Alumni
There are over 200 alumni of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities
Including annual fellows, postdoctoral fellows, graduate fellows, undergraduate fellows and visiting scholars. Many of our past fellows have remained at the University of Calgary, while others are professors at other institutions, as well as politicians, novelists, poets, artists and curators.
Annual Fellows Alumni 2013-22
2022-23 CIH Resident Fellows
The Calgary Institute for the Humanities is proud to announce the recipients of our 2022-23 Resident Fellowships and Graduate Student Fellowship. These awards recognize the excellence of the recipients' research projects and their scholarly accomplishments. We are grateful to our community of donors and to the Faculty of Arts for making these awards possible and allowing our scholars the time to focus on their research.
Anthony Camara
CIH Resident Fellow
Associate Professor
Department of English
Neural Netfics: Science Fiction Stories for You and Other Machine Learners
Today, machine learning (ML) is everywhere. Take for instance facial recognition algorithms; self-driving cars; virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri; and Aibo the robot dog. Given this technology’s ubiquity, it is unsurprising that machine learners are also found in contemporary science fiction (SF). In this project, I theorize what I am calling “Neural Netfics”: SF narratives that explore the possibilities of neural computing ML, written by authors such as Ted Chiang, Catherynne Valente, Annalee Newitz, and Peter Watts. Informed by Alan Turing’s pioneering work in neural computing, this study argues that neural networks furnish SF with speculative sites for the imagining of diverse modes of machinic cognition and sensation which traverse a wide spectrum of virtual posthuman possibilities. Neural Netfics speculate on the advent of software objects that are bona-fide lifeforms in themselves that entail ethical consideration and that inaugurate new possibilities for living intimately and ecologically with humans.
Matthew Croombs
CIH Resident Fellow
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication, Media and Film
The Colonizer Who Refuses: René Vautier and the Horizons of Solidarity
In the 1950s and 1960s, René Vautier was the only French filmmaker known to have documented the social and economic vicissitudes of revolutionary Algerian society. Over the course of the Algerian War, he established the Front de Libération National’s film unit, trained key Algerian filmmakers, recorded the first-ever combat documentary, L’Algérie en flammes (1957), and collaborated with Frantz Fanon on a film about the war’s traumatic impact on Algerian children, J’ai huit ans (1962). Following independence, Vautier aided in founding Algeria’s film industry, and administered two ciné-vans across hundreds of locations to project pedagogical films for the nation’s peasantry. Yet despite his crucial importance as a film artist and educator, Vautier’s work has almost vanished from orthodox Anglophone film scholarship. This research project will examine Vautier’s filmography in its broader institutional and biographical contexts.
I will explore how Vautier’s alliance with the FLN remained a precarious one, marked by collisions of ideological orientation and communicative double binds. Caught between the application of a set of values borrowed from the resistance and a colonial situation that required new ways of knowing, Vautier confronted the horizons of solidarity.
Rachel Friedman
McCready Emerging Fellow
Instructor, Arabic Language and Muslim Cultures
School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
The Clear Arabic Qur’ān:Al-Bāqillānī’s Islamic Theory of Language
Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī (d. 1013 CE) was one of classical Islam’s leading scholars; his thought played a key role in the formation of Islamic thought. While scholarship has addressed his contributions to individual disciplines, the overarching themes that characterize his work have gone unexplored. As this project demonstrates, the most prominent idea that runs through al-Bāqillānī’s oeuvre is a concern with establishing the status of the Qurʾān as clear and comprehensible to its human audience. This concern stems from the recognition that establishing the stable accessibility of Qurʾānic meaning was of great importance for a tradition in which the Qurʾān is a central source of authority. By establishing that the Qurʾān’s meanings are accessible to its human audience in methodologically rigorous ways, al-Bāqillānī places the institution of Islamic thought on a firmer theoretical foundation. This project contributes to interdisciplinary understandings of Arabo-Islamic thought and its approaches to language and communication.
Carolyn Muessig
Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow
Professor and Chair of Christian Thought
Department of Classics and Religion
Breaking the Glass Pulpit: Women Preachers in an Age of Silence
Medieval scholasticism defined preaching as a sacerdotal/male office. But did this mean medieval and early modern women in western Europe never preached nor gave sermons? My research establishes that women did preach in various ways. It shows that nuns and laywomen (e.g., Umiltà of Faenza (d. 1310); Chiara of Rimini (d. 1324); Juana de La Cruz d. 1534; Stefana Quinzani (d. 1530) gave sermons in convents and publicly in churches and secular courts. My study argues that medieval sermons were more nuanced than contemporary scholarship recognizes; in so doing, this project illuminates the misunderstood context of female preaching. It re-evaluates pre-modern attitudes toward learning, gender and authority, demonstrating that women as preachers played a pivotal role in medieval education and the devotional life of men and women in premodern Europe.
