Professors Emeritus

Professors Emeritus

Peter Daly
Emeritus professor
German studies

Peter Daly arrived at McGill in 1978 to chair the Department of German Studies, a job he held for 22 years. An influential scholar in the interdisciplinary field of emblem studies, Daly's work combines literature, art, art history, history and architecture. An early proponent of using technology for research purposes, Daly's bibliographic database and his Index Emblematicus have been used by scholars around the world. He has earned Alexander von Humbold and Guggenheim fellowships and was awarded the Konrad Adenauer Research Award. Daly has written or edited 30 books and 73 articles and essays and continues to be productive. He is currently preparing a book on Images as Communications, the subject of a recent intensive seminar course he developed for first-year students. As part of that project, he is developing a web site, which will feature an archive of 500 scanned images.

John Fossey
Emeritus professor
Art history

A specialist in Greek archaeology, epigraphy and topography, John Fossey has taught at McGill for 32 years. He created, and for 25 years supervised, three classical archaeology programs which were unique in Canada. He was the first Canadian archaeologist to work on the Greek diaspora in the Black Sea, focusing his efforts in Bulgaria and Georgia. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Fossey has written nine books, including The History of the Greek Diaspora: From Antiquity to Modern Times, and about 100 scholarly articles. He has been active in a wide number of organizations and this involvement includes stints as president of the Canadian Society for Archaeology Abroad and president of the Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens.

Richard Hamilton
Emeritus professor
Pediatrics

The former chair of the Department of Pediatrics and the former physician-in-chief of the Montreal Children's Hospital, Richard Hamilton is a gastroenterologist with expertise in pediatric nutrition and the causes of diarrhea in children. He has published dozens of research papers and contributed to several medical textbooks. He has been the co-editor for Nelson's Textbook of Pediatrics, the standard work in its field. Hamilton chaired a pediatric task force in Ontario that examined the coordination and delivery of specialized surgery, transplantation and other services to young patients. He has received the Nutrition Award of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Schwachmna Award from the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology.

Kresimir Krnjevic
Emeritus professor
Physiology

Kresimir Krnjevic's research revealed that neural chemicals glutamate and gamma-amniobutyric acid (GABA) play important roles in determining how information travels through the brain. His work also revealed that the amount of calcium present in nerve cells has an important influence on how active a nerve cell will be and that too much calcium leads to cell death. In 1981, the publication Current Contents called Krnjevic one of the 1,000 most cited contemporary scientists and named three of his papers "citation classics." He has been a chief editor of the Canadian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, has published over 200 scientific articles and about 100 book chapters. He served as the chair of his department from 1978 to 1987 and was the director of the Anesthesia Research Unit from 1964, when he arrived at McGill, to 1999.

Arak Mathai
Emeritus professor
Mathematics and statistics

Professor Arak Mathai joined McGill in 1964. Early in his career, he discovered that techniques involving hypergeometric functions could be applied to the derivation of certain statistical distributions, which otherwise remained intractable. Today, he is recognized as one of the world's top authorities on statistical distribution theory and has been a leading force in applying its techniques to problems in astrophysics. A fellow of both the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the National Academy of Sciences, Mathai was the founding editor of The Canadian Journal of Statistics from 1972 to 1977. He has published over 200 papers, 13 research monographs and two textbooks for undergraduates.

Michael Perceval Maxwell
Emeritus professor
History

An internationally recognized expert on Irish and British history in the 17th century, Michael Maxwell has taught in the Department of History since 1963. Maxwell chaired his department from 1972 to 1975 and served twice as the dean of arts, using his position to encourage professors in the faculty to increase their research performance. Maxwell's books include The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the winner of the 1995 James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Irish History and Social Science. Maxwell is currently working on a biography of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond (1610 -88), a dominant figure in 17th century Irish life.

Beverley Murphy
Emeritus professor
Obstetrics and gynecology

A productive and widely respected clinician-scientist, Beverly Murphy is best known for developing the first practical test for the measurement of the thyroid hormone thyroxine. Her early work on the stress hormone cortisol continues to be cited decades later. Her paper on measuring thyroid hormone was one of the 100 most cited papers in 1980 and she was one of only 27 women listed among the 1,000 most cited contemporary scientists a year later. She first taught at McGill in 1964 and served for 20 years as senior obstetrician and gynecologist at the Montreal General Hospital, where she directed the Reproductive Physiology Unit from 1972 to 1994. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a winner of the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression's Distinguished Investigator Award and was the first Canadian woman named a fellow of the American Society of Clinical Investigation.

