Evelyn Hamilton Chair

Evelyn Hamilton Chair in Liberal Education

Thanks to a $2-million donation from Art and Mary Jane Crooks, the Evelyn Hamilton Chair in Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge honours Art’s mother and her lifelong desire to learn.
 

Evelyn Hamilton and her husband, Hew Crooks, resided in Ontario, where Art grew up. Art and Mary Jane moved from Ontario to Lethbridge in 1979 to open the city’s first Canadian Tire Store. Since then, they have been benefactors to many organizations in the city and elsewhere.

In 2022, Dr. Miranda Leibel (she/her) was appointed as the inaugural Evelyn Hamilton Chair. She is a settler scholar, currently working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Lethbridge. her current research interrogates the relationship between bureaucracy and power in the context of settler-colonial Canada, both historically and contemporarily. In addition to completing her manuscript on the subject of public inquiries, settler benevolence, and New Public Management, she is currently working on a collaborative research project with Dr. Justin Leifso at the University of Victoria that traces the political, economic, geographic, and infrastructural relations between the history of Canadian postal services and the creation and maintenance of "Canada" as a nation-state.