Annual Fellows 2021-22
Shelley M. Alexander, PhD
Professor, Department of Geography
Applied Ethics Fellow 2021-22
Research Activities
Lessons from Coyote: Decolonization, Jurisprudence and the Geo-ethics of Marginalized Populations
Burdened by the colonial label of ‘pest’, coyotes can experience legally sanctioned, often unrestrained, persecution everywhere in Canada. Yet, evidence shows the species presents minimal risk to people, is ecologically important, and has social systems analogous to those of humans. As such, coyotes are my entry point to critically explore the marginalization of populations, engendered by the intersection of animal ethics, jurisprudence, and colonial worldviews. My aim is to expose the mechanisms and relationships that reinforce speciesism and oppression, and to offer insights and recommendations to de-colonize wildlife conservation and everyday practice towards marginalized non-human and human animals alike. Applied outcomes include characterization of an understudied ethical challenge, support for legal reform, and guidelines that can empower human communities to make ethical and ecologically sustainable choices that embody justness for for non-human animals.
Eleonora Buonocore, PhD
Instructor, School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures
CIH Annual Fellow 2021-22
Research Activities
Dante’s Memory: From Fixity to Fluidity
Memory played a key role in the Middle Ages: it was ubiquitous in medieval education, from rhetoric to philosophy and even theology. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a masterpiece of medieval culture, yet, before my research, there was no comprehensive study of Dante’s concept of memory. I argue that memory is one of the underlying structuring principles of the Comedy. Dante begins with a rhetorical memory trap, rooted in the fixity of the art of memory, that is a punishment in Inferno. In Purgatorio memory becomes a force for good, linked to prayer, which reduces penance. In Eden, at the rivers Lethe and Eunoè, signifying oblivion and good memory, there is a paradigm shift: from memory to forgetfulness. This oblivious memory, fluid and altruistic, informed by theology, is the only memory left in Paradiso. My book shows the Divine Comedy’s importance within the studies of memory in the European Middle Ages.
Ryan Pierson, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Media, and Film
Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow 2021-22
Research Activities
Pragmatic Visions: Vachel Lindsay’s “Democratic” Spectatorship and Early Cinema
In 1915, as cinema was coalescing into a major industry, American poet Vachel Lindsay wrote the first book of film theory, arguing for film as a tool of aesthetic enlightenment and political engagement. Pragmatic Visions traces Lindsay’s little-understood theory of how cinema engages viewers. Lindsay argued that film’s sensuous power could offer spectators “visions,” in something like a religious sense, of society’s potential future. But the public nature of film exhibition meant that, unlike private religious visions, cinema’s visions could be debated democratically. This project also unearths the cultural context around Lindsay’s ideas. By locating Lindsay’s encounters with print culture, Progressivism, and primitivism, this project reveals disturbing tensions between the ideal and practice of democracy in turn-of-the-century America—tensions that still exist today.
Annie Rudd, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Media and Film
Wayne O. McCready Fellow 2021-22
Research Activities
Unbidden Exposures: Histories of Candid Photography
Unbidden Exposures will offer the first full-length study of the history of candid photography, focusing on the period between the 1890s and the 1960s. Defining candid photography as a genre in which the depiction of unsuspecting subjects is assigned special revelatory capacities, Unbidden Exposures historicizes the idea that an unposed image is an optimally “natural” or “truthful” image. Topics discussed include the “art of not posing” in late-19th-century commercial portrait studios; the shifting meanings of candid photographs in the news, and the strategic deployment of “behind-the-scenes” aesthetics by political figures; the establishment of the candid camera as a mass-culture cliché, and the artistic appropriation of this trope; and midcentury female photographers’ contestations of candid photography’s truth claims. Through these case studies, this book illuminates the development of a pervasive yet largely unquestioned contention: the idea that the camera can best reveal its subjects when it is itself concealed.
Frank W. Stahnisch, PhD
Professor, Department of History
AMF/Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine and Health Care, Department of Community Health Sciences
CIH Annual Fellow 2021-22
Research Activities
Great Minds in Despair – The Forced-Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989
In the history of science scholarship, the ‘Brain Gain Thesis’ is often taken as an unquestioned given in studies of the forced migration of physicians and medical researchers following the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany after 1933. Research literature on the receiving countries has primarily tended to take the intellectual, academic, and institutional dimensions of the forced migration wave into account, while the individual fate and adaptation problems of many émigré psychiatrists and neurologists are still considerably under-investigated. In this project, I thus want to look at the fate of a group of émigré physicians and researchers, who could be classified as early “neuroscientists” and who immigrated to Canada and the US either transitionally or for good. The thesis put forward here is that the process of forced migration most often constituted an end or at least a drastic change to the careers of this group of medical professionals.
