An accomplished researcher, lecturer and author, Dr. Sheila McManus is one of the most respected educators from within the Faculty of Arts and Science and the University of Lethbridge’s Department of History.

Dr. Sheila McManus says peer mentoring will be a major focus of her work as a Board of Governors Teaching Chair over the next two years.

The University of Lethbridge is proud to appoint McManus to a two-year term as a Board of Governors Teaching Chair, commencing July 1, 2014.

The concrete joys of teaching help balance McManus's research interests. McManus describes her research specialty as “the history of invisible lines” because her primary interests include the history of the borderlands of the North American West.  Her current book project is Both Sides Now: Writing the Borderlands of the American West (under contract to Texas A&M Press). Her earlier work includes the 2005 monograph, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands; the 2008 anthology One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests, co-edited with Elizabeth Jameson; and her 2011 textbook Choices and Chances: A History of Women in the U.S. West.

McManus grew up in Calgary and first studied at the post-secondary level at the University of Calgary, completing her bachelor’s degree in 1992. After finishing her master’s degree at the University of Victoria in 1994 and her PhD at York University in 2001, McManus was appointed the first Post-Doctoral Associate at the Howard Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University.

Her teaching career began in 2002 when she taught American and Canadian history as an assistant professor at the University of Winnipeg. She joined the University of Lethbridge in 2003.

The Board of Governors Teaching Chair is a two-year position (with two-course relief per year) that requires candidates to submit a teaching-related proposal for the duration of their term. The Chairs then serve on the Teaching Centre’s Advisory Council and work with council on its projects throughout the two-year term.

“I’m delighted to renew my connection to the Teaching Centre, after being a Teaching Fellow with the centre in 2012,” says McManus.

As a Teaching Fellow, she helped recruit half a dozen colleagues from a variety of University departments to create the (He)art of Teaching drop-in peer mentoring program. Peer mentoring is going to be a key theme of her work as BOG chair.