Patricia Demers

Patricia A. Demers, CM, FRSC, humanist, professor, expert on English literature (born 1946 in Hamilton, ON). Patricia Demers was the first female president of the Royal Society of Canada, serving from 2005 to 2007. She is distinguished professor emeritus at the English and Film Studies Department of the University of Alberta, Calgary, and one of Canada’s most decorated literary scholars.

Photo of the Faculty of Arts Building at the University of Alberta

Education and Early Career

Patricia Demers grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. Her mother was a schoolteacher of English and science. Demers graduated from McMaster University in 1968 with an Honours degree in English and French and then worked as a high school teacher for two years before returning to academia. She obtained a Master’s degree from McMaster with a thesis on Christopher Marlowe (1971) and a PhD from the University of Ottawa (1974). Her dissertation was titled Imagery in the Tragedies of George Chapman (a playwright of the English renaissance). She also took courses in Greek and Hebrew.

Upon receiving her PhD, she accepted a position at the University of Alberta in Calgary as a sessional instructor. Three years later, in 1977, the university hired her as an assistant professor.

Career Highlights

Patricia Demers spent her entire teaching career at the University of Alberta and is one of the university’s most decorated professors. She received the University of Alberta Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Arts Faculty Teaching Award, the McCalla Research Professorship Award and the University Cup, the school’s most prestigious faculty award for sustained excellence in teaching, research and service. She also received the Sarah Shorten Award from the Canadian Association of University Teachers in 2008. Her alma mater, McMaster, awarded her a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2017.

Demers served as department chair (1995–98) and as vice-president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (1998–2002). In 2000, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, where she held various administrative and executive positions. She was elected president of the Royal Society in 2005, becoming the first female president since its founding in 1882. During her two-year term, she advocated the induction of more artists, as opposed to the traditional heavy focus on sciences.

In 2016, Demers was made a member of the Order of Canada for her “insightful contributions to the study of early works of English literature, and for her service to the academic community.”

Teaching and Research Interests

As an instructor, Patricia Demers has taught classes on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, 17th century poetry, 18th century novels, early modern women’s writing, contemporary women’s writing, biblical literature and children’s literature. Students describe her as an engaging instructor who values active participation.

As a researcher, Demers has published 18 books (as author or single editor) and over 50 articles. She is internationally recognized for her focus on neglected voices in the English-language literature — specifically, women writers. However, her publications cover a much wider variety of topics, including early modern drama and poetry, women as interpreters of the bible or translators of sermons, contemporary female Canadian writers, children’s books and children’s poetry and humanities research in general. Due to her diverse research interests, her predecessor as president of the Royal Society of Canada, Gilles Paquet, called her a “Renaissance woman.”

The Beginning of Print Culture

In the early 2000s, Patricia Demers learned of a Cree prayer book printed in 1883 at Lac La Biche. In 1876, cleric Émile Grouard brought a printing press, the first in Alberta, and special type (syllabics used for many Indigenous languages) to the mission at Lac La Biche. He used it to print devotional works in five different Indigenous languages — some of the first books printed in present-day Alberta. The Cree prayer book was the most extensive of these works. Demers invited Cree specialist Dorothy Thunder and Métis poet Naomi McIlwraith to form a team, which produced translations of the text into English and Modern Cree. The resulting book, The Beginning of Print Culture in Athabasca Country: A Facsimile Edition and Translation of a Prayer Book in Cree Syllabics, was published in 2010 as a valuable testament to the Cree language and culture. It won the Scholarly and Academic Book of the Year prize at the 2011 Alberta Book Awards.

Advocate for Digitization and Accessibility

Patricia Demers also champions the conservation and accessibility of information. With the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory, she leads the project “Women’s Writing and Reading in Canada from 1950,” which collects digitized texts and associated documents in an open-access online database. Within the Royal Society of Canada, she chaired an expert panel formed in 2013 on the status and future of Canada’s libraries and archives. In its 2014 report, the panel concluded a need for a national digitization program to preserve Canada’s cultural and scientific knowledge for the future and formulated an action plan.