Karen Bourrier
Annual Fellow 2020-21
Research Activities
Mapping Victorian Women’s
Literary Sociability
How was it possible to make it as a woman writer in Victorian London? What role did social networks—including who you knew and who you lived near—play in literary production? Mapping Victorian Women’s Literary Sociability uses digital mapping methodologies pioneered in geography to answer the literary question of how social networks could sustain the careers of Victorian women writers by geolocating (pinning down latitude and longitude) their addresses in four London neighbourhoods alongside the addresses of other writers, illustrators, editors and publishers. In Victorian London, women were not always welcome in the spaces of the club or the publisher’s dinner, but they did have opportunities to network in each other’s homes and at literary soirees. This project examines the residences of writers, artists, editors and publishers, in four London neighbourhoods to examine how propinquity—proximity leading to frequent interaction—facilitated careers and collaboration in Victorian England.
William Bridel
Annual Fellow 2020-21
Research Activities
Exploring the Meaning of Sport and Physical Activity in the Lives of Queer Calgarians: A Socio-Historical Inquiry
From invisibility to outright hostility, sport and physical activity have historically excluded gender and sexually diverse persons in varying ways. At the same time, certain mainstream sports (e.g., softball), gyms, and categorical sport (i.e., organizations and teams created by and for queer persons) have provided safe spaces to be active and to form community—often during times of significant persecution in the broader social context. Following from the Calgary Gay History Project (Allen, 2018) oral histories will be gathered from 10 to 15 queer Calgarians in order to explore the meaning of sport and physical activity in their lives during the second half of the last century. The primary interest is in investigating the relationship between these social spaces and both individual subjectivity and community building. Did sport and physical activity spaces provide opportunities for various forms of resistance in a conservative era, fueled by fear and hatred of difference?
Victoria Fast
Annual Fellow 2020-21
Research Activities
Digital Justice and Injustice in the Smart City
Cities across the world are increasingly turning to information and communication technologies—to smart cities—with the hopes that doing so will create more livable, resilient places. However, these hopes to date have produced little substantive evidence of improved living conditions. Indeed, a growing chorus of critical voices are questioning the social justness in the smart city. These debates are emerging alongside a burgeoning research agenda called “digital geographies” in which interdisciplinary scholars interrogate the implications of society, space, and technology’s mutual imbrications by looking at how technologies—larger data flows, more sensors, complex analytics software, internet-connected devices, and open data platforms in ‘smart city’ strategies—and socio-political relations come to impact one another in and through places. In this research, I bridge critical smart city scholarship with digital geographies to focus scholarly attention on digital
(in)justice in the smart city.
Trevor Stark
Annual Fellow 2020-21 (Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship)
Research Activities
Weak Politics: Marcel Broodthaers between Poetry and Reification
The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers made the political and financial compromises of culture under capitalism into his medium. Despite abandoning his early career as a poet in 1964, my book argues that the political stakes of Broodthaers’ art turned upon his preoccupation with the history of poetry. I reconstruct Broodthaers’ encounter with the theory of “reification” in a seminar on Baudelaire led by the sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann in 1969. First developed by Georg Lukács in 1923 and disseminated by Goldmann, reification described the rationalization of the social world for commodity exchange. Developing this political diagnosis, Broodthaers produced works in a variety of mediums that meditated on the obsolescence of poetry faced with the rise of the entertainment industry and the art market. My book reclaims Broodthaers as a resource in urgent contemporary debates on the social value of art and poetry amid intensifying financialization and wealth inequality.
Lindsay Driediger-Murphy
Annual Fellow 2019-20 (Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship)
Research Activities
Roman Religious Anxieties
This project demonstrates that many Romans experienced fear and anxiety when interacting with their gods, and considers why anxiety-inducing ways of characterizing the gods rise to prominence in certain contexts in Roman history. To date there has been no systematic study of what Romans believed about the character of their gods. Most scholars hold that Romans saw their gods as benevolent by default. My project seeks to recover a different strand of Roman theology. I identify three key contexts in which Roman sources express concern about the reliability and loyalty of the gods: the Roman conquest of Italy, the Second Punic War, and the collapse of the Late Republic. In each of these periods, I argue, we can see Romans confronting the possibility that the gods might give or transfer their support to Rome’s enemies. This conclusion encourages us to re-evaluate our reconstructions of Roman conceptions of divine-human relationships.
Derritt Mason
Annual Fellow 2019-20 (Wayne O. McCready Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar)
Research Activities
The Virtual Child: Children’s Literature and Digital Culture
The Virtual Child explores the pre-digital history of “the virtual” in order to think through young people’s digital virtualities with greater nuance. This history illuminates how digital virtual space is a site for contemporary iterations of longstanding anxieties and desires surrounding the child’s own virtual qualities. Drawing on the etymology of “virtual,” The Virtual Child argues that we can characterize children’s literature—including its digital texts—as a genre that typically attempts to manage the child’s virtuality. More specifically, children’s literature aims to instill virtue (purity and moral goodness) in the child, while delimiting and subsequently regulating their Virtu (openness and creativity). By considering pre-digital virtualities in key works of children’s and young adult literature including J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) and Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1942), I maintain that we can better theorize how digital texts for young people endeavour to construct and secure their audiences.
