Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
Research Interests
Sheila's research focus is the languages in contact, relations between linguistic minorities and majorities, and dialectometry (statistical methods applied to dialect study), with particular application to British, Finnish and Romanian dialects.
Biography
Dr. Sheila Embleton's academic background and graduate work is in both mathematics and linguistics, and her areas of scholarly interest are historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, mathematical/statistical methods in linguistics, onomastics, Peircean semiotics, and women and language; she has published in all of these areas. Dr. Embleton served as Vice-President Academic & Provost at York from July 2000 to June 2009, having previously been Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts from July 1994 to June 2000. She served as Chair of the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents from 2004-2008 and of the National Vice-Presidents Academic Council from 2006-2007. She is a Past-President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Names, the American Name Society, the Linguistics Association of Canada and the US (LACUS), and the International Quantitative Linguistics Association. She is the President of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, and of the Canadian Friends of Finland Education Foundation, as well as Executive Director of LACUS. She is a member of the Boards of the Canadian Bureau for International Education and MITACS (Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems). She is associate editor, review editor, or member of the editorial board of numerous journals and book series. She has won several awards for her academic contributions, and is a Knight First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), London, a Senior Fellow of Massey College in the University of Toronto, and an Invited Member of Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura (Finnish Literature Society).
