[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Vassanji_MG.jpg” caption=”Moyez G. Vassanji”]The Great Hall at Hamilton Place will see degrees conferred upon 616 students from the Faculty of Humanities and 56 students from the Arts & Science program today in a joint ceremony. An Honorary Doctor of Letters degree will be presented to novelist, Moyez G. Vassanji.

The 9:30 a.m. ceremony will be followed by a humanities reception in Celebration Hall (Basement of Kenneth Taylor Hall from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and an arts & science reception in Council Chambers (GH- 111) from 3 to 6:00 p.m.

Dean of Humanities, Nasrin Rahimieh says Vassanji's selection as honorary degree recipient is particularly appropriate for this Convocation. “It is most befitting that as our graduands embark on exciting new ventures, they have the opportunity to hear M. G. Vassanji speak about his trajectory across different cultures and professional endeavors,” says Rahimieh.

Dean Rahimieh and arts & science Director Peter Sutherland were pleased to share their warm congratulations with the graduating classes.

“On behalf of all of the arts & science instructors and staff, I wish to express our great sense of pride for all the achievements – academic and extracurricular – of the students who will receive their degrees on June 6. In this shared Convocation with Humanities, we are pleased that one of our students, Rob Gillezeau, will speak on behalf of all the students in his role as valedictorian,” says Sutherland. “Our graduands are about to set forth on a variety of quite diverse paths – graduate school, medical school, law school, teachers' college, journalism, volunteer service, and travel – and we wish them every success along the way.”

“The Faculty of Humanities is proud to celebrate the accomplishments of the 2006 graduands who will have completed programs as diverse as multimedia, classics, studio art, philosophy, communications studies, English, music, and women's studies. The many disciplines and forms of knowledge our students have mastered in the course of their studies at McMaster have prepared them well for a professional career or pursuing future studies,” says Dean Rahimieh. “Their education in Humanities will have raised their awareness of history, cultural diversity, and the creative and critical impulse.”

Moyez G. Vassanji, Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.)

M.G. Vassanji was born in Nairobi, Kenya and brought up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. When he was 19, Vassanji left the University of Nairobi on a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He studied nuclear physics, which he later earned a PhD in at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he came to Canada. He is the author of seven works of fiction, including three award-winning books set in East Africa, The Gunny Sack, The Book of Secrets, and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.

Vassanji's first novel, The Gunny Sack, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and established the author as an important voice in the emerging field of immigrant-minority writing. The Gunny Sack introduced readers and critics to his distinctive treatment of important cultural themes such as identity, displacement, race relations and the roles of histories both private and public.

He won the first Giller Prize, Canada's richest literary award, in 1993 for The Book of Secrets, a novel that traces the histories of people who possess the eponymous book – a British colonial minister's diary.

Vassanji is making a return visit to McMaster today: last September he met with first-year students to discuss his second Giller Prize (2003) winning book “The In-Between World of Vikram Lall”.

Vassanji edited a volume of articles and essays entitled A Meeting of Streams: South Asian Canadian Literature. He has received the Bressani Literary Prize and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. In 2005, he was inducted as a member of the Order of Canada.