In Memoriam: Gabriele Helms (1966 -- 2004)

In Gabriele Helms, dedicated teacher and scholar, both the English Department at UBC and the ACCUTE community have lost a fine colleague and friend. Her sudden illness and death have received national attention for two particular reasons. After her first experience of cancer in 2002, Gabi had become an advocate for cancer awareness, especially the cancer of young women; she had been a key organizer of the national conference held at UBC in May 2004, "The Young and the Breastless: A Networking Event for Young Women with Breast Cancer," which had been a remarkable success. Second, she died two days after the birth by Caesarian section of the baby she had so very much wanted; Hana Gabriele was born at a mere twenty-six weeks-and seems to be doing very well. Whereas Gabi would neither have sought nor expected the media attention her death received, she would have been sensitive to the ways in which such dramatic life issues become cultural narratives. However, in the academic community we also remember the teacher, the scholar, the colleague, and friend. Gabi came to Canada from the University of Cologne in 1991 on a Canadian Government Scholarship. She completed her doctorate under the supervision of Sherrill Grace in 1996, a SSHRC postdoctorate with Shirley Neuman in 2000, and another with Valerie Raoul's Peter Wall project on "Narratives of Disease, Disability, and Trauma" in 2001. She had a brief appointment at Simon Fraser (interrupted by her first experience of cancer) and was then hired as an Assistant Professor at UBC in 2003. Gabi's academic career was all-too brief but it was richly productive. The temptation when describing the academic profile of a young colleague may be to focus on her monograph. Gabi's impressive work, Challenging Canada: Dialogism and Narrative Techniques in Canadian Novels, was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2003 and identifies her central concerns with the nature, mutations, and value of literary genres in the culture in which they are produced-a fertile starting place for her more recent work, specifically in narratives of disability, literature of the two world wars, theatre and autobiography, Reality Television, and the representation of food in Canadian literature. Gabi's earliest publications made important contributions to auto/biography studies (she liked the slash, which identified the dialogic nature of writing about the self and about another). In 2000, she co-hosted the second International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) conference at UBC on "Autobiography and Changing Identities" and, with Susanna Egan, co-edited a special issue of biography and a special issue of Canadian Literature, both devoted to autobiography. She leaves in press an article for an MLA publication on the teaching of autobiography. In 2004, she helped co-organise a very successful Peter Wall Workshop on "Theatre and Auto/Biography" with Sherrill Grace. Gabi's writing, her numerous conference presentations, and her extensive scholarly collaborations all speak to her passionate commitment to intellectual exchange, to interdisciplinary research, to the processes of discovery, and to the very personal nature of academic inquiry, which, for her, involved close connections with people around the world and at all levels of the academic enterprise. Students write and speak of Gabi with deep affection and respect. Colleagues from Australia and China, the United States, and Europe, have responded both to her work and, more recently, to her illness and death with a sense of deeply personal connection. It is unusual, in my experience, for so young a scholar to have made scholarly contributions as varied and rich as these, or to have given such a wide range of colleagues a sense of the magnificent potential of intellectual collaborations.. Gabi is survived by her daughter, Hana, her partner, Bob Shore, her parents Karl-Heinz and Marlies Helms and her brother Michael Helms in Germany. The English Department at UBC will be raising funds for an award in Gabi's name.