Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of French
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Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of French
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of German
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was established on 1 July 1988, composed of humanities and social science departments within the former Faculty of Arts and Science. The restructuring of the Faculty began in 1986 with the establishment of a committee to consider its future direction. The Smith Report, drafted in 1987 by Rowland Smith, McCulloch Professor of English and Acting Dean of Arts and Science, recommended the division of the Faculty, which was followed by a faculty-wide referendum resulting in marginal favour of the decision.
The earliest university calendar lists only a Faculty of Arts. However, to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree, students were first required to pass matriculation examinations in classics, mathematics and English, while subsequent classes included rhetoric, logic and psychology, natural philosophy (experimental physics), modern languages, metaphysics, chemistry, ethics, political economy, and history. MA degrees were granted on completion of a thesis on a literary, scientific or professional subject.
In 1878 a Department of Science was established in connection with the Faculty of Arts, and in 1880 the university calendar lists a Faculty of Science. By 1906, the university calendars refer to a single Faculty of Arts and Science, a title which lasted until the administrative division in 1988.
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Science. Department of Chemistry
The teaching of chemistry at Dalhousie College was introduced in 1842 by Professor James MacIntosh, although the chemistry department dates from 1863 with the appointment of the first chair, Professor George Lawson, who taught chemistry and botany at Dalhousie for 32 years. Ebenezer MacKay, who graduated in 1886 with first-class honours in experimental physics and chemistry, returned to Dalhousie in 1896 with a PhD from Johns Hopkins University to become the second professor of chemistry following Lawson's death.
The first postgraduate chemistry degree was conferred on James Forrest in 1871, and 11 more Dalhousie BA graduates received MA degrees between 1871 and 1934. In 1904, the first Master of Science degree was awarded to W.H. Ross, but research in chemistry did not flourish at Dalhousie until the arrival of Carl C. Coffin in 1930. When the Department of Chemistry received approval for a PhD program in 1960, the number of accepted MSc theses numbered only 62 after more than a half century. Dalhousie's first PhD in chemistry was granted to St. John H. Blakeley in 1964. Since then, some 500 alumni have received MSc and PhD degrees from the Chemistry Department, a number that increases by about 15 each year. Today the department's graduate program is the largest east of Montreal and the only PhD chemistry graduate program in Nova Scotia.
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Russian Studies
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Science. Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Science. Department of Oceanography
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Law, Justice and Society Program
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Graduate Studies
Dalhousie University. Schulich School of Law
Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law originated as the first university law school established in the common-law provinces of Canada, and became the model for legal education across the country. The school was opened in 1883 with Richard Chapman Weldon as dean, supported by a volunteer faculty of Halifax lawyers and judges.
After four years in temporary housing, in 1887 the law school moved into a corner of the new Dalhousie College, known from 1919 as the Forrest Building. In 1951 the school moved to the Law Building (currently the University Club), which had been designed and built for the purpose thirty years earlier, but commandeered for other uses; by 1966 the law students and faculty had outgrown the space and moved into their current residence, the Weldon Law Building, named for the school’s first dean. After the fifth-floor library was destroyed by fire in 1985, the building was expanded and renovated to create the new James Dunn Law Library.
The Faculty of Law counts among its notable graduates Dalhousie’s first black graduate, James Robinson Johnston, who earned his law degree in 1898. In 1918 Frances Fish became the first woman to graduate from Dalhousie Law School and later the first woman to be admitted to the Barristers’ Society of Nova Scotia. By 1936 Dalhousie Law School graduates sat on the bench of all but three Provincial Supreme Courts, and in 1950 the faculty began offering graduate programs.
During the second half of the twentieth century the law school established initiatives and programs including Dalhousie Legal Aid (1970); the Marine and Environmental Law Program (1974); the Indigenous Blacks and Mi’kmaq Initiative (1989); the Health Law Institute (1992); and the Law and Technbology Institute (2001). In 2009 Sir Seymour Schulich donated $20 million to fund 40 new annual scholarships, the largest gift of its kind ever made to a Canadian law school, and the school was renamed the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.
A $3 million gift from John McCall MacBain in 2011 established the MacBain Chair in Health Law and Policy, and Joanna Erdman was the first person to hold the chair.
Robert Archibald Logan was born on in Middle Musquodoboit, N.S. on August 17, 1892. Born to small land-owning farmers, he helped his mother on the farm whilst attending school. On his graduation, he attended the Technical University of Nova Scotia to become a Dominion Land Surveyor. When war broke out in 1914, he learned to fly an airplane at his own expense, and became the first Canadian civilian pilot to earn a commission in the British Royal Flying Corps. During the war he distinguished himself as a pilot and navigator, and was involved in training other pilots. On Apr. 8, 1917, he was shot down behind enemy lines by an aerial attack led by Baron von Richtoven. He and his observer survived the crash and spent the rest of World War I in 6 different German POW camps, including Schweidnitz. He began to study languages during his internment, which began an interest that continued for the rest of his life.
