Dr. Sheila Embleton is the President of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. Prior to this appointment, she was the Vice-President Academic of York University in Toronto, from 2000 to 2009. Previously, she served as Associate Dean of York’s Faculty of Arts. She is a currently a Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts.
Born in Ottawa, Dr. Embleton graduated from Lisgar Collegiate Institute, then attended the University of Toronto, where she earned her BSc (Mathematics & Linguistics, 1975), MSc (Mathematics & Statistics, 1976), and PhD (Linguistics, 1981). Her areas of scholarly interest are historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, mathematical/statistical methods in linguistics, onomastica, Peircean semiotics, and women and language. She has published in all of these areas. Her areas of language specialization include English, German, Germanic, French, Romance, Slavic, and Finno-Ugric. Her current research is mostly on dialectometry (statistical methods applied to dialect study), with particular application to British, Finnish and Romanian dialects.
In her capacity as Vice-President Academic, Dr. Embleton served as Chair of the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents (OCAV) from 2004-2008. She has been on OCAV’s Executive since 2001, chairs OCAV’s standing committee on international issues, and represents OCAV on several Council of Ontario Universities committees and task forces, as well as on the Board of the Ontario Universities Application Centre. In 2006-2007, she was Chair of NATVAC, the National Vice-Presidents Academic Council.
