Director

CRiCS is the initiative of Dr. Angela Failler, Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Culture and Public Memory. Failler is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and teaches for the MA Program in Cultural Studies. Her research is focused on how practices of culture and public memory are used to grapple with the “difficult knowledge” of historical traumas and injustices, including their ongoing/after effects. Her projects pay special attention to memorials, museums, commemorative artworks, community-based practices of remembrance, and government sponsored memory projects. She employs interdisciplinary, collaborative methodologies that draw on the expertise of scholars, educators, artists, curators, and other cultural practitioners. She is the Principal Investigator of a long term in-depth study of public memory and the cultural afterlife of the 1985 Air India Bombings. 

Failler is also interested in phenomena at the intersection of culture, embodiment and psychical life and has published writings on anorexia and self-harm in this vein.

More recently, she has turned her attention to museums as a Co-Applicant on the Thinking through the Museum SSHRC Partnership, co-leading the Museum Queeries cluster with Drs. Michelle McGeough (ConcordiaU) and Heather Milne (UWinnipeg). Failler also currently sits on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies (CACS) and is an active member of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) 

In 2017 Failler secured a John R. Evans Leader’s Fund grant from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to create a research centre on campus at the University of Winnipeg. Additional funding provided through her CRC have helped launch the centre’s initial programs. Failler serves as the inaugural Director of CRiCS.