Dr. Jan Zwicky, C.M.
Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria

Dr. Zwicky is one of Canada’s most respected artists and intellectuals, known equally for her original work in philosophy and her poetry, and translated into a number of European languages. Her writing has covered issues in music, poetry, philosophy, and the environment. She was among the first to offer courses in environmental studies at Canadian universities, as well as interdisciplinary courses in the humanities. Her latest books include Once Upon a Time in the West (2023), and Sixty-Seven Ontological Studies (2022) co-authored with photographer Robert Moody. Dr. Zwicky has published nine book-length poetry collections, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won the Governor-General’s Award in 1999, Robinson’s Crossing, which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize in 2004, and Forge, short-listed for the Griffin Prize in 2012.

Previous lecture

UNDERSTANDING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dr. Kevin Leyton-Brown’s research addresses issues in computational game theory; also in market design, analysis and clearing, as well as the application of machine learning to the automated design and analysis of algorithms for solving hard computational problems. He is a Fellow of  the Royal Society of Canada, the Association of Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Next lecture

HOW THE ARTS ARE CENTRAL TO A HEALTHY DEMOCRACY

Mr. Max Wyman, OC is one of Canada’s foremost cultural commentators. For more than three decades he wrote arts criticism for The Vancouver Sun and CBC Radio. Mr. Wyman is the author of a number of books, among them Dance Canada: An Illustrated History (1989), The Defiant Imagination: Why Culture Matters (2009), and its sequel The Compassionate Imagination: How the Arts Are Central to a Functioning Democracy (2023).