A Big Day: Visit to Cormex Research & PR/Social Media Talk

Today was an eventful day. First, I taught my French semantics class this morning. Then I got a little work done in my office until the COMM-Lab managers, Shelagh Hartford and Arun Jacob, joined me in my office and we drove in to Toronto to have a research visit with our lab industry partner, Cormex …

My beautiful trip to DC

Last weekend, I traveled to Washington, DC, one of my favourite cities in the world. It was a bit of a working vacation for me, since I have been going quite hard, with research and teaching. I arrived on Saturday morning, flying on Jetblue out of Buffalo. It was a funny flight, because I was …

How I became an academic: from tenure until the present

During the last month, I have been recounting the story of how I became an academic. In this, the final blog entry in this series, I discuss what it was like settling into the reality of becoming a middle-career academic and learning to savour life a little. During the last two years before tenure, I …

New editorial and research assistant: Natalie St. Clair.

I am very pleased to welcome Ms. Natalie St. Clair to COMM-Lab, where she will work with me as Editorial and Research Assistant this year. Natalie’s primary role will be to serve as Assistant Editor of the Journal of Professional Communication. Her responsibilities in this role will include assisting me, the Editor-in-Chief, with subscription management, bookkeeping, promotions, …

Co-organised LACUS Conference.

Last week I organised a conference called LACUS – Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States. I love event planning. I love hosting people. I love throwing parties and cooking for people. So, last year, I agreed, with my colleague Dr Michael Kliffer from the Department of French, to host the Annual Meeting of …

Montréal, je t’aime.

Sometimes, my mind wanders, during that brief moment between dusk and night, as my eyes adjust to the dimming light and advancing twilight makes the edges of tree branches seem soft and hazy against the paling sky. My mind wanders back through misty memories to moments I would like to relive or retrieve. Perhaps it …

QPMAP – Question Period Monitoring and Analysis Project Launched at CCA in Montréal!

Today, my colleague Philip Savage and I presented the first, very preliminary results from our QPMAP: Question Period Monitoring and Analysis Project in front of a great crowd of  24 engaged colleagues from across Canada at the  Canadian Communication Association’s (CCA) annual conference at Concordia University in Montréal. The CCA was part of the Congress …

COMM-Lab: Communication Metrics Laboratory is LAUNCHED!

Today, we launched the COMM-Lab: Communication Metrics Laboratory, of which I am the founder and co-director with my colleague, Dr. Philip Savage. COMM-Lab was created because of a dearth of empirical and evidence-based research on communication studies in Canada. Many scholars, practitioners and MPs have told Philip and me that more data is needed to …