Faculty Achievements
UVic Distinguished Professors
The title University of Victoria Distinguished Professor is the highest academic honour that can be bestowed on a faculty member. It is awarded to those who have achieved great distinction in the areas of both teaching and scholarly research, and who have made a substantial contribution to the university and wider communities. The title is awarded to those whose scholarly work is of exceptionally high international calibre and whose teaching and student supervision is outstanding as judged by peers and students.
The Faculty of Humanities is proud to have two outstanding faculty members with this distinction:
Dr. John Oleson, Department of Greek and Roman Studies
Dr. John Oleson is one of the world's foremost experts in ancient hydraulic technology and underwater archaeology. He is an archaeologist and Classics scholar in the Dept. of Greek and Roman Studies , where he has taught since 1976. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He served eight years as Chair of the Department. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Board member of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman and of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Canada. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member of Council of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He was appointed a Killam Research Fellow for 2000-2002. In 2003 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, the highest academic honour the university can bestow. In November 2010 the Royal Society of Canada awarded Oleson the Pierre Chauveau Medal "for a distinguished contribution to knowledge in the Humanities."
Prof. Oleson's research focuses on ancient technology, particularly ships, harbours, and water-supply systems. He has published 11 books and over 70 articles and chapters in the areas of maritime archaeology, ancient technology, the Roman Near East, Etruscan tombs, numismatic art and related subjects.
Prof. Oleson has directed or participated in underwater excavations at a number of Roman harbour sites in Italy and Israel, and between 1986 and 2006 he directed excavations at the site of Humayma, ancient Hawara, a small caravan stop in Jordan's southern desert. Since 2001 he has co-directed the Roman Hydraulic Concrete Study (ROMACONS), which has taken cores of concrete from Roman maritime structures around the Mediterranean for engineering analysis. He is also a member of the team of archaeologists that used a nuclear submarine and remotely operated vehicles to survey and excavate deep water Roman shipwrecks at Skerki Bank in the Mediterranean in 1997.
Over the past 25 years Prof. Oleson has given more than 150 public presentations to scholarly conferences and local archaeological societies. He is very interested in cultural resource management, and for eight years he served on the Board of the Royal British Columbia Museum. Prof. Oleson is committed to publicizing and preserving the core values of the Humanities, and to furthering humanistic research and teaching through the use of the latest technologies. His hobbies are aerobatic flying, boating, and SCUBA diving.
Dr. Ray Siemens, Department of English
Dr. Raymond Siemens, a Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and professor in the Department of English, recently became UVic's twelfth Distinguished Professor. This title is the highest academic honour that UVic can bestow on a faculty member. It is awarded to individuals who have achieved great distinction in the areas of both teaching and scholarly research, and who have made a substantial contribution to the university and wider communities. The title is awarded to those whose scholarly work is of exceptionally high international calibre and whose teaching and student supervision is outstanding as judged by peers and students.
Siemens is a digital humanist who specializes in Early Modern texts. He also contributes to the Department of Computer Science, and heads the SSHRC-funded “Implementing New Knowledge Environments” project (INKE), a digital humanities research group that seeks to investigate the many questions produced by this dynamic and burgeoning intersection between information technology and the humanities.