When the War ended, Logan participated in a Canadian government expedition by boat into the Arctic, and helped to establish the first air landing fields in the far north, including on Ellesmere Island. He also became involved in the new field of aerial surveying, which led him to south-central Africa for two years. Upon his return to the USA, he was employed by Pan-American Airways, where he investigated potential landing sites for the airline through travels that took him from Alaska to Argentina, and was Operations Manager for Pan-Am in Argentina and Brazil.
In 1933, he participated in the "Jelling" North Atlantic voyage with the Lindberghs, which investigated fueling and landing sites for Pan-Am’s cross-Atlantic routes. He also began and managed a gold mining operation in Nova Scotia during this time. He was then hired by the Irish national airline Aer Lingus Teoranta, and was its general manager until World War II necessitated the shutdown of its operations.
During WWII, Logan worked for the RCAF as a Command Navigation Officer in Nova Scotia, and Lt. Colonel and Director of Intelligence in Ottawa until the USA entered the War. In 1941, he participated in a secret Arctic expedition to Greenland and Iceland with the US military for the establishment of northern military airbases. After that, he continued work with the American military, and was sent on an another special mission to the South Pacific in 1943 with Rear Admiral Richard Byrd (who he knew from their mutual association with the Explorer’s Club in New York), again to research potential airfield and fuelling sites for the US military. Due to a leg injury during this expedition, he was given a medical retirement discharge, and retired as a Colonel.
After Logan retired from the military, he devoted most of his time to writing. His research and writing spanned a great deal of topics, such as genealogy, history, astrology, philosophy, mineralogy, writing systems, and fiction. He also compiled and published a two-volume Cree-English dictionary, and had it distributed to many academic libraries across N. America at his own expense.
Logan remained active in these pursuits well into the later years of his life, and his achievements have been noted by organizations like the International Biographical Associations of the UK and the USA, and the Explorer’s Club. He died shortly after his 100th birthday in 1992, in Duluth, Minnesota.
Susan Sherwin is an internationally-renowned feminist philosopher and health care ethicist and a Dalhousie professor emeritus. She was born in Toronto in 1947 and educated at York University and Stanford University, where she wrote the first doctoral dissertation in the United States on feminist ethics. In 1974 she became the first woman to be hired by Dalhousie's Department of Philosophy, later serving as the first woman to serve as president of the Dalhousie Faculty Association (DFA). She has served on numerous significant committees, including the Royal College Ethics and Equity Committee; the Standing Committee on Ethics at Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); the Advisory Group on Reproductive and Genetic Technologies at Health Canada; and the Chief Public Health Officer’s Ethics Advisory Committee for the Public Health Agency of Canada. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1999) and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (2007). In 2006, she won the Killam Prize in Humanities and, in 2007, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Bioethics Society. Her book No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care (1992) was revolutionary in the emergent field of feminist bioethics; she is also the author of The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy (1998). In 2015 she received the Order of Canada.
In 2018 Sue Sherwin was named one of 52 Dalhousie Originals, a list of individuals identified as having made a significant impact on the university and the broader community since Dalhousie's inception in 1818. https://www.dal.ca/about-dal/dalhousie-originals/eliza-ritchie.html
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Medicine
Dalhousie Medical School is an internationally-recognized faculty in undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing medical education. The only medical school in the Maritime provinces, it is closely affiliated with the provincial healthcare systems in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and is affiliated with over one hundred teaching sites, including nine teaching hospitals.
The Dalhousie College Act, ratified in 1863, stipulated the establishment of a medical faculty; with the support of the premier and the provincially-funded Halifax Hospital, the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1868, half a century after the university's founding, and the fifth medical school in Canada, preceded by McGill (1842), Queens (1854), Laval (1823) and Toronto (1843).
The initial class of 14 students was taught by a volunteer faculty of Halifax physicians under the leadership of Dr. Alexander P. Reid. Primary subjects only were offered, and students transferred to McGill, Harvard or New York to complete their training; by 1870 a full program was available and in 1872 the first class graduated from Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine. In 1873 financial difficulties forced the school’s closure and two years later the independent Halifax Medical College was formed, with Dr. Reid as president. After an ambiguous affiliation with the college, in 1889 Dalhousie’s Faculty of Medicine was re-established, with the Halifax Medical College remaining as the teaching body while the Faculty of Medicine took over the role of examining body.
