Jane Rupert holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto (1997) and an MA in lettres françaises from the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral thesis, John Henry Newman on Education, explored the two ways in which the humanities teach students to think and the foundational importance of respecting the different methods proper to all disciplines. Her first book, Uneasy Relations, Reason in Literature and Science from Aristotle to Darwin and Blake (2010), examined literary rationality in contrast to empirical philosophy and science in Greek antiquity and from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. A second book, John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind (2011), contrasted the understanding of reason in the Enlightenment, in religious belief, and in the long tradition of studies in the liberal arts.
After writing booklets on a seventeenth-century French mission on Lake Ontario and on a pioneer homestead, Dr Rupert began her edition of the letters written by Dr Henry Wentworth Acland during the royal visit to British North America in 1860, an undertaking that included the history of nineteenth-century science, medicine, religion, and education (to see offsite, click here). Several excerpts from this appear on our website. A subsequent edition will contextualise Dr Acland's letters written during the royal party's unofficial visit to the United States just a few months before the Civil War.
Created 6 July 2023