The John Wesley Dafoe Foundation is happy to introduce the jurors for 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!
This year, Patricia Bovey, Dale Barbour, and Greg C. Mason will be selecting a longlist, shortlist, and winner.
A ten-book longlist and five-book shortlist will be announced in the coming weeks, with the winner announced October 14th. We can’t wait to share these outstanding titles with you!
Patricia Bovey, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Director Emerita, is a Winnipeg-based art historian, arts advocate, museologist, author, and professor. She served as a member of the Senate of Canada (2016-2023) and is a former Director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Founder of St. Boniface Hospital’s Buhler Gallery. She has lectured and published extensively on western Canadian art, her most recent book being Western Voices in Canadian Art. She has received a number of publishing and community awards.
She is currently representing Manitoba on the Boards of the Confederation Centre for the Arts, the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, and the Roberta Bondar Foundation. She is a national Advocacy and Awareness committee member for Type 1 Diabetes and Ambassador for the Pan African Heritage Museum in Ghana currently under construction.
Dale Barbour grew up in Manitoba’s Interlake and worked in journalism and communications before getting into history. He has degrees from the University of Manitoba, (BA. (HON), MA) and the University of Toronto (PhD) and served as the University of Winnipeg’s H. Sanford Riley Postdoctoral Fellow in Canadian History in 2021.
Over the past seven years Dale has worked as a course instructor at the University of Winnipeg, University of Manitoba, and Brandon University teaching courses on Manitoba,Canada, and the world.
Dale has published two books: Undressed Toronto: From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850-1935 (UofM Press, 2021) and Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900-1967 (UofM Press, 2011). Currently Dale is working on a collaborative historical atlas focused on Winnipeg.
Specializing in economic policy, the basic annual income, health economics, and Indigenous economics, Greg C. Mason joined the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1974. Recently he has written on the economics of COVID, telemedicine, electronic health records, the modern annuity, and urban reserves.
Greg’s research encompasses the implementation of basic annual income (he served as an advisor to the Ontario Basic Income Pilot), health economics, and indigenous economic development.His teaching focuses on program evaluation, economic research and communication and creating viable online courseware in economics.