With the support of the Carnegie Foundation, the medical school was reorganized; in 1911 the Halifax Medical School was fully reintegrated into the university, with a full-time pre-clinical teaching staff and strict entrance requirements. In the early 1920s further grants from the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations enabled the construction of the Dalhousie Public Health Clinic and the Medical Sciences Building, as well as the expansion of the Pathology Institute. In 1925 the school obtained an A1 accreditation from the American Medical Association.
Financial challenges throughout the 1930s and 1940s were alleviated by contributions from the provincial governments of Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and during this period the faculty established the first continuing medical education program in Canada. In 1967 the Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building was completed, housing the W.K. Kellogg Health Sciences Library, several medical science faculties, and facilities for teaching and research.
Nova Scotia Poultry Association
Nova Scotia Blueberry Institute
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Music
The Department of Music had its origins in an affiliation between the Halifax Conservatory and Dalhousie dating back to 1889. The Conservatory offered a licentiate diploma and a Bachelor in Music degree, as did the Maritime Academy of Music, founded in 1934. The association with Dalhousie continued after the two music schools amalgamated in 1954 as the Maritime Conservatory of Music and, from 1949 until the mid 1960s, elective music appreciation classes and ensemble groups at Dalhousie were organized by Harold Hamer.
The Dalhousie Department of Music was established in 1968 and began offering practical instruction and theory: instrumental lessons and voice coaching were expanded in 1975 under the leadership of Peter Fletcher. While the initial aim of the department was to produce students of a high practical ability, by the late 1970s the department's mandate was to train prospective professional musicians, performers, composers and critics. The 1971 opening of the Dalhousie Arts Centre greatly enhanced teaching and performance capacity, as the new building offered performance halls, practice rooms and a piano lab. Imported instructors were replaced with both part-time and full-time faculty, and the department sponsored both professional and community ensembles such as the Dalhousie Chorale, the Dalhousie Opera Workshop and Musica Antiqua.
Beginning in 1977 the department offered four-year Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Music Education degrees and a five-year integrated degree program. Further academic programs included a pre-baccalaureate foundational studies program and a B Mus curriculum in organ and church music in collaboration with the Atlantic School of Theology and the community churches of the RCCO. Other programs were offered in collaboration with Henson College and the Department of Theatre.
In 2014 the Department of Music became a program in the Fountain School of Performing Arts.
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Fountain School of Performing Arts
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Theatre
Dalhousie's Department of Theatre developed out of the Dalhousie Drama Workshop, which was formed in 1963 by then recently appointed Professor of English John Ripley, who offered it as an adjunct to his English 9 (History of Drama) class. The following year, Susan Vallance was hired as an instructor, working jointly for the Education and the English departments and teaching Child Drama, the first credit course in any performance-based class. In 1965 theatre historian Lionel Lawrence came to Dalhousie, and in 1966 four credit courses in theatre were offered in the newly established Drama Division within the Department of English. In 1967/1968 a BA in Drama and Theatre was offered, and in 1968 the Senate agreed to separate the study of drama from the Department of English, and Alan Andrews left alongside to serve as the inaugural chair of the new Department of Theatre.
In its first few years, the department's offerings were largely theoretical and not designed to train students for the professional theatre, but with the 1971 opening of the Dalhousie Arts Centre, the capacity for offering practical instruction changed. The new building included a designated wing for theatre studies that housed the James Dunn Theatre, two teaching/performance studios, and costume and set workshops. In the 1973/1974 university calendar, the department description emphasized the nature of theatre as a performing art and offered its first degree credit classes in acting. The department began to develop collaborative relationships with local theatres, including Neptune, and teaching faculty included Canada Council Artists-in Residence such as Fred Allen and Nancey Pankiw (1974) and Robert Doyle (1977).
In 1975 the department began to offer a BA Honours degree in three streams—general, acting and scenography—and by 1976 all theatre students were expected to be involved regularly in either acting or in other areas of production work. With the support of Robert Doyle, in 1976 the department launched a three-year diploma program in Costumes Studies, which in 2005 started to be offered as a four-year Honours BA in Theatre (Costume Studies).
The Department of Theatre, along with the Department of Music, became a program within the Fountain School of Performing Arts in 2014.
Alan R. Andrews is professor emeritus at Dalhousie University. Born in England in 1935, he was educated at King Henry VII and King Edward VI schools before earning his BA, MA and a Diploma of Education from Leeds University. He later obtained his PhD at the University of Illinois.