Timothy J. Stapleton
Annual Fellow 2019-20
Research Activities
Military Culture in British Colonial West Africa (c.1860-1960)
This project will produce a scholarly history of Britain’s colonial military in West Africa from the late nineteenth century conquest to decolonization in the 1950s. Located in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, the Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF) was Britain’s largest army in colonial Africa yet it has not received much academic attention. This racially hierarchical institution was central in maintaining British rule, it served as a manpower reservoir for Britain’s global conflicts, and it was the catalyst for important social and political change in West Africa. Utilizing documents from British and African archives and with a focus on the ordinary African serviceman and his family, this study will attempt to better understand the military in British West Africa by employing the concepts of “military culture” which looks at basic assumptions that inform how the military works, and “combat motivation” which explores reasons why soldiers fight.
Morgan Vanek
2019-20 Annual Fellow
Research Activities
Forms of Trade: Significant Omissions in the Records of Empire, 1694-1785
To date, Anthony Henday appears only around the edges of histories of Alberta, where he’s briefly celebrated as the first Englishman to see the Rocky Mountains – but he’s also the first Hudson’s Bay Company explorer to use the empirical forms of record-keeping that the Royal Society would later recommend to all agents of the British empire. As the four extant versions of his journal demonstrate, however, even small changes introduced to regularize the form of these observations have significant consequences for the journal’s argument about the people and places observed. During the period of the proposed fellowship, I aim both to examine the implications of these formal changes for Henday’s theory of environment, and to explore how these changes in the forms of empirical record-keeping might be correlated to changes in both Company and Cree land management practices in western Canada in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Wendi Adamek
Annual Fellow 2018-19
Research Activities
Representing Nirvāṇa in Sixth-Century China
The Buddhist doctrine of tathāgatagarbha (buddha-matrix), positing universal potential buddha-nature, could be considered to challenge the fundamental Buddhist teaching of anātman (non-self). This has been a recurring topic in tathāgatagarbha theorization since its inception in the early centuries of the Common Era. The aim of this book project is to examine selected sixth-century Chinese contexts for the development of tathāgatagarbha influenced soteriology, using the lens of the Nirvāṇa-sūtra characterization of nirvāṇa as permanence, joy, self, and purity (chang le wo jing 常樂我凈). I examine hermeneutical and devotional representations based on the Nirvāṇa-sūtra, demonstrating that such representations were an integral part of evolving buddha-nature discourse in China. The classic Buddhist doctrine of non-self, though it would seem to be disjunctive, was actively assimilated into these representations and interpretations.
Susan Cahill
Annual Fellow 2018-19 (Wayne O. McCready Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar)
Research Activities
States of Observance: The Art of Surveillance in Canada after 2001
How is surveillance depicted, visualized, and imagined by creative practitioners within the Canadian context? How can art provoke new ways of seeing surveillance systems in Canada post-9/11, a period marked by elevating concerns about security and intensifying surveillance tactics? Creative practices offer a singular viewpoint into discussions on the topic, because they surveil the agents and systems of surveillance, and present them to audiences in ways that can reveal the often invisible and unquestioned logic that governs them. This research program brings together creative practices as critical contributions to debates on Canadian surveillance systems. It uses the revisualization of surveillance structures offered by artworks to re-imagine and de-stabilize the processes, technologies, and agents that have contributed to normalizing surveillance and surveillant viewing in the present historical moment.
Daniel Voth
Annual Fellow 2018-19
Research Activities
Testing the Ties that Bind: Indigenous Women, Kinship, and Politics in Métis and Halfbreed Identity at Red River
In 1869/70 Canada sought to expand its territory westward into the Red River Valley. In that act, the settler state encountered indignant Indigenous peoples who called themselves Métis and Halfbreeds. Scholars have struggled to know if these people were a single, unified Indigenous people, or if the Métis and Halfbreeds should be seen as two distinct, and divided Indigenous peoples. The literature on the debate tends to privilege the perspectives of Indigenous male elites, settler clergy, and European identities. My project will take up the question of Métis/Halfbreed identity and cohesion in 1869/70 by focusing on the way Métis and other Indigenous women anchor Indigenous identity and community, and then by examining how this shapes our understanding of the Red River community’s political positions–taken in response to the expanding settler state.
