Faculty Profiles

Gregory Canning, PhD (he/him)

Gregory Canning is a part-time instructor of film and cultural studies in the Cultural Studies Program at Mount Saint Vincent University. He completed his PhD in interdisciplinary studies (history, cultural studies, and film) at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. His research concerns the early reception of film in the Maritime provinces of Canada, American film history, cult film, and animation film history. His research has appeared in Rain/Drizzle/Fog: Film and Television in Atlantic Canada, ed. Darrell Varga (University of Calgary Press, 2009) and in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.
His favorite films right now are Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi, 2016) and Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962), but that does change regularly. His favorite book is River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Rebecca Solnit, 2003) but is also subject to change, in general he loves reading the histories of technology.

Dr. Michael McGuire (he/him)

Michael McGuire is an artist and academic based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Inspired by the hip hop tapes he discovered as a child, he started rapping and performing spoken word as Hermitofthewoods. In the years that followed, he began facilitating workshops and giving talks on the culture and production of hip hop, with a particular focus on the local scene in Halifax. Leaning into the academic world, a Master’s thesis on the history of hip hop in Halifax soon followed, along with an opportunity to teach in the Cultural Studies program at Mount Saint Vincent University. In 2017, he established the East of East Atlantic Canadian Hip Hop to preserve the cultural legacy of the region’s hip hop artists and as a platform for future academic research and study and in 2022 completed a doctorate focused on critical hip hop pedagogy.  He lives in Timberlea, Nova Scotia, making rap records with an adorable beagle named Goose.
Research interests: Atlantic Canadian Hip Hop, musicology, hip hop studies, critical and arts-based pedagogy, ergodic literature, digital humanities, cultural archiving.
Non-research interests: Folk/country music, music production, making records, MCU, fine art, printmaking, the deserts of the Southwest, tattoos, tacos.

El Jones

Dr. Randi R. Warne (official); Prof. Warne (general)

Dr Randi Warne

Dr. Warne was born in Winnipeg, a product of 4 different ethnicities, into 6 different religious traditions, thus explaining her field of religion and culture/cultural studies.  She read everything, from a 6 volume British Children’s Encyclopedia (pub. 1905), political treatises, John Kenneth Galbraith, and all the science fiction she could get from her grandfather’s The First Men on the Moon (18xx by H.G. Wells) to the present day. (she still has her grandfather’s books.  She still has ALL the books.) Dr. Warne has been a vocalist, an actor, and was a regular commentator on CBC, especially in Edmonton. Dr. Warne’s 2 part “Ideas” series, “The Stream Runs Fast” was based on her Chatauqua performances across Canada and in several US states as Nellie McClung, an internationally known social activist and author in the first half of the 20th c.  Warne also attended the first gay marriage in Winnipeg (1974), and took a Psychology of Religion class that had Alan Watts as a guest speaker (sort of – he was quite high).  She is grateful for having been in Toronto during the birth of punk, and saw The Clash in a small club on the Danforth, and the Ramones at the El Mocambo.(Yes, the Ramones were really, really ugly – check out Rock and Roll Highschool for evidence)