UPEI’s 2026 Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy to take place on September 22
Dr. Kevin Gannon, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of History at Queens University-Charlotte, will give the 2026 Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy on September 22, at 3:30 pm, in the Faculty Lounge (Room 201), SDU Main Building, UPEI.
Dr. Gannon’s lecture, titled Hope for Humans, is free and open to the public.
“We live in times where it’s hard to embrace hope; so much of what we see and hear around us is both inhuman and inhumane,” said Dr. Gannon. “Higher education seems no different; callous leaders and the consultant class, fraught cultural conflicts, dizzying changes wrought by AI tools can—if we let them—portend a pretty bleak future. But that future is not inevitable! The future that tech lords and authoritarians want does not have to be destiny. In higher education, we have the opportunity—the obligation—to not just imagine, but create models of other possible futures, hopeful futures which are just and sustainable. To be meaningfully hopeful, though, means that hope must be accompanied by a sense of agency—and the primary way we can cultivate that agency is through (re)centering the essential human-ness at the core of our work. I will explore that possibility space and suggest practical ways to create those hopeful models for and with students—humans teaching humans, humanely.”
Dr. Gannon is Director of the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence and Professor of History at Queens University in Charlotte, in North Carolina. After an over 25-year faculty career, serving as a program coordinator and department chair along the way, he has moved into faculty development full-time. Even in an administrative role, he continues to work with first-year students—a particular passion of his—by teaching sections of Queens’ new student seminar course, “the Queens Roadmap,” every fall semester.
He is the author of Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto (West Virginia University Press, 2020), and the co-editor of The Campus Crisis Toolkit: Strategy and Solidarity for the Rest of Us (SUNY Press, 2026). His writing has also appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education (where he is a regular contributor), Vox, CNN, and The Washington Post.
The Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy was established in 2023 to honour the achievements of Dr. Shannon Murray, an award-winning professor of English and a 3M National Teaching Fellow. In 2022, Dr. Murray received the Christopher Knapper Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the highest honours awarded in Canada for teaching and learning in higher education.