Hendrik Kraay
Annual Fellow 2018-19 (Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship)
Research Activities
From Entrudo to Carnaval in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
This project examines pre-Lenten celebra-tions and the origins of the quintessentially Brazilian carnaval (carnival) through the repression of entrudo, a celebratory form involving banquets, practical jokes, and water fights with syringes and waxen balls filled with perfumed water or other less savory liquids. Castigated as a “barbarous game” after independence (1822), entrudo was nevertheless practiced by people of all classes in the early nineteenth century. After tracing entrudo’s Iberian origins, the criticisms (and defenses) of it, police repression, this project turns to the institution of new forms of “civilized” celebration in the form of balls and public parades by societies of upper-class men. The conflicts over entrudo constituted a struggle about Brazil’s very nature at a time when new ideals such as citizenship and nationhood, challenges to slavery, and openings to outside cultural influences provoked numerous social anxieties involving questions of race, class, and gender.
Amelia Kiddle
Annual Fellow 2017-18
Research Activities
The Mexican Oil Expropriation of 1938 and the Roots of Resource Nationalism in Latin America
This project investigates the influence of the 1938 Mexican oil expropriation on resource nationalism in Latin American history. The expropriation became a touchstone, reverberating throughout the world, changing business practices, government policies, labour relations, and discourses of resource nationalism. Through qualitative historical analysis, we will investigate the history of resource nationalism in Latin America stemming from this critical event. Although the expropriation held multiple meanings for individuals, social groups, and governments throughout the region, it framed the transnational flow of ideas regarding resource nationalism and continues to influence Latin American petroleum policies into the present. The primary outcome will be a co-authored monograph to be published in both Spanish and English that will heighten awareness of the historical roots of contemporary energy issues. It is timely given that the government has now decided to end its oil monopoly, abandoning the country’s long history of sovereign control over the extraction of this national asset. Ironically, the Mexican government is now inviting the successors of the very companies that were expropriated in 1938 to cooperate in the development of Mexico’s natural resources. By studying the transnational history of the Mexican oil expropriation of 1938 we can begin to recognise the effects that the new landmark change in Mexican petroleum policy may have in the region.
Jack Lucas
Annual Fellow 2017-18
Research Activities
Political Authority and Democratic Reform in the Western Canadian City
Who should have the right to vote? Are proportional voting systems desirable? Should policymaking be entrusted to technical experts? While these questions may seem to share little in common, what holds them together is a concern about political authority – a concern about who should have the power to govern. Through much of the twentieth century, Western Canadian cities led North America in their willingness to experiment with new answers to these questions – experiments that included proportional electoral systems and the early enfranchisement of women.
My research will explore these democratic experiments, explaining how they emerged, why they were implemented, and how they embodied changing ideas about political authority. I will write two comparative-historical studies – on enfranchisement and proportional electoral systems – as well as a broader essay on the development of urban political authority in Western Canada. These papers are part of a book-length project on the development of political authority in the Western Canadian city.
Sabrina Perić
Annual Fellow 2017-18
Research Activities
Ilegala: Reading, Radicalism and Paramiltarism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1932-1942
While radicalization today is spoken of as a new phenomenon, the integration of youth and disenfranchised citizens into larger political projects deemed ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ has long sustained paramilitary activity around the world. In order to understand this phenomenon, I am studying a historical case of radicalization: the rise of Communist Party youth in the 1930s Kingdom of Yugoslavia and their subsequent transformation, in the early 1940s, into Yugoslav Partisan paramilitary units, and eventually the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOV). This project will ask: how did ordinary civilians ally themselves with Communist politics and become members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) in the 1930s? And, furthermore, how did these Communist Party members organize themselves from local KPJ committees into paramilitary units during World War II? This project, in particular, plays close attention to the role of engineers, scientists and miners from Bosnia and Herzegovina's resource extraction industry in the rise of Communist politics. Dr. Perić is especially interested in the cultural tactics used by these industrial elites in promoting new ideas, such as literacy campaigns, reading circles and informal libraries. Her research is intended to provoke a broader discussion of the usage of cultural forms and cultural objects in non-state violence and paramilitary organizations.
Murray McGillivray
Annual Fellow 2016-17
Research Activities
The Gawain Poems: A Linguistic Study
The project seeks to examine the language used in British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. (art.3), the famous unique manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and three other poems commonly thought to be by the same author. The examination will be based on the text established in the Cotton Nero A.x. Project critical editions, gawain-‐ms.ca, which will be complete at the time the Fellowship begins. These new critical editions form a solid basis on which to examine the phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the Middle English dialect in which the poems are written. Two main products of this research are envisaged: a review of the phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax of the poems, to be published as a longish chapter among the introductory chapters to the online manuscript facsimile (gawain-‐ms.ca; gawain.ucalgary.ca); and a lemmatized glossarial index and concordance to the poems.
