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The author reflects on professor Ron Srigley's account of what teaching looks like in the contemporary university in the form of an article published in the April 2016 issue of "The Walrus" magazine. She cites some responses to the article, which depicts the disconnect between teachers' front-line service and the current state of the university. She also comments on the position of women's rights advocates to stop taking the burden of unpaid emotional labour in their workplaces.

The article critiques books about Burma by author Karen Connelly including her novel "The Lizard Cage," memoir "Burmese Lessons: A Love Story," and poetry collection "The Border Surrounds Us." Topics discussed include the way Connelly used her travel experiences on the Thai-Burmese border in writing said books, the fictional setting and characters of her novel which focused on the Burmese prison system, and the intention of Connelly to introduce the Burmese political crisis to Western readers.

The article discusses the book "Unless" (2000) by Carol Shields. At the conclusion of this novel (her final novel), the mysterious trauma that has been haunting the narrator Reta's teenaged daughter, Norah, is climatically revealed.

Michael Helm's most recent novel, "Cities of Refuge" (2010), takes as its starting point an act of violence that reverberates through, and intertwines, the lives of a group of disparate people living in Toronto. Raising questions about contemporary regimes of racialization, art's capacity to respond to violence, and the ethical ambiguity of fiction's attempts to account for historical and political atrocities, the novel constitutes a challenge to familiar notions of family, justice, and truth. In this interview, Helm addresses the "resistance" of nontransparent language and the power of literature to lift readers out of the "white noise" of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camilla Gibb discusses how and why her creative impulse finds its inspiration elsewhere—in Ethiopia and England for her novel "Sweetness in the Belly" and Vietnam for her novel "The Beauty of the Humanity Movement"—the limits of the cultural appropriation debate, and the relationship between her training as anthropologist and her fiction writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Kim Echlin discusses Canadian writers' interest in writing about other cultures, which requires research and an empathic imagination as well as the responsibility to people who cannot tell their own stories of trauma. She addresses primarily her process of writing "The Disappeared," her novel about Cambodia, in which the central character tests the limits of empathy and witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karen Connelly's poetry and prose has dealt extensively with her experience of living abroad and writing about foreign places—notably Thailand, Burma, France, Spain, and Greece. In this interview, she discusses how learning a foreign language offers her a point of entry into a new culture and transforms her sense of self as well as how her books—especially "Touch the Dragon," "One Room in a Castle," "The Lizard Cage," and "Burmese Lessons"—engage with concepts of the foreign and the fraughtness of empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years that poet P. K. Page spent in Brazil as wife of the Canadian ambassador are widely considered to be a transformative episode in her literary career, marking a dramatic shift in her aesthetics. Critical work on Brazil's influence on Page tends, however, to deploy Brazil as a trope of the foreign, eliding her affiliation with the Canadian embassy. This construction of Brazil mirrors Page's own narrativization of her time there, exemplified in her 1969 essay "Questions and Images," originally published in a special tenth anniversary issue of Canadian Literature but most frequently cited in its 1991 republication in "The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New." This essay examines the different print contexts of "Questions and Images" to call for a rereading of Page's Brazilian work that is more attentive to the geopolitical realities of Canadian-Brazilian relations and the alignment of Page's travels with a particular moment in Canadian cultural nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Sweetness in the Belly," by Camilla Gibb is presented. It outlines the main character and explores her symbolic significance. It examines the topic chosen and the author's courage in choosing the topic. An overview of the story is also given which focuses on culture and religion.

Studies of historical isolates inform on the evolution and emergence of important pathogens and phenotypes, including antimicrobial resistance. Crucial to studying antimicrobial resistance are isolates that predate the widespread clinical use of antimicrobials. The Murray collection of several hundred bacterial strains of pre-antibiotic era Enterobacteriaceae is an invaluable resource of historical strains from important pathogen groups. Studies performed on the Collection to date merely exemplify its potential, which will only be realised through the continued effort of many scientific groups. To enable that aim, we announce the public availability of the Murray collection through the National Collection of Type Cultures, and present associated metadata with whole genome sequence data for over half of the strains. Using this information we verify the metadata for the collection with regard to subgroup designations, equivalence groupings and plasmid content. We also present genomic analyses of population structure and determinants of mobilisable antimicrobial resistance to aid strain selection in future studies. This represents an invaluable public resource for the study of these important pathogen groups and the emergence and evolution of antimicrobial resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the relationship between modernism and media and aesthetics and politics of serial form. Topics discussed include claims made by professor, Jessica Pressman regarding the use of modernism strategy of innovation that employs the media of its time to reform and refashion older literary practices, materiality of print and its relationships with other communication technologies and media ecology.

Shigellosis (previously bacillary dysentery) was the primary diarrhoeal disease of World War 1, but outbreaks still occur in military operations, and shigellosis causes hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in developing nations. We aimed to generate a high-quality reference genome of the historical Shigella flexneri isolate NCTC1 and to examine the isolate for resistance to antimicrobials. Methods In this genomic analysis, we sequenced the oldest extant Shigella flexneri serotype 2a isolate using single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing technology. Isolated from a soldier with dysentery from the British forces fighting on the Western Front in World War 1, this bacterium, NCTC1, was the first isolate accessioned into the National Collection of Type Cultures. We created a reference sequence for NCTC1, investigated the isolate for antimicrobial resistance, and undertook comparative genetics with S flexneri reference strains isolated during the 100 years since World War 1. Findings We discovered that NCTC1 belonged to a 2a lineage of S flexneri, with which it shares common characteristics and a large core genome. NCTC1 was resistant to penicillin and erythromycin, and contained a complement of chromosomal antimicrobial resistance genes similar to that of more recent isolates. Genomic islands gained in the S flexneri 2a lineage over time were predominately associated with additional antimicrobial resistances, virulence, and serotype conversion. Interpretation This S flexneri 2a lineage is a well adapted pathogen that has continued to respond to selective pressures. We have created a valuable historical benchmark for shigellae in the form of a high-quality reference sequence for a publicly available isolate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the case of a male patient with bacillary dysentery that he acquired during World War 1 and from a bacterial isolate deposited in the British National Collection of Type Cultures. It discusses the symptoms experienced by the patient, military deaths attributable to disease, and the prevalence of bacillary dysentery in military populations during World War 1.