Meet Vice-Dean Lynda Jessup

The Faculty of Arts and Science is pleased to introduce you to Vice-Dean Lynda Jessup, who was appointed to her current position on July 1, 2021. We would like to share some of her achievements and accomplishments on the path to her appointment as Vice-Dean.

In her role as Vice-Dean, Dr. Jessup will provide valuable leadership for the faculty relations portfolio as well as for the implementation of many of the priorities and initiatives contained in the Faculty’s Strategic Plan, many of which are related to EDII.

Dr. Jessup brings a wealth of experience to her role as Vice-Dean, having served as an Associate Dean in FAS since 2014. She was appointed in 2014 as the Associate Dean responsible for Graduate Studies, and then assumed the additional role of Associate Dean for Research at the beginning of 2015, and managed both portfolios until 2017. She then took on the role of Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Global Engagement, followed by the Associate Deanship of Strategic Initiatives, the position which she held up until her appointment as Vice-Dean

“We are extremely fortunate to have Dr. Jessup in this role,” says Dean Barbara Crow. “Her experience extends from leadership in research and teaching to administration at both the Faculty and University levels, and she has served as a trusted mentor to many by sharing her expertise, knowledge, and skills.” 

In addition to her appointment as Vice-Dean, Dr. Jessup is a member of Department of Art History and Art Conservation and is the founding director of the Cultural Studies Program.

Active in both research and teaching, she is a former Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar and holds both the Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching, awarded annually to one Queen’s University professor who shows outstanding knowledge, teaching ability, and accessibility to students, and the Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision which recognizes supervisors who demonstrate outstanding excellence in advising and mentoring graduate students through their training. Dr. Jessup has supervised 74 PhD and Master’s students in Art History and Cultural Studies and two of her PhD students have been awarded the Queen’s University Gold Medal (Carla Taunton, 2011; Sarah Smith, 2013).

Dr. Jessup is also director of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI), a transdisciplinary partnership that seeks to establish cultural diplomacy as a critical practice. This research focusses on bringing academics and practitioners of diplomacy into conversation with practitioners and academics on the cultural side–that is, on bringing critical cultural studies into disciplinary debates from which it has been excluded to date.  She is co-author of the group’s first research summit report, Cultural Diplomacy as Critical Practice, which was released this year as an open access publication available in English-, Spanish- and French-language editions.

Dr Jessup’s research focuses on the representation and circulation of Canadian and Indigenous visual and material culture in exhibitions and in museum collections, an interest that has taken shape most recently in research on the use of exhibitions in cultural diplomacy. Active in collaborative research and public scholarship, her projects range from On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery (2002) and  Around and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture (2008) to Negotiations in Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2014).  

Dr. Jessup takes over the role of Vice-Dean from Dr. Gordon Smith who left the position on June 30, 2021 and is currently on sabbatical.

Learn more about Dr. Jessup and her work within the Faculty of Arts and Science.