Rachel Schmidt
Annual Fellow 2016-17
Research Activities
Non-Literary Discourses in Cervantes´s Late Prose
The study will show how non-literary genres shaped Cervantes´s two last major prose works, Don Quijote II (1615) and Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617). The Spanish novelist used the thematics of genres such as domestic governance, dueling, natural history and humanistic letters to structure the episodes in the second part of Don Quixote, but also constructed the conversations that link these episodes through discourse related to these genres plus religion and medicine. In the Persiles he employed cosmography and astrology to introduce irony into the allegorical pilgrimage of Protestant Scandinavian prince and princess to Rome. Through analyzing these non-literary discourses, I illuminate political and social nuances that have been lost to 21st-century readers who are no longer familiar with the conventions, language, and ideas of the writings in which they circulated, nor the debates, which they summarized in a nutshell.
Charles Tepperman
Annual Fellow 2016-17
Research Activities
Film Production Culture in Canada: Case Study of a Creative Producer
This project initiates a consideration of Canada’s film production culture by focusing on the role of the producer. Studies of Canadian cinema have traditionally examined prominent directors, government institutions, and questions of national identity, ignoring the immediate contexts of film production – and the role of the producer, in particular – almost entirely. Yet producers play a critical role in Canadian filmmaking by navigating financial and cultural considerations, assembling key creative ingredients (from actors and directors to script source material), and facilitating the film’s national and transnational circulation. Using Canada’s most commercially successful film producer as a case study, this project adapts new methodologies from studies of film industries elsewhere to a Canadian context, examines a range of textual, archival, and filmic source materials, and generates new insights about the role of the producer in Canadian cinema.
Cheryl Dueck
Annual Fellow 2015-16
Research Activities
National Pasts, Transnational Presence: Post-Communist Cinemas of Central Europe
This project seeks to gain understanding of the cinematic response to post-communist transition in Central Europe, where both the means of film production and the thematic content of films have been affected by the societal rupture since the collapse of socialism in 1989-90. I will make the case that there has been a shift from the national to the transnational in cultural identity and memory in cinema of the region, as precipitated by the dismantling of nationalized film production, the rise of funding bodies developed to foster pan-European cultural policy and European identity, and the necessity of audiences from multiple nations and cultures. In 2015, I will engage with local elements of the transnational audience, namely Central European diaspora communities in Calgary through public screenings and panel discussions. I will analyze 1) remembrance and national myths on screen (Hungarian Uprising, Prague Spring, Solidarnosc and the Fall of the Berlin Wall), and 2) the artistic decisions that serve to make film stories of the secret police in socialist countries appealing to varied cultural audiences.
Ishtiyaque Haji
Annual Fellow 2015-16; 2005-06
Research Activities
Luck’s Influence on Obligation and Responsibility (2015-16 project)
Something is a matter of luck if it is beyond our control. My fundamental objective is to develop the view that luck significantly affects the breadth both of what is morally obligatory for us and conduct for which we are morally responsible. I first show that owing to luck, we frequently lack alternatives – we can do no other than what we in fact do. Since alternatives are required for obligation, luck undermines or restricts obligation, to derive the further skeptical conclusion that the range of what we are morally responsible for is curtailed.
Freedom's Fragile Steps: Authenticity, Education and Responsibility (2005-06 project)
Elizabeth Rohlman
Annual Fellow 2015-16
Research Activities
Telling the Stories of Geography: Compositional Process, Narrative Design, and Communal Identity in the Sarasvatī Purāņa
My project is the final phase of a monograph on the Sarasvatī Purāņa, a regional text composed in the western Indian region of Gujarat between the 12th and 15th centuries. The book explores the evolution of the text over the course of several centuries, which resulted in two distinct and theologically opposed recensions. Focusing on the intertextual, this project seeks insight into the compositional processed through which the Sarasvatī Purāņa manufactured its own textual and religious authority. While this investigation will not reveal a single, human author of the Sarasvatī Purāņa, it will illuminate the human presence that guides the text’s continual recreation.
Stefania Forlini
Annual Fellow 2014-15
Research Activities
Stefania Forlini has a SSHRC-funded pilot study to develop a computer-assisted approach to the study of early science fiction (1840-1899) in order to provide a more rigorous account of its emergence and evolution in the context of popular periodicals. Rather than focusing on a few supposedly representative texts to define early science fiction (as most critics do), this study will employ technologies of textual analysis and data visualization to assess a much larger sample of published works, tracing the evolution of formal features that came to define this popular genre.
Susan Franceschet
Annual Fellow 2014-15
Research Activities
Susan Franceschet's current research focuses on the executive branch of government, asking what sorts of effects women's greater presence has on the role of the cabinet in policymaking and governance. This project uses the case studies of Spain and Chile where women's cabinet presence equaled that of men's under the governments of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and Micelle Bachelet.
