Top academic who made university history dies
ASTOCKPORTBORN academic and author, has died suddenly at her home in Canada aged 83.
Patricia Monk, a retired professor of English at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, had lived in a Canada for more than 50 years.
Patricia lectured at Dalhousie from 1970 until her retirement in 2003 and created history by becoming the first woman to be promoted to the rank of full professor in the university’s English department which was overwhelmingly maledominated when she was hired.
She was an internationally recognised scholar in Canadian literature and science fiction, especially her works on the writers Robertson Davies and James De Mille.
She and four books published, Alien Theory: The Alien as Archetype in the Science Fiction Short Story (2006); Mud and Magic Shows: Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business (1992); The Gilded Beaver: An Introduction to the Life and
Work of James De Mille (1991); and The Smaller Infinity: Jungian Self in the Novels of Robertson Davies (1982).
Marjorie Stone, a former colleague at Dalhousie, said: “Patricia was a wellrecognised scholar in her primary field of Canadian studies.
“And of course, she was also a pioneering scholar in the field of science fiction, which used to be rather marginalised in the academic study of English. But she helped to change that.”
Patricia, a lifelong Manchester United fan, was raised in the Woodsmoor district of Stockport and was a former pupil at Stockport High School and student at Reading University. She later studied for her MA at Carleton University, Ottawa, and PhD at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario.
Patricia, who died on December 29, was the daughter of the late Bill and Kay Monk. She leaves sister Kitty Monk who lives in Auckland, New Zealand.