Faculty

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. El Jones (PhD, Queen’s Cultural Studies) is an acclaimed Halifax-based poet, author, Assistant Professor of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, journalist, and social justice advocate. She received her PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University. She is also one of Acadia’s most recent Honorary Degree recipients, having received her Doctor of Letters degree in May 2024.

Among her many achievements, Dr. Jones was the National Slam champion two years in a row (2007 and 2008), and was the Fifth Poet Laureate of Halifax, an honour she held from 2013-2015. She is a winner of two gold Atlantic Journalism awards in 2018 and 2019.  In 2015, she was a resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2021, she was the poet in residence at the University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2023, she was a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law at the University of Cambridge.

Since 2016, she has co-hosted the radio show Black Power Hour on CKDU FM. This weekly show empowers people of colour, especially through reaching out to prisoners in Nova Scotia, who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous, by giving them a voice where they can phone in to express their views and make music requests. In 2016, she was awarded the Burnley “Rocky” Jones human rights award from the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.

Dr. Jones is the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!; a book of spoken word poetry about advocacy, history, and empowerment for members of the African diaspora, and Abolitionist Intimacies; a combination of prose and poetry, which depicts the experience of prisoners in a tender, compassionate way, while at the same time, advocates for abolition of the prison system. Abolitionist Intimacies won the Evelyn Richardson Prize for non-fiction at the Nova Scotia Book Awards in 2023.

Dr. Jeff MacLeod, Professor Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. MacLeod holds a PhD in political science (Western) and his research explores politics, culture and art through arts-based methods of inquiry. Journals in which his work is published include Tolkien Studies, Mythlore, Mallorn (illustrations), The Artifice, The International Journal of the Image, The Canadian Journal of Political Science and the Canadian Parliamentary Review. MacLeod is also an active visual artist (drawing, painting and digital art).

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.

Dr. Bernadette V. Russo (mixed Indigenous ancestry and Sicilian)

Assistant Professor
BS from Northern Arizona University: major Criminal Justice, minor Anthropology
MA from Sam Houston State University: English; additional 30 hours in Criminal Justice
PhD from Texas Tech University: English, concentration Indigenous Literatures and Film
Graduate Certificate from Texas Tech University: Women and Gender Studies

Phone: 902-457-6222
Email: bernadette.russo@msvu.ca

Research and Teaching

Indigenous literatures and film of North America, social justice issues, women and gender studies, environmental justice, rhetoric and linguistics of survivance, decolonizing practices, Postcolonial theory, queer theory, and intergenerational trauma, healing, and resilience