In the spring, the book won the Canadian Historical Association's 2010 Clio Prize for Ontario, and now it has won the Champlain Society鈥檚 Floyd S. Chalmers Award in Ontario History.

The award will be presented to Wall on Saturday at the society's annual general meeting in Toronto. Wall, a history professor at the University of Winnipeg, will also deliver a lecture at the meeting. To attend, go to the City of Toronto Archives, 55 Spadina Rd. at 2pm.

Published by the University of British Columbia, explores the history of an institution that shaped the lives of thousands of children who attended or worked at summer camps. Wall examines the connections between summer camps and the history of childhood, the natural environment, class cultures, and modern recreation and leisure.

Two competing cultural tendencies 鈥� anti-modern nostalgia and modern enthusiasms about the landscape, child rearing and identity 鈥� shaped the summer camp, argues Wall. She examines how this tension played out in camp programs, such as 鈥淚ndian鈥� programming, and informed modern assumptions about nature, technology and identity.

Left: Sharon Wall

The Nurture of Nature discusses the summer camp鈥檚 contribution to modern social life in North America and will appeal to students of history, sociology and cultural studies as well as anyone who has ever been packed off to camp and wants to explore why, states the publisher.

Republished courtesy of YFile鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin

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The main focus for Alejandro Zamora, a professor in Glendon鈥檚 Department of Hispanic Studies, is the study of the modern novel, including its philosophical and social issues, which he explores in his recently published book.

(Playing for Self Esteem: Playful Characters in the Modern Novel) (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009) was published as part of the European Union鈥檚 academic publication series, European University Studies. It is based on Zamora鈥檚 2006 PhD thesis.

Through the works of some of the most important modern novelists, such as Andr茅 Gide, Italo Calvino, Witold Gombrowicz, Julio Cort谩zar, Milan Kundera and others, this book is a literary exploration of human playfulness as an affirmation of authenticity and self-esteem. These human attributes are juxtaposed with the utilitarian, pragmatic and institutional dimensions of everyday life and interpersonal relations in contemporary societies.

Jugar por amor propio is an important contribution to the development of comparative literature in Spanish language. 鈥淟iterature has a cognitive potential,鈥� says Zamora. 鈥淚t is an extraordinary tool for the understanding of cultures. It also provides a unique insight into important issues of the human experience 鈥� its complexity, its ambiguity, its paradoxes. A comparative system of literary analysis is by its nature multidisciplinary, enabling us to examine writings from psychological, philosophical, sociological, historical, as well as other perspectives.鈥�

Zamora's next major undertaking is the mounting of a trilingual, comparative, interdisciplinary conference on the Glendon campus, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, titled聽. The conference is to commemorate and reflect on the bicentennial of Mexican independence of 1810, and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Right: Alejandro Zamora

鈥淭he conference also provides an opportunity to examine those other Mexican revolutions, which have occurred or are currently taking place at the margin of the nation鈥檚 dominant narratives, at the periphery of nationalistic discourses that assign specific identities for Mexican-ness, at the borders and edges of well-defined and visible systems of power,鈥� says Zamora.

Zamora is currently completing research on childhood and literature, and is writing a book-length essay on this topic. His research for the project took him to the National Film Institute of Madrid in the summer of 2008. While there, he watched聽three to four聽movies a day in order to compare the idea of Spanish children in movies made during the Franco era 鈥� Catholic, conservative, patriarchal 鈥� with those of the post-Franco era, portrayed with all the ambiguities, the questioning and wonderment that children display.

Why study Spanish language and literature? 鈥淏ecause literature is much more than just a collection of stories,鈥� says Zamora. 鈥淚n fact, literature reveals some of the most intimate aspects of a country and its society, culture, history and people.鈥� As for learning the Spanish language, 鈥溾�t is the聽third-largest language group in the world and thus very useful in the global workplace. It is also the necessary key to fully access an extraordinary culture.鈥�

Zamora brings his experience in teaching, journalism, professional and fiction writing to Glendon as a specialist in comparative literature. He examines literature in Spanish, as well as French, Polish and Finnish. In addition, Zamora teaches a Spanish language course with French as the reference language, affirming the trilingual nature of Glendon's Hispanic Studies Program.

He has worked as a journalist for Mexican newspapers,聽including a weekly column, La ciudad y los libros (The City and Books), from 1996 to 2000, for which he received the Provincial Journalism Award of Michoac谩n. He has also published fiction and, in 1998, received the J贸venes Creadores (Young Creators) Award from the government of Mexico's National Fund for Culture and the Arts.

By Marika Kemeny, Glendon communications officer

Republished with files courtesy of YFile 鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

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