Margery Fee

Margery Fee (born 1948) is a professor emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia (UBC). From 2015 to 2017, Fee was the Brenda and David McLean Chair In Canadian Studies at UBC. She publishes in the fields of Canadian, postcolonial and Indigenous studies and Canadian English usage and lexicography.

Education Fee completed her PhD studies in English at the University of Toronto in 1981, with a dissertation entitled "English-Canadian literary criticism, 1890–1950: defining and establishing a national literature". After earning her PhD, Fee began to take up an interest in Indigenous peoples literature.

Career Early career Because academic jobs in English were scarce in the early 1980s, Fee decided to earn a diploma in applied linguistics at the University of Victoria in order to teach English as a second language (ESL) in Japan. While earning the diploma, she learned of the existence of the Strahy Language Unit at Queen's University. The Unit was founded in 1981 to study the English language in Canada by a bequest from J. R. Strathy, a Queen's alumnus with a lifelong passion for the English language. Two years later, Fee was hired as director of the Unit, replacing W. C. Lougheed. Lougheed had recognized the need for creating a computer-based Canadian English "corpus" of texts, essentially a database of Canadian English. Fee helped obtain a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant to continue the expansion of the corpus. The resulting Strathy Corpus of Canadian English is a 50-million-word corpus of written and spoken English dated between 1970 and 2010. It is freely available online. Using this corpus, she coordinated with later director Janice McAlpine to publish the Guide to Canadian English Usage in 1997 (1st ed.).

During this period, Fee continued her work on Canadian literature. In 1985, she published Canadian poetry in selected English-language anthologies: an index and guide. In 1992, Fee compiled a collection of essays titled Silence Made Visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John. The book also included an interview of Howard O'Hagan, conducted by Keith Maillard in 1979, where he explained his writing process. She published The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood's "Lady Oracle", a literature review of Margaret Atwood's work in 1993.

UBC Fee was hired as an associate professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1993. She came to UBC with the purpose of teaching First Nations literatures.

From 2007 until 2015, Fee was an editor of Canadian Literature, a quarterly journal of criticism and review. She led the team that established CanLit Guides, an open-access resource for the study of Canadian literature. In 2015, Fee was selected as the Brenda and David McLean Chair In Canadian Studies at UBC. The book analyses texts produced between 1832 and the late 1970s by speakers and writers who resisted nationalist ideas about Canada's claim to land: John Richardson, Louis Riel, E. Pauline Johnson, Archibald Belaney (Grey Owl) and Harry Robinson. Similarly, Fee became a co-Investigator with Daniel Heath Justice and Deanna Reder on a SSHRC-funded project called The People And The Text. The project aimed to collect ignored texts and literature from Indigenous Canadians during the time of British colonization.

In 2016, Fee published Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's writings on native North America, which detailed the life of the early North American Indigenous poet and fiction writer. The following year, Fee was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her research in Canadian literature and Canadian English lexicography.

Publications The following is a list of publications: Edited with Jean Barman. On the Cusp of Contact: Gender, Space, and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia: Essays by Jean Barman. Harbour, 2020. Polar Bear. Reaktion, 2019. Associate editor with Stefan Dollinger (chief editor). DCHP-2: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles', Second Online Edition. March 2017. www.dchp.ca/dchp2 Edited with Dory Nason. Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's writings on native North America. Broadview, 2016. Literary land claims: the "Indian land question" from Pontiac's war to Attawapiskat Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015. Written With Janice McAlpine. Guide to Canadian English usage: the essential English resource for Canadian writers & editors. Oxford UP, 1997. Second edition, 2007. New issue, 2011. The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood's "Lady Oracle". ECW Press, 1993. Silence made visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John. ECW Press, 1992. Canadian poetry in selected English-language anthologies: an index and guide (1985)