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The Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations

The Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations is held on a rotating basis by an ICSLAC faculty member entrusted with making a leading contribution to the program. Building on an established record of interdisciplinary research, the Professorship holder creates synergies and engagement around a topic of specific relevance to the Cultural Mediations academic community. The Professorship revolves around the delivery of a special topic seminar enhanced throughout the academic year by a program of   events. It is named in honour of Ruth and Mark Phillips, two emeritus ICSLAC faculty members whose lasting contributions helped shape the Cultural Mediations program and the Institute as a whole as a thriving academic environment for interdisciplinary doctoral research.

A renown scholar in the field of critical museology and an art historian who specializes in the Indigenous arts of North America, Professor Ruth Phillips was for many years the Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University (ICSLAC / School for the Study of Art and Culture). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and served as Director of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Anthropological Association’s Council for Museum Anthropology

Professor Mark Salber Phillips was an historian of ideas whose scholarship focuses on questions of historical representation. Cross-appointed at �Ӱ�ԭ�� with the Department of History and ICSLAC, he was a visiting Professor at several prestigious universities, and held many distinguished fellowships, including from the Guggenheim and the Yale Center for British Art. His publication On Historical Distance (Yale, 2013) was awarded the Canadian Historical Association’s Ferguson Prize.

Current Professorship Holder:

Dr. Malini Guha, (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and the 2025-27 holder of the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations. Guha is cross-appointed with the Institute for Studies in Art and Culture and is affiliated with Migration and Diaspora Studies. She is a settler of South Asian descent.

Guha’s project for the RMPP, “Traction, Flight Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines” will facilitate and nurture what scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe as a “common intellectual practice” of  geographical thinking across disciplinary divides. This project is both inspired and deeply indebted to the work of abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, alongside activists and organizers Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, all of whom espouse the necessity for ‘thinking like a geographer” for the building of better worlds.

Read a short interview with Guha about her project.