Saulesh Yessenova
Annual Fellow 2014-15
Research Activities
Saulesh Yessenova's project focuses on nuclear and biochemical military projects that the Soviet state ran in Kazakhstan during the Cold War. It examines a range of issues, from the establishment of those projects in Soviet Kazakhstan to the post-Cold War situation marked with political debates and controversies surrounding the damage done by the testing and development of nuclear and biochemical weapons to environment and human health in Kazakhstan.
Christian Bök
Annual Fellow 2013-14
Research Activities
Xenotext project, which involves inserting a poem via genetic code into a microbe. The resulting organism will ensure poetic immortality of a quite literal kind. The Xenotext is a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics from the viewpoint of the Humanities—doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S. Burroughs, who has declared that “the word is now a virus.” Working in collaboration with the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) at the University of Calgary, I have been conducting interdisciplinary research, funded for the last four years by a SSHRC Research/Creation Grant, striving to address the implications of biotechnology for the Humanities by creating a “xenotext”—a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form. I am striving, in effect, to create an example of “living poetry,” doing so, in order to highlight the contributions that the Humanities can, in fact, make to other scientific endeavours.
Noreen Humble
Annual Fellow 2013-14
Research Activities
Xenophon's View of Sparta
My project is to complete a monograph presenting a new reading of a treatise entitled the Spartan Constitution by the Athenian author Xenophon (c. 430-355 BCE). This work is central to our understanding of the ancient Greek state of Sparta at the height of its power (c. 500-370 BCE), and in turn to our understanding of the origins and impetus for the mythologisation of Sparta, which continues in the 21st century (e.g. the recent film 300).
The Spartan Constitution is a short treatise examining how Sparta came to be so powerful. It includes information about eugenics, the education system, the routine of daily life, military practices and the role of the kings. Its penultimate chapter openly chastises the Spartans for their present behaviour. It has traditionally been regarded as a praise, defence or idealisation of Spartan culture. My reading challenges these current assumptions about the work. I argue that it is an analytic work which explores openly both the positive and negative aspects of Sparta and her rise to power. I agree with others that the work belongs broadly to a type of writing about constitutions (politeia-literature) but I argue that it does so in a manner typical of philosophic enquiry.
Richard Zach
Annual Fellow 2013-14; 2006-07
Research Activities
The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (2013-14)
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth Century. He was certainly the most important member of the Vienna Circle school of logical empiricism, and through his long and distinguished career in the U.S., Carnap exerted a significant influence on leading English-speaking philosophers such as Quine, Goodman, Kripke, Hempel, and Kuhn. He made important contributions to logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the foundations of probability. However, Carnap’s work is widely scattered and often technical, which makes painting a comprehensive picture of his thought difficult. This inherent difficulty of Carnap’s work, together with long-running misconceptions about the doctrines he and the logical empiricists held, has led to a prolonged period of neglect, from about 1960 until near the end of the twentieth century. An editorial team of 14 distinguished
researchers from the U.S., Germany, France, and Canada is preparing The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap (14 vols.) for publication with the respected Open Court publishing house. The volumes Zach is responsible for will contain Carnap’s logical writings up to 1942, including the Logical Syntax of Language (1934), Carnap's anti-metaphysical and epistemological writings from the heyday of the Vienna Circle, and his articles on logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the post-war period.
The History of Logical Metatheory (2006-07)
Graduate Student Fellows 2013-2021
2022-23
Rozanski, Chelsea
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology
Graduate Student Fellow 2022-23 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Regenerating Roots: Community-Driven Food Networks in Moh’kinstsis
Situated as an activist-scholar and small-scale farmer in Moh’kinstsis (colonially known as Calgary in Southern Alberta, Canada), my experiential doctoral research will engage with regenerative growing practices to enhance local food resilience and foster more socially inclusive spaces that are decolonial in nature. To support movements of resistance to male-dominated industrialized agro-food systems, this work will strengthen scalable agrarian alliances through a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach. Within a CBPR framework, the questions, objectives, methods, and hopeful outcomes have been developed in collaboration with key counterparts. Our central research question asks: How and to what extent can community-driven food networks regenerate the land and relational fabric of society? Combining hands-on growing with farm tours, learning walks, sharing circles, and storytelling, I will work alongside citizen researchers to build capacity in urban agriculture as a tool for wider social transformation.
2021-22
Nella Darbouze-Bonyeme
PhD Candidate, School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures
Graduate Student Fellow 2021-22 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Systemic Racism in Nineteenth-Century Tales of Black and Mixed-Race Revenge
“All Negroes need is a leader, valiant enough to guide them towards vengeance and massacre” wrote Denis Diderot, one of the most famous figures of French Enlightenment, in Histoire des deux Indes (1770). Far from viewing revenge as a private vendetta, Diderot saw revenge as revolution; as a way for the oppressed to repair systemic wrong to which they are victims and establish social equilibrium. For that reason, recent scholarship has identified nineteenth-century tales of black and mixed-race revenge as vehicles for discourse regarding black agency and racial injustice. However, narrative form and its import on the appraisal of social inequality has been neglected. The aim of my dissertation is to investigate the narrative structure of six nineteenth-century tales of revenge. I argue that the formal features of revenge narratives evolve throughout the century, revealing shifts in thinking about systemic racial injustice and black agency.
