Appointment of Principal of Victoria College

ANNOUNCEMENT

PRINCIPAL OF VICTORIA COLLEGE

President Paul Gooch and the Board of Regents are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Angela Esterhammer as the eleventh Principal of Victoria College as of 1 July 2012.

Angela Esterhammer graduated from Victoria College in English and Literary Studies in 1983.  That year she won the Moss Scholarship and the Governor General's Gold Medal at the University of Toronto.  Among her many honours are the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature awarded by the Government of Ontario (1990), appointment as Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario (2005) and election to the Academia Europaea (2008).

Professor Esterhammer was the founding director of the Graduate Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, where she held in succession the positions of Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Acting Dean, Faculty of Arts, and Associate Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies.  She is the founding director of the PhD program in English and American Literary Studies at the University of Zurich, where she holds the Chair of English Literature.

An internationally renowned scholar of British, German, and European Romanticism and 19th century literature and culture, she is the author or editor of thirteen books.  In the last decade she has published close to fifty articles and delivered as many invited lectures and conference papers.  She brings outstanding scholarship to this position and to the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where she will hold her academic appointment.

Professor Esterhammer has maintained her connections with Victoria and U of T, and was an external reviewer of Victoria College in 2005.  She is highly qualified to lead the College in its next phase as it continues to provide an outstanding undergraduate education and to support the scholarship of its faculty.  She will build on the transforming work of Professor David Cook, who steps down from the position he has held with such success since 2000.