans and Burn. Based on a story that won the L. M. Montgomery Children's Literature Award in 2006, the book tells the story of Sam who is so full of energy that his family sends him out to the garden to play. Little do they know that when he goes he has extraordinary adventures with samurai, giants, and dragons. (Acorn Press).

Malcolm Murray (Philosophy) has published two books this year. The Moral Wager: Evolution and Contract (Springer) illuminates and sharpens moral theory by analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of interpersonal relations in a variety of games. Liberty, Games and Contracts: Jan Narveson and the Defence of Libertarianism, edited by Murray, brings together significant critics of Jan Narveson, one of the most important contemporary defenders of the libertarian political position. (Ashgate).

Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, edited by James Moran (History), with Leslie Topp (University of London) and Jonathan Andrews (Newcastle University), is the first volume of papers devoted to an examination of the relationship between mental health/illness, and the construction and experience of space. This is the first rigorous scholarly analysis of its kind in book form. (Routledge)

In Shape of Things to Come, poet Richard Lemm (English) traces his own journey from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Canada with his first foray into the world of short fiction. His hard-living characters follow their own paths through relationships with parents and siblings, friends and lovers, discovering and sometimes crossing their limits as they try to find their own way in the world. (Acorn Press)

In Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860–1930, Lisa Chilton (History) explores the work of the women who promoted, managed, and ultimately transformed single British women's experiences of migration to Canada and Australia between the 1860s and the 1920s. (University of Toronto)

Island Studies Journal (ISJ) is a scholarly journal dedicated to the inter-disciplinary study of our “world of islands.” Published twice a year (May and November), the first issue appeared in May 2006. Editor-in-chief is Dr. Godfrey Baldacchino, Canada Research Chair in Island Studies, based at the Institute of Island Studies, UPEI. The international Editorial Board is made up of island studies scholars from over 50 universities and institutions.

Sociology professor Benet Davetian is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking scholarly work about civility.

Led by English professor Catherine Innes-Parker, 17 UPEI students are exploring literature, art and religious thought in Harlow, England, this semester.

For more information: www.upei.ca/news/media/2009/09/17/upei-students-spend-fall-semester-stud...

Religious studies chair Joe Veladium grapples with the “big” questions during a podcast to be broadcast on December 14 as part of the 2010 Olympics’ Intellectual Muscle program.