Margery Fee

Because academic jobs in English were scarce in the early 1980s, Fee decided to earn a diploma in applied linguistics at the University of Victoria in order to teach English as a second language (ESL) in Japan. While earning the diploma, she learned of the existence of the Strahy Language Unit at Queen's University.[4] The Unit was founded in 1981 to study the English language in Canada by a bequest from J. R. Strathy, a Queen's alumnus with a lifelong passion for the English language.[5] Two years later, Fee was hired as director of the Unit, replacing W. C. Lougheed.[4][6] Lougheed had recognized the need for creating a computer-based Canadian English "corpus" of texts, essentially a database of Canadian English. Fee helped obtain a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant to continue the expansion of the corpus. The resulting Strathy Corpus of Canadian English is a 50-million-word corpus of written and spoken English dated between 1970 and 2010.[7] It is freely available online.[8] Using this corpus, she coordinated with later director Janice McAlpine to publish the Guide to Canadian English Usage in 1997 (1st ed.).[9]

During this period, Fee continued her work on Canadian literature. In 1985, she published Canadian poetry in selected English-language anthologies: an index and guide. In 1992, Fee compiled a collection of essays titled Silence Made Visible: Howard O'Hagan and Tay John.[10] The book also included an interview of Howard O'Hagan, conducted by Keith Maillard in 1979, where he explained his writing process.[11] She published The Fat Lady Dances: Margaret Atwood's "Lady Oracle", a literature review of Margaret Atwood's work in 1993.[12]

Fee was hired as an associate professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1993.[13] She came to UBC with the purpose of teaching First Nations literatures.[3]

Fee served as Associate Dean of students from 1999 to 2004.[1] In 2005, Fee was awarded the Margaret Fulton Award for her contribution to student development and the University community.[3] She served as director of the Arts One Program and director of the Canadian Studies Program from 2005 to 2008.[1] The year she left her position as director, Fee was honoured as a distinguished scholar in residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies[13] and was the recipient of the Dean of Arts Award.[14]

From 2007 until 2015, Fee was an editor of Canadian Literature, a quarterly journal of criticism and review.[15] She led the team that established CanLit Guides, an open-access resource for the study of Canadian literature.[16] In 2015, Fee was selected as the Brenda and David McLean Chair In Canadian Studies at UBC.[1] That year, her book Literary Land Claims was shortlisted for the 2015 Gabrielle Roy Prize by the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures.[17] The book analyses texts produced between 1832 and the late 1970s by speakers and writers who resisted nationalist ideas about Canada's claim to land: John Richardson, Louis Riel, E. Pauline Johnson, Archibald Belaney (Grey Owl) and Harry Robinson.[18] Similarly, Fee became a co-Investigator with Daniel Heath Justice and Deanna Reder on a SSHRC-funded project called The People And The Text.[19] The project aimed to collect ignored texts and literature from Indigenous Canadians during the time of British colonization.[20]

In 2016, Fee published Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's writings on native North America, which detailed the life of the early North American Indigenous poet and fiction writer.[21] The following year, Fee was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for her research in Canadian literature and Canadian English lexicography.[22][23]