Andrews was appointed to Dalhousie's English department in 1966, but moved to the newly created Department of Theatre in 1969, where he served as the inaugural chair until 1971. He was promoted to full professor in 1981. His scholarly interests included George Bernard Shaw, Granville Barker and St. John Hankin, about whom he wrote and lectured frequently, including at the Shaw Festival in Ontario. He directed many university theatre productions, served as an editor of The Dalhousie Review (1985-1995), and was secretary to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the early 1980s. He had close ties with Neptune Theatre, was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers from 1992-1994. Alan Andrews retired from Dalhousie in June 2001.
Herbert Farquhar MacRae was Principal of Nova Scotia School of Agriculture from 1972-1989 and the namesake of Dalhousie's Agricultural Campus library. Born on 30 March 1926 in Middle River, Nova Scotia, he graduated from the Nova Scotia Teachers College in 1948, earning a Superior First-Class Teaching License. He taught high school for five years and then studied at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, graduating at the top of his class and receiving a scholarship at Macdonald College, McGill University. He earned his BSc in 1950, MSc in 1956, and his DPhil in Agricultural Chemistry in 1960. MacRae worked for two years with the Food and Drug Directorate, Health and Welfare Canada, before returning to Macdonald College to teach for twelve years, ending up as professor and chair of the Department of Animal Science.
In 1972 he returned to Nova Scotia as Principal of the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, where he remained for the next 17 years, providing leadership to the agri-food industry in numerous capacities, including as a founding member and later Chairman of the Canadian Agricultural Research Council (CARC). He also served as President of the Association of Faculties of Agriculture in Canada; Chairman of the Atlantic Provinces Agricultural Services Coordinating Committee; Chairman of the Association of Deans of the Faculties of Agriculture in Canada; and Executive Director, Confederation of Canadian Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine. MacRae received an Honorary Doctorate from McGill in 1987, was elected a Fellow of the Agricultural Institute of Canada in 1988, and was named to the Order of Canada in 1992. On his retirement from NSAC in 1989, the College library was renamed in his honour. He died in 2002 in Truro, Nova Scotia.
Dalhousie University. Faculty of Architecture and Planning
The Faculty of Architecture was established on 1 April 1997 with the merger of the Technical University of Nova Scotia (TUNS) and Dalhousie University. It was the outgrowth of the first school of architecture in Atlantic Canada, which opened at the Nova Scotia Technical College in 1961, sharing a building on Spring Garden Road with the Nova Scotia Museum of Science. During the 1960s the professional architecture program began, consisting of two years of engineering at one of seven Maritime universities, followed by four years at the School of Architecture, leading to a BArch degree. In 1969 the engineering prerequisite was changed to two years in any university subject.
In 1970 the School of Architecture took over the entire building and initiated the trimester system and co-op work term program. In 1973 the architecture portion of the professional program included a two-year pre-professional degree (later called Bachelor of Environmental Design Studies) and a two-year professional BArch degree. The BArch program was validated by the Commonwealth Association of Architects and a one-year, post-professional Master of Architecture program was offered. In 1976 the NSTC Faculty of Architecture was established, with the School of Architecture continuing as a constituent part of the Faculty. The main floor of the building was renovated, including the addition of a mezzanine for faculty offices. The Master of Urban and Rural Planning program was first offered in 1977. In 1978 the Department of Urban and Rural Planning was established within the Faculty of Architecture, becoming the School of Planning in 2001.
In the early 1980s, after the Nova Scotia Technical College had become the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the building's studio level was renovated and mezzanines were added. In the mid-1980s the professional program was transformed, leading to a two-year MArch (first professional) degree with a thesis component. The school began to participate in overseas activities with the International Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) and external adjuncts and examiners were appointed. In the late 1980s the Faculty opened a publishing department, Tuns Press, to produce architecture and planning publications. An arrangement with Apple Canada introduced an initial fleet of computers for student use. In 1989 a one-year, non-professional Master of Environmental Design Studies degree was offered.
In 1993, following an international design competition, the first phase of a new addition designed by Brian MacKay-Lyons was built in the rear courtyard of the existing building. In a second phase in 2002, upper floors for studios were added inside the addition. In 1994 the School's professional architecture program became the first in Canada to receive full accreditation from the Canadian Architectural Certification Board. Full accreditation was granted again in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2015. In 1997, a decision by the Nova Scotia government to amalgamate universities led the three faculties of the Technical University of Nova Scotia (Architecture, Engineering, and Computer Science) to become part of Dalhousie University. In 2001 the Faculty of Architecture was renamed the Faculty of Architecture and Planning.