Margery Fee

Margery Fee FRSC is a professor emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia (UBC). From 2015 to 2017, Fee was the Brenda and David McLean Chair In Canadian Studies at UBC. She is also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Fee completed her PhD studies in English at the University of Toronto in 1981. After earning her PhD, Fee began to take up an interest in Indigenous peoples literature. She published her dissertation under the title "English-Canadian literary criticism, 1890–1950: defining and establishing a national literature".

Early career

Despite her PhD, Fee found it difficult to earn a position in English. She, therefore, decided to earn a diploma in applied linguistics at the University of Victoria in order to teach English as a second language (ESL) in Japan. While earning the diploma, Fee was approached by Henry Warkentyne and George Logan, the Head of English at Queen's University, to assume a role as a linguist.

In 1985, Fee published Canadian poetry in selected English-language anthologies: an index and guide. Two years later, Fee began her role as director of the Strathy Language Unit at Queen's University, replacing W. C. Lougheed. W.C. Lougheed had created the Strathy Language Unit with the aim of creating a computer-based Canadian English "corpus" of texts, essentially a database of Canadian English. After superseding Lougheed as director, Fee helped obtain a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant to continue the expansion of the corpus. As a result, she coordinated with later director Janice McAlpine to publish a second edition of "the Guide to Canadian English Usage" in 2007.

In 1992, Fee compiled a collection of essays titled Silence Made Visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John. The book also included an interview of Howard O’Hagan, conducted by Keith Maillard in 1979, where he explained his writing process.

UBC

Fee was hired as an associate professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1993. She came to UBC with the purpose of teaching First Nations literatures. That year, she also published The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood's "Lady Oracle", a literature review of Margaret Atwood's work.

In 1999, Fee was hired as an associate dean of students until 2004. In 2005, Fee was awarded the Margaret Fulton Award for her contribution to student development and the University community. She was also selected to serve as director of the Arts One Program and director of the Canadian Studies Program until 2008. The year she left her position as director, Fee was honoured as a distinguished scholar in residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and was the recipient of the Dean of Arts Award.

From 2007 until 2015, Fee was an editor of Canadian Literature, a quarterly journal of criticism and review. In 2015, Fee was selected as the Brenda and David McLean Chair In Canadian Studies at UBC. That year, her book Literary Land Claims was shortlisted for the 2015 Gabrielle Roy Prize by the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures. The book examined three narratives of Indigenous people who tried to contradict the stereotypes of "savage Indians" and "civilized Canadians." Similarly, Fee became a Co-Investigator with Daniel Heath Justice and Deanna Reder on a SSHRC-funded project called The People And The Text. The project aimed to collected ignored texts and literature from Indigenous Canadians during the time of British colonization.

In 2016, Fee published Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's writings on native North America, which detailed the life of an early North American Indigenous poet and fiction writer, E. Pauline Johnson. The following year, Fee was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her research in Canadian literature and Canadian English lexicography.

The following is a list of publications:

• Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's writings on native North America (2016)
• Literary land claims: the "Indian land question" from Pontiac's war to Attawapiskat (2015)
• Guide to Canadian English usage: the essential English resource for Canadian writers & editors (2011)
• The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood's "Lady Oracle" (1993)
• Silence made visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John (1992)
• Canadian poetry in selected English-language anthologies: an index and guide (1985)