Research excellence

Each year, several UVic faculties confer awards for excellence in research to faculty members who have made significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in their field. In this issue, we profile four recent recipients of such awards for leading-edge work in international finance, nano-magnetization dynamics, Victorian popular literature and global corporate power and social change.

Dr. William Carroll

Dr. William Carroll (sociology) has been tracking social movements and analyzing corporate power structures since the ’70s, and he knows first hand there is a lot more involved than just “teaching the world to sing.” In recognition of his extensive research in the field, Carroll is the recipient of the 2008 Faculty of Social Sciences Research Excellence Award.

Carroll has been a member of UVic’s sociology department since 1981. His major research interests revolve around mapping structures of corporate power, in Canada and globally, and exploring the forms through which social movement activists attempt to create change.

In his latest book Remaking Media: the Struggle to Democratize Public Communication (2006, with Bob Hackett), Carroll has helped clarify the current situation with media activism and new media, specifically that they provide a “nexus” or meeting point. Although the invisible web of wireless connection is almost unavoidable now, news and information need not only come from the internet: community radio, alternative papers and magazines as well as TV are also vehicles of communication explored by Carroll and Hackett.

“We ended up looking at media activism and new media as a nexus,” says Carroll. “Reader literacy has improved over the years, and readers are more able to read critically rather than be passive spectators, and consequentially are more able to press for more democratic forms of media.” On two occasions, Carroll has been awarded the Canadian Sociology Association’s John Porter Memorial Prize (1988, 2006) for outstanding scholarly studies, for his research on corporate power in a globalizing world. He is the only scholar to receive this book award twice, with both books having become near classics in the field.

“Now we live in interesting times with the economic meltdown,” says Carroll, “and right now we are seeing dramatic reshaping of the landscape of corporate capital. It will be interesting to explore the effect of the financial meltdown on the global corporate network.” This is where Carroll intends to turn next.

In the past five years alone, Carroll has published four books, authored 11 articles and six book chapters, and presented 25 research papers at academic conferences around the world. He has been an active and influential member of the Canadian Sociology Association and was editor of the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology from 2000 to 2003. He also serves on the executive committee of the Economy and Society Research Committee of the International Sociology Association, is affiliated with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Sociologists Without Borders, and is director of UVic’s new Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Program in Social Justice Studies.

Dr. Byoung-Chul Choi

Dr. Byoung-Chul Choi (physics and astronomy) has made big progress in studying the very small and the very fast, for which he has received the Faculty of Science’s 2007/08 Award for Research Excellence.

Choi is a leading researcher in the field of spintronics, and specifically ultrafast magnetization dynamics. One of very few Canadian scientists in this field, he studies the dynamics of magnetization switching that occur on time scales of 50 picoseconds (50 trillionths of a second) and on sub-micron length scales (less than one millionth of a metre).

His work has great potential for significant applications in the field of electronics, including development of new high-density storage media, magnetic computer memory and processors.

Choi has published nearly four dozen papers in leading journals and another two dozen scholarly articles in conference proceeding volumes. His award citation states that “what distinguishes this body of work is a combination of theory and experiment…a rare combination that allows him to probe physical phenomena with rather remarkable insight.”

In Choi’s work, there is a very close relationship between pure, fundamental research and its practical application. “In the study of magnetization dynamics there is a simple model that has been used to describe what happens during these magnetic reversals,” says Choi. “In our studies, a combination of experimental and theoretical work is used to extend and refine this model. This helps us gain more information about what is going on, and that can lead to further application of this knowledge.”

Choi came to UVic in 2002, following postdoctoral work at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Alberta. At UVic, he was charged with building a research group in condensed matter physics, which includes the fields of superconducting, semiconducting and nanomagnetism. In the six years hence, he has led the creation of an internationally recognized lab that has put UVic on the condensed matter physics map.

Dr. Basma Majerbi

Dr. Basma Majerbi’s research into international finance and emerging market currency risks in stock markets earned her the Faculty of Business Excellence in Research Award for 2007/08.

