Assistant Professor

Virginia McKendry is an historian and interdisciplinary scholar, specializing in the area of visual culture and communication. From 2001-2005, Dr. McKendry served as a core faculty member at Wilfrid Laurier University and its Laurier Brantford campus. She brings to her new role several years of teaching experience, primarily in the fields of Communication and Cultural Studies. Her work outside of the academy includes applied communications roles in website development, public relations and, for the past five years, community development work. Her academic research has focused primarily on how images transmit culture, in order to discover and document the foundational assumptions and values that structure Western cultures. She is an advocate for educating professional communicators to be able to provide their clients, employers and communities with the critical thinking and communication tools needed for cultural self-awareness, enabling people to mutually participate in the design of positive futures and solutions to thorny problems.

Dr. McKendry holds a Bachelor of General Studies (’91), an M.A. in Women’s Studies from Simon Fraser University (‘93), and a Ph.D. in History from York University (’98). Three publications stemming from her Master’s thesis focus on how images of the royal family in Britain’s earliest illustrated magazines aimed at a mass audience had the effect of normalizing unequal class relations, gender relations and race relations.  Her doctoral dissertation focused on a century of political cartoons and how these both reflected and contributed to a cultural process she has characterized as the ‘feminization’ of the British monarchy, during the period 1760-1860. Dr. McKendry expects to publish this research in the near future. In the meantime, she is embarking on a new line of research that looks at the potential for using performance and images as tools for surfacing worldviews and enabling more positive forms of intercultural communication.

Selected Publications:

“Mother Knows Best: The Ironic Use of Visual Satire in Regency Political Culture.” Envisioning: Studies in Image and Idiom (SUNY Binghamton: Binghamton, 2002).

 “The Queen, the Press and the Rhetoric of Familial Love.” Nineteenth Century Prose, vol. XXIV, no.1, Spring 1997.

“The Illustrated London News and the Invention of Tradition.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. XXVIII, no.1, Spring 1994.

Contact Information:
School of Communication & Culture
2005 Sooke Road
Victoria, BC V9B 5Y2
Ph. (250) 391-2600 ext. 4846
Fx. (250) 391-2694
E-mail: virginia.mckendry@royalroads.ca