Media: news releases

Critically acclaimed Canadian opera singer and national CBC Radio host Marion Newman is returning to the University of Victoria to join the award-winning teaching faculty at the School of Music. Newman—whose traditional name is Nege’ga—is of Kwagiulth and Stó:lō First Nations descent with English, Irish and Scottish heritage. The 2022 UVic Distinguished Alumni Award recipient will officially join the School of Music as an assistant professor on July 1, 2024.

The POLIS Project on Ecological Governance is hosting a film screening and conversation at the University of Victoria to showcase the importance of freshwater management and governance in celebration of World Water Day.

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you’ll likely learn that they are “dead stars” that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.

Located on Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt) territory, the National Centre for Indigenous Laws (NCIL) at UVic is still under construction but its architectural design is already winning awards.

Canadian and European experts in polar observation are joining forces in a new partnership that will see Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) operating a subsea observatory at the Spanish Antarctic Station, providing year-round, near real-time data on ocean conditions there—the first time that ONC will extend its ocean monitoring outside Canadian waters.

Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) expands the reach of Pacific Ocean monitoring with new deep-sea Argo floats that collect vital ocean data while traveling up and down through the water column, the space between the sea surface and the seafloor.

Xuebin Zhang has been named director, president and chief executive officer of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), bringing more than a decade of experience collaborating on PCIC projects and 25 years of experience as a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada where he led the assessment on changes in temperature and precipitation for Canada’s Changing Climate Report.

Globally renowned Indigenous art historian and curator Dr. Heather Igloliorte joins the University of Victoria as the inaugural Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices. The $8-million research chair will advance reconciliation through the transformative power of art and innovative exhibition practices and support a new generation of students, researchers, educators, curators and artists to drive change through artistic practice.

The Métis are often referred to as Canada’s “invisible people” – the “ghosts of the land” – whose stories haunt the country’s collective unconscious. Lii Michif Niiyanaan: We Are Métis is a one-hour documentary that addresses this invisibility by shining a new light on the historical and contemporary experience of Métis people in Canada and providing a space for Métis people to share their diverse perspectives on what it means to be Métis today.

Andrew Petter and Linda Catlin Smith receive UVic’s highest academic honour on Nov. 14 and 15, when they receive honorary degrees during the UVic's fall convocation ceremonies.

Unlearning colonial ways is a journey with many steps. For the University of Victoria, those next steps are grounded in language and ancestral teachings—guided by Indigenous communities—to ensure the work is done in a good way. UVic launches Xʷkʷənəŋ istəl | W̱ȻENEṈISTEL | Helping to move each other forward: UVic’s Indigenous Plan. With local Indigenous teachings and Lək̓ʷəŋən and SENĆOŦEN language woven throughout, this new plan proposes a fundamental rethinking of the institution’s approach to learning and work.

A global UVic research partnership will design and advance a sustainability framework to integrate Indigenous knowledge into sustainability projects.