Newsbites (Page 3)

Alliance Atlantis Opportunity

From left: Will Straw, Michael MacMillan, Pamela Mollica, Nelson Fernandes. PHOTO: Owen Egan

Pamela Mollica and fellow Communications graduate student Nelson Fernandes are spending eight weeks this summer working in the fast-paced, competitive world of film and television production and distribution. Thanks to a new work-study fellowship from Alliance Atlantis, Mollica and Fernandes will each receive $7,500 in tuition support and $5,000 as an honorarium for an eight-week internship at the company's Toronto office.

Mollica's previous work experience includes an internship at the National Film Board of Canada, where the primary focus is documentary filmmaking. Mollica, who confesses to feeling "passionate about the industry as a whole," hopes to pinpoint new areas of interest and expand her contacts. She says working for Alliance Atlantis, known for its award-winning television shows (Due South, Traders, CSI) and films (The Sweet Hereafter), offers a completely different view of the industry. How are things going so far? "I'm really excited about every aspect of the experience."

Fernandes, whose interest in media planning, marketing and interactive advertising secured him a spot in the online broadcasting department of Alliance Atlantis, is as enthusiastic as Mollica about the opportunity this fellowship provides. "It's a lot different from the theoretical training we get at McGill," says Fernandes, "a lot more hands-on."

When the fellowships were announced, the response was enormous, according to Professor Will Straw, acting chair and graduate program director of Art History and Communication Studies. "So many people were hunting me down that I feared I would need to disconnect my phone!"

McGill is one of only two universities in Canada to receive funding for the fellowship (Queen's is the other). At the reception introducing the award recipients, Alliance Atlantis CEO Michael MacMillan remarked, "McGill is a great school and deserves our support."

Electronic Life for Old Texts

One of the dilemmas facing today's libraries is how to provide access to the rare and special collections of yesteryear, often too fragile to subject to frequent handling by researchers and students. Thanks to special federal and provincial funding for digital archives, McGill Libraries this year launched five projects in their Digital Collections Program, which provides Internet access to some of these rare texts at the click of a button. Deputy Prime Minister Herb Gray (above, with student James Medd and Director of Libraries Frances Groen) was on hand earlier this year for the official popping of virtual corks.

The latest projects draw from collections in architecture and the rare books division and combine digital imagery and meticulous annotations with searchable text databases.

Scholars and web surfers alike can examine the beautifully illustrated Canadian Architect and Builder, the only Canadian architecture journal of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Genealogists will find "In Search of Your Canadian Past: the Canadian County Atlas Digital Project" a fascinating research tool, with names of residents often marked on the maps of township lots from this collection dating between 1874 and 1881. And Canadian historians are offered a rare glimpse into the Canadian fur trade at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, complete with original manuscripts, maps and diaries, by clicking on over to "In Pursuit of Adventure: the Fur Trade in Canada and the North West Company."

There are also projects on the architecture of Edward and William S. Maxwell, Montreal-born brothers who made up one of the most prominent architectural firms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Canada, and on the architecture of Montreal hospitals, spanning 358 years of history.

You can check out the digital projects at imago.library.mcgill.ca.

Passing of a poet

	PHOTO: McGill Archives

McGill lost one of its legends in March when Louis Dudek, BA'39, professor emeritus of English, passed away at the age of 83. The loss for Canadian literature is even greater: Dudek was one of the country's most important modernist poets, a central figure in 20th century Canadian poetry. He was also a mentor to dozens of poets who came after him, as well as a publisher, critic and great defender of poetry.

It was as a professor at McGill in the '50s that Dudek published the first book of poems by Leonard Cohen in his Contact Press series, begun with Irving Layton and Raymond Souster. The press went on to publish, among others, Al Purdy, George Bowering and Margaret Atwood -- a who's who of Canadian literature.

As a teacher at McGill, Dudek was also an inspiration to generations. The English Students' Association named the teaching award it established in 1996 after him, and McGill English professor Brian Trehearne recalls Dudek's influence on him: "I still remember scoffing at T.S. Eliot, thinking to please the man who had himself shorn Eliot of a few feathers, only to have Dudek wheel his chair around to my side of the desk, The Waste Land in hand, and declaim from it passages of such intense beauty that I date my own dedication to modernist studies from that moment."

Dudek's own poetry was in part influenced by Ezra Pound, with whom he corresponded and visited during Pound's confinement to a psychiatric hospital in the '40s and '50s. Long modernist poems of Dudek's like "Europe," "En México" and "Atlantis" sprang from this period. He published over 25 books of poetry, essays and criticism, most with the small presses he championed throughout his life.

Last year, when handing his publisher at one of those small presses the manuscript for The Surface of Time, a collection that in good part addressed death and aging, Dudek said, "This will be my very last book." In his preface to the book, indeed his last, Dudek wrote, "The poems are divided into three parts, and 3 is downright philosophical. But nothing to be afraid of."

He is survived by his second wife, Aileen Collins, and his son, Gregory Dudek, a McGill professor in the School of Computer Science.