Jamaican-Canadian named to endowed chair at University of Illinois

TORONTO:

A Jamaican-Canadian academic at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has been selected as the first Terrance & Karyn Holm Endowed Professor in Nursing — a position created for a faculty member who represents excellence in nursing history research.

Dr Karen Flynn, associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Department of African-American Studies Program, will also serve as the director of the Midwest Nursing History Research Centre, which is housed at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Nursing, starting in 2024.

“I am grateful and excited, recognising that endowed chairs are few and far between and particularly for those of us who are humanities-based, and so it’s truly an honour as well to be selected,” said Flynn in thanking the donors and those who recognised her work and achievements.

The Terrance & Karyn Holm Endowed Professorship was made possible by a $1-million gift from Karyn Holm, who spent 12 years on faculty at UIC Nursing, in memory of her late husband, Terrance. It also created the Karyn Holm Unrestricted Research Centre Program Fund to support the college’s Midwest Nursing History Research Centre.

“Dr Flynn knows that nurses universally continue to care for individuals, families and communities in health and in illness, in peace and in war. It is my hope that giving voice to nursing’s accomplishments ensures that its rightful place in the history of healthcare is documented,” said Karyn Holm.

Dr Flynn’s vision is to make the Midwest Nursing History Research Centre global and to connect with communities. Some of that work is already being done by herself and UIC Nursing associate professor Gwyneth Franck on the Mapping Care project, which features a travelling exhibit and website on the contribution of black nurses in Chicago.

“The UIC Nursing School is really situated to bring nurses from elsewhere. I know that they recently had some nurses from Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean,” said Flynn, whose interest is to write the history of Caribbean nurses. She said it has been very difficult trying to connect with, especially elder nurses, to get their stories documented before they die.

“We take so much of our history for granted. I think the last book about nursing history in the Caribbean was Jocelyn Hezekiah’s book. I don’t know that people are actually writing about the history. We’ve got a lot of elderly nurses in the Caribbean whose stories need to be told.

“My hope is that, with this endowed chair and being the director of the research centre, that I’m able to build that history of people who have not been at the centre of nursing history and that we recognise those folks,” said Flynn.

SCHOLARSHIP

She said her career journey included failing the Common Entrance Examination while a student in Jamaica, and “a lot of times not been made to forget it”. She was also a student at Papine Secondary, which at the time had a bad reputation.

Still, Dr Flynn said she had been groomed for excellence from basic school and thanked her teachers Ms Rose and Mrs Joan Newell (nee Richards), and all the persons who contributed to her being in this moment of achievement.

She received her professional degree/doctorate in women’s studies from York University, Toronto, Ontario, in 2003. Her research interests include migration and travel, Black Canada, health, popular culture, feminist, diasporic and post-colonial studies.

Dr Flynn’s book Moving Beyond Borders: Black Canadian and Caribbean women in the African Canadian Diaspora, published by the University of Toronto, won the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association of the History of Nursing. She is currently working on a second book project that maps the travel itineraries of young black English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers across borders.

Flynn was awarded the Unit for Criticism Senior Fellowship 2020-2022, and was named as the Aaron and Laurel Clark Professorial Scholar, 2020-2023. In 2019, she was awarded the Hilda Neatby Prize in Canadian Women’s and Gender History, awarded by the Canadian Committee in Women’s History of the Canadian Historical Association and the AAHN Mary Adelaide Nutting Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing in a Manuscript or Article, for the article ‘Hotel Refuses Negro Nurse: Gloria Clarke Baylis and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel’ published in the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History. She is currently a Public Voices fellow with The OpEd Project.

Dr Flynn was recently a dean’s fellow for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), a programme geared towards strengthening and expanding the cadre of leaders in the college. In 2015, Dr Flynn was selected as the Conrad Humanities Fellow for LAS, for excellence in scholarship.