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From the archives

Dangerous Grounds

Coming soon to a democracy near you

The Collapse of Syria

The story of a nation’s unravelling, one neighbourhood at a time

Trompe Le Toil

The modern conundrum of overwork

Stephen Henighan

Stephen Henighan has three books coming out in 2018: Blue River and Red Earth (short stories); his English translation of the novel Transparent City by the Angolan writer Ondjaki; and Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala, co-edited with Candace Johnson. Henighan is head of Spanish and Hispanic studies at the University of Guelph and general editor of the Biblioasis International Translation Series.

Articles by
Stephen Henighan

Continental Shifts

The many lives of Mario Vargas Llosa March 2018
In March 2017 Mario Vargas Llosa travelled from his home in Madrid, Spain, to Arequipa, Peru, where he was born. After celebrating his eighty-first birthday in the city of his birth, Vargas Llosa returned to Madrid, then left for Chicago to give four hour-long lectures, delivered in English, without notes, on the gestation of his major…

Language Wars

Is English bound to remain the dominant global tongue? November 2015
Prior to 1990, intercultural interactions took place in a variety of languages. Diplomats might hold a meeting in the Middle East in French, a British tourist and a Polish hotel manager would negotiate the price of a room in broken German, an American working in the Philippines might resort to his high school Spanish to make himself understood by people whose native language contained many Spanish…

Goodbye to All That

The cultural causes—and fallout—of climate change December 2013
In 1984, recent university graduate Stephen Henighan went hiking in Alaska with a friend, an emerging wildlife biologist. As they experienced the state’s austere beauty together, the biologist predicted that by 2050 or so, it would probably all be over. “We would be choking on fumes, murdering each other for the last scraps of food and mouthfuls of fresh

¿Habla Usted Español?

How Castillian made it to the top of the linguistic heap October 2013
To Canadians, Spanish is both close and unfamiliar. The language is all around us, yet it is less influential here than anywhere else in the western hemisphere. As Spanish’s cultural influence booms, propelled by economic growth in Latin America and the mounting self-confidence of the 52 million-strong Hispanic minority in the United States, Spanish is in retreat as an academic discipline in Canadian…

Guerillas or Folklorists?

Two very different takes on Atlantic-Canadian writers October 2011
One of the paradoxes of Canadian culture since the intensification of globalization in the early 1990s is that the visibility of Atlantic-Canadian literature has increased as the region that produces it has become more marginalized. Economically peripheral, except as a reservoir of just-in-time labour for Alberta and Ontario, overlooked in national political campaigns and omitted from contemporary debates about multiculturalism because it does not attract…