Majerbi is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Business and a UVic Scholar. Her research interests include such topics as international asset pricing modelling and testing, the benefits of international diversification and the impact of exchange risk on international portfolio investments, and the role of financial system development in economic growth.

Her research into how exchange rate volatility influenced stock market returns in emerging countries, and how this affected the pricing of global risks in the broader world equity markets also led to major publications in three top business journals and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant.

“Foreign capital flows into emerging markets have increased sharply in recent years. These countries offer valuable diversification potential to international investors, but at the same time tend to be characterized by large exchange rate uncertainty,” says Majerbi, citing both the “Tequila Crisis” in Mexico and the “Asian Flu” currency crises during the 1990s.

As a follow up to her work on risk pricing in international equity markets, Majerbi is now studying the link between the structure of the financial system and economic growth. “The recent financial crisis reminds us about the crucial role that the financial system plays in the overall economy,” says Majerbi. “Previous research has shown that countries with better developed financial systems tend to grow faster, which led to numerous policy prescriptions, particularly for developing countries, by such institutions as the IMF and the World Bank.”

These policies are mainly designed to reform the banking system and/or develop the stock markets, which Majerbi says ignores the role of other types of financial sector participants such as credit unions and mutual savings banks. “Non-bank financial institutions provide access to financing for a wide range of small and medium-size enterprises, but these do not easily qualify for stock market or bank-based financing in many countries.”

Her goal in this study is to investigate whether a more diversified institutional structure of the financial system, evidenced by a variety of institutional forms such as co-operative financial institutions, will have a positive impact on economic performance and poverty reduction.

Dr. Lisa Surridge

Dr. Lisa Surridge (English), recipient of the 2007/08 Faculty of Humanities Award for Research Excellence, is quick to point out that much of the work she is being honoured for is the product of collaboration. An expert in Victorian literature and culture, Surridge is a pioneer in the study of Victorian illustrated serials and in new models of research collaboration in the humanities.

In the traditional model of humanities research, the individual scholar labours away developing a text for publication. But some years ago, Surridge discovered the advantages of collaboration.

“My colleagues Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Judith Mitchell and I would co-edit our individually written papers, preparing them for publication,” explains Surridge. “And we realized just how productive collaboration could be.”

This has blossomed into a major scholarly collaboration between Surridge and Leighton that sees them sitting at the same computer making notes together, discussing their ideas and co-writing their text. “It’s very creative,” says Surridge. “We argue back and forth and take risks with our ideas, knowing that the other person will test them. And if one of us has writer’s block, the other takes over. It’s like passing the ball in soccer.”

Currently they are collaborating on a study of Victorian illustrated serial fiction which considers the role of illustration in producing plot and narrative effects. In this, they are bringing together separate threads of scholarship on Victorian book illustration and narrative and asking new questions about how they might work together.

The Victorian readers of serial fiction saw a verbal/visual hybrid, a type of novel in which pictures and letterpress played an equal part. “The readers of these serials were performing a kind of verbal/visual matching as they read in which they brought the two elements together in complex ways,” explains Surridge.

Surridge and Leighton point out that since serial parts were bound with the images in front, Victorian readers knew in advance much of what the serial part was about. For example, if readers saw a picture of a corpse being pulled out of a moat, they already knew the main event of the chapter. Instead of asking “What will happen next,” they read in order to elaborate that knowledge.

Their work is about to be published in the journal Victorian Studies, which Surridge describes as “the Mount Everest of our field.” “This is something that I just could not have achieved without the collaborative process,” she says.

Surridge, Leighton and others in the English department also collaboratively edit the Victorian Review, Canada’s only Victorian studies journal. That collaboration extends to include undergraduate professional writing students as well as graduate students who are provided the opportunity for hands-on experience in all aspects of the scholarly publication process.

Surridge’s most recent book is Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction, and, with Leighton, she is co-editing a textbook on Victorian nonifiction periodical prose, reintegrating the voices of both male and female writers for the periodical press, which have until now only been studied separately.