Faculty & Staff

SJCS Banner Image 2019
SJCS Banner Image 2019

Full- time SJCS Faculty

Benita Bunjun (on sabbatical Sept.1 2022 – Aug.31 2023)
Associate Professor
McNally South 205
902-496-8161
benita.bunjun@smu.ca

For details on Dr. Bunjun's work, please see:
Profile page

Val Marie Johnson
Associate Professor, Department Chair
McNally South 203
902-420-5879
vjohnson@smu.ca

For details on Dr. Johnson's work, please see:
Profile page

Patrick Radebe
Assistant Professor
McNally South 202
     902-420-5793
patrick.radebe@smu.ca 

For details on Dr. Radebe's work, please see:
Profile page

Jessica Ticar
Assistant Professor
McNally South 209
jessica.ticar@smu.ca

For details on Dr. Ticar's work, please see:
Profile page

Rachel Zellars 
Associate Professor
Senior Research Fellow
McNally South 207
rachel.zellars@smu.ca

For details on Dr. Zellars's work, please see:
Profile page

Adjunct SJCS Faculty 

Yvonne Brown
yvonne.brown@smu.ca 

Dr. Yvonne Brown brings to SJCS over forty years of training, experience, and innovation at all levels of the education system. At the post-secondary level, she has engaged in extensive and ongoing research and teaching in feminism, critical multiculturalism, slavery, anti-racism, globalization, decolonization, African and diaspora literature and history, and Caribbean Studies. Yvonne has a strong commitment to mentoring students as they navigate their way through very complex university bureaucracies, mindful of the obstacles facing students with challenges of indigeneity, race, class, disabilities and language. She believes in making racism and other forms of discrimination objects of scholarly inquiry that aim to transform curricula, policies, and practices in ways that acknowledge emotions of pain, shame, rage, and fear, and look at ways we can provide spaces for healing, dialogue, and reconciliation. Dr. Brown is the author of the autoethnography Dead Woman Pickney: A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica (2010), and in the process of preparing a second edition. 

Part- time SJCS Faculty

Fallen Matthews
McNally South 220

Fallen Matthews is an Afro-L'nu demigirl graduate candidate from Dalhousie University's interdisciplinary doctorate program. Although her project is anchored by psychoanalytic film theory in Cinema and Media Studies, other disciplines which span her research interests include Africana Studies, Artificial Intelligence, English, History, Indigenous Studies, and Gender Studies. Her thesis examines African American film history and socioeconomic conditions utilizing a Deleuzian theoretical framework. Points of focus include Black Power, Blaxploitation, Civil Rights, New Black Realism, rap music, Reaganomics, Red Power, and postmodernist film. She is also a programmer for local film festivals and moderates several special interest groups.

You can find a comprehensive list of her publications and infrequent blog entries on her website: http://www.fallenkittie.com

Community Educators Collaborating with SJCS

Michelle Paul:
michelle.paul@smu.ca
Michelle Paul (Dalhousie University, Sociology/Anthropology; University of King's College, journalism) is a mother, treaty rightsholder, water protector, land defender, advocate, and activist. Her rights-based advocacy work is within Indigenous communities in solidarity with allies, and mainly around resistance to colonial interests’ infringements on Mi’kmaw sovereignty in their unceded territory. This importantly includes environmental concerns and resisting industry exploitation of Mi’kmaq lands without Mi’kmaq consent, such as in the Alton Gas Resistance.

SJCS Staff

Olivia Denman
Interim SJCS Administrator
McNally South 211
902-491-6624
sjcs@smu.ca