François-Marc Gagnon awarded Canada Prize in the Humanities

Art History researcher and and Distinguished Research Fellow of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, François-Marc Gagnon, has won the Canada Prize in the Humanities for his book "The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas".

The prize, awarded by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, marks the second major award Gagnon has won for this particular book. In June 2012, he was honoured by the Historical Society of Canada with the Sir John A. Macdonald prize, a Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research.

According to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences jury, book editor Gagnon, along with translators Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet, created a stunning bilingual edition of two remarkable and little-known manuscripts: the Codex Canadensis, an illustrated text about the flora, fauna and peoples of the New World, and the Histoire naturelle des Indes Occidentales by Louis Nicolas, one-time Jesuit missionary to New France. The jury also called the book "a gift to the peoples of Canada and the world of scholarship beyond."

Celebrating the best Canadian scholarly books - not simply within a single academic discipline, but across all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences - four $2,500 Canada Prizes are awarded annually to books that make an exceptional contribution to scholarship, are engagingly written, and enrich the social, cultural and intellectual life of Canada. The 2013 award ceremony was held in in Ottawa on March 23.

In 1978, Gagnon received the Governor General's Award for his critical biography of Paul-Émile Borduas and in 1999 he was was awarded the Order of Canada. His books include La Conversion par l'image (1975), Paul-Émile Borduas: Ecrits/Writings 1942-1958 (1978), Paul-Émile Borduas (1988), and Chronique du mouvement automatiste québécois 1941-1954 (1998). He teaches two brilliantly conceived e-Concordia courses: "Introduction to Canadian Art" and "From Realism to Abstraction in Canadian Art."