Roberto Abraham and Nicholas Terpstra were also granted the prestigious designation
The Henry NR Jackman Faculty of Law’s John Borrows has been named a university professor at the University of Toronto – the university’s top academic rank.
Borrows is an Indigenous law scholar known for his study on the revitalization of Indigenous Peoples’ laws and their relationship to Canadian constitutional law, Canadian Aboriginal rights law, and environmental law. He is Anishinaabe/Ojibway and part of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation.
He was appointed the first Loveland chair in Indigenous law and advocated for the provision of educational opportunities in Indigenous legal studies, including the first-ever trans-systemic joint degree program in Indigenous legal orders and Canadian common law. He contributed to the immersive land-based program on Indigenous law in his Bruce Peninsula-based community.
Borrows is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has been awarded the Molson Prize, the Killam Prize, the Governor General’s Innovation Award, and the Mundell Medal for excellence in legal writing. Canadian Lawyer ranked him among the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers of 2018.
In April of this year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named Borrows a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow in Indigenous Studies. He is set to study accountability within legal systems and communities, grounded in relational principles linking people to one another and the natural world; the research will involve engaging with Indigenous communities in Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Joining Borrows as newly appointed university professors at the University of Toronto are Roberto Abraham and Nicholas Terpstra.
Abraham is part of the David A. Dunlap department of astronomy and astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. The astrophysicist co-founded the Dragonfly Telephoto Array and is spearheading the development of Chile-based facility MOTHRA (the Modular Optical Telephoto Hyperspectral Robotic Array).
Terpstra is part of the department of history in the Faculty of Arts & Science. He is an Italian Renaissance historian whose research has touched on the intersections of politics, religion and gender. He was involved in the DECIMA mapping project.
According to the University of Toronto, university professors are typically honored for special scholarly achievements and pre-eminence in a certain field of knowledge. Appointments usually do not exceed 2 percent of tenured faculty.