Dennis Osmond
Emeritus professor
Anatomy and cell biology

Dr Dennis Osmond joined McGill as an associate professor of anatomy in 1965. He served as the chair of his department from 1985 to 1995. The onetime president of the Canadian Association of Anatomists, he created a course, "Anatomy for Surgeons," that provided some much-needed grounding in anatomy for students contemplating careers in surgery or radiology. A respected teacher, Osmond was named to the Faculty of Medicine's Honour List for Educational Excellence in 2000. His seminal work as a researcher established the central role of the bone marrow in the immune system as a primary site of B lymphocyte production and quality control, an important contribution to our understanding of the normal immune defences of the body. He has earned the J.C.B. Grant Award of the Canadian Association of Anatomists and the Bernard Cinader Award of the Canadian Society for Immunology.

Michel Paradis
Emeritus professor
Linguistics

Professor Michel Paradis has been associated with McGill for more than 35 years since first arriving as a graduate student. In 1975, McGill named Paradis to the newly created position of coordinator of the teaching of French at the University. He chaired the Department of Linguistics from 1992 to this year. His contributions to the neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism have earned him the respect of scholars from around the world. He is especially known for his major insights into the patterns of recovery in bilingual aphasia, the representation of language in the brain of a bilingual person and the involvement of procedural/declarative memory in the acquisition, representation and use of language. Paradis is the author of over 70 articles and chapters and 11 books, including The Bilingual Aphasia Test, now available in more than 65 languages.

Albert Schachter
Emeritus professor
History

Albert Schachter has been teaching at McGill since 1959. A two-time chair of the Department of Classics (now a part of the Department of History), Schachter chaired the curriculum committee for the Faculty of Arts between 1984 and 1991. He has written six books, co-written one and was the joint editor of two more. His most significant contribution as a scholar revolves around his ongoing and multi-volume study of the Cults of Boiotia. His exploration of religion in Boiotia pioneered a now more common regional approach to the study of ancient Greece.

George Szanto
Emeritus professor
Communications

A member of McGill's professorial ranks since 1974, George Szanto is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He established McGill's program in comparative literature and has produced five books of criticism and analysis, including the influential Narrative Consciousness and Theatre and Propaganda. He is also a successful fiction writer and playwright. Three of his plays have been performed on CBC Radio, while his short story collection, Friends & Marriages, won the Hugh MacLennan Award for best English fiction in Quebec. From 1983 to 1985, Szanto served as the director of the Graduate Program in Communications. Szanto has been an active presence in several writing and cultural organizations, serving as Quebec representative for the Writers' Union of Canada and chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International (Canada).

John Taylor
Emeritus professor
Mathematics and statistics

John Taylor's McGill career began in 1963 when he joined the University as an assistant professor. His theoretical work, particularly on the subject of Martin boundary, is held in high regard. His reputation has earned invitations to attend conferences and symposiums around the world. While the study of Martin compactification was the focus of his research work, he made significant contributions in other areas of analysis and probability. He published over 40 refereed papers, a research monograph and a textbook for the graduate level.

Hershey Warshawsky
Emeritus professor
Anatomy and cell biology

Hershey Warshawsky began teaching in 1960 as a demonstrator for the Department of Anatomy. A world authority on calcified tissue and tooth enamel, Warshawsky's efforts have earned him an honorary fellowship from the Royal College of Dentists of Canada. He has served his fellow faculty and the University community in a variety of roles, including president of the McGill Association of University Teachers, a member of the search committee for a dean of dentistry, a member of the Board of Governors and chair of the Senate Committee on Student Grievances. A highly regarded teacher, Warshawsky is the only professor to have won the top teaching prizes for both the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Science. He played an important role in the development of the Faculty of Medicine's current curriculum.

Michael Anthony (Tony) Whitehead
Emeritus professor
Chemistry

Tony Whitehead joined the Department of Chemistry in 1962 as an assistant professor. He has published well over 200 peer-reviewed articles and his laboratory has produced 26 doctoral theses. He has attracted continuous funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council for 40 years and has served McGill in a variety of ways, including the role of University marshal and Molson Hall men's director. He has been instrumental in keeping McGill's Sigma Xi Chapter one of the country's most active. In his research, Whitehead has applied quantum field theory to molecular systems and developed aspects of density functional theory. He was recently a Visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.