Alex Gillespie has been appointed as new Vice-President, University of Toronto and Principal, University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). The appointment runs from July 1, 2020 to December 31, 2025.
Alex Gillespie is the chair of UTM’s Department of English & Drama. She is well-known in our community of medievalists as a great supervisor of many of our PhD students. She also engages in fascinating and important projects. She is the principal investigator of U of T Old Books New Science Lab; she and her team have received over $2.5 million (Cdn) in funding. Their international research initiative uses non-destructive analytic techniques to investigate the origins and development of books in their project entitled The Book and the Silk Roads. In 2016, she founded the Jackman Humanities Institute’s tri-campus Digital Humanities Network. Her 2006 book, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, showed that pre-modern ideas about authorship shaped Western printing technologies while her forthcoming monograph, Chaucer’s Books, explores the literary history and philosophy of the book sciences.