2020-21
Surkan, Neil
PhD Candidate, Department of English
Graduate Student Fellow 2020-21 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Be/hold: Poems on Activism in Contemporary Canada (At the End of the World)
My creative dissertation, Be/hold, explores the relationship between poetic practice and activism. In poems that dramatize the transition from retreat to political action, my speaker protests Alberta’s petroleum industry. A settler, he struggles to revolt and rebel while recognizing that his every action carries white privilege and potentially harmful consequences. I uniquely conceive of activism as prayer by intersecting Simone Weil’s concept of “consenting attention,” the writings on cross-cultural encounter by the Christian theorist-theologians Richard Kearney and Trevor Hart, and the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Taken together, these four writers develop a prayerful method of engaging with others that, as Hart puts it, “allow[s] difference in all its fullness and integrity to be maintained, shared and…practiced.” Owing to the radical alterity of the other, not in spite of it, Be/hold considers how seeing the world another way (or, an other’s way) creates the conditions for meaningful change.
2019-2020
Giraldo, David Barrios
PhD Candidate, Department of History
Graduate Student Fellow 2020-21 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Commemorative Practices and Rituals of Memory in Colombia, 1872-1919
How was modernization experienced and understood in the province of Antioquia (Colombia), from 1872 to 1919? Specifically, I examine how regional elites used commemorations during this period to celebrate historical change and the emerging of new modernizing social classes, and claim a larger national significance for themselves and their region. So far, I have written two chapters explaining how the funeral of the novelist Jorge Isaacs in 1906 and the centennial celebrations in 1910 created specific links between the local elites, the public, and national memory. I am particularly interested also in uncovering the underlying silence of mestizos, women and working class sectors in these celebrations and how did those communities inhabited and possibly transformed Medellín’s mnemonic landscapes. This project challenges traditional historiography by showing that Colombia between 1870 and 1938 was marked by a deep sense of faith in peace and progress.
2018-2019
Whitehead, Joshua
PhD Candidate, Department of English
Graduate Student Fellow 2018-19 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Feral Fatalisms: An Indigiqueer Manifesto
In our post-Residential, pro-TRC cultural moment we bear witness and are account-able to a wave of ninety-four calls to action, all of which make Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer livelihoods and politics peripheral. My project aims to answer two primary questions: what is the hi/story of Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer peoples when removed from the romantic, anthropologic, and literary domain of the assigned term “berdache”? And how do we self-define within our communities when those communities adopt heteropatriarchy as tradition? My project braids together Western schools of theory, mainly queer theory and affect studies, with decolonial and Indigenous (nehiywak/Cree) epistemologies and languages in order to etch out space for queerness and Indigeneity to work across boundaries, borders, and bodies of literature. I label my project a manifesto as this form allows me to fuse together critical analysis and oral storytelling to allow a more holistic, land and cultural based approach to reading and writing theory.
2017-2018
Nicol, Jessica
PhD Candidate, Department of English
Graduate Student Fellow 2017-18 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Lost in the Stacks: A Fictocritical Study of Material and Digital Objects in the Bob Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction
My project, Lost in the Stacks, explores the paradoxes of collecting material artifacts in the digital age, using the ongoing digitization of the mysterious Bob Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction as my case study. Examining a subset of this print collection of books, magazines, and unique hand-compiled anthologies, housed in the Taylor Family Digital Library, I want to discover what aspects of this material collection, and Gibson as a collector, change in their digital manifestation. I will then explore the possibilities of bridging the functions of material and digital artifacts to better understand collecting and archiving practices, as well as our complicated connection to objects of various kinds in our digital, hyper-connected age.
To tackle the relationship between material and digital objects, my dissertation takes the form of an experimental, interdisciplinary novel that uses both creative and theoretical writing, displayed in print and digital forms.
2016-2017
Bertolazzi, Riccardo
PhD Candidate, Department of Classics and Religion
Graduate Student Fellow 2016-17 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Julia Domna: Public Image and Private Influence During the Reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla
‘He possessed the craftiness of his mother and the Syrians, to which race she belonged.’ Thus Cassius Dio, a Roman senator and historian who lived between the second and the third centuries CE, referred to the cunning of Caracalla, a quality that this emperor inherited from his mother Julia Domna, the wife of Septimius Severus and the first Augusta who came from the Eastern provinces of the empire. She maintained the role of ‘first lady’ for twenty years, a period covering the reigns of two emperors, Severus (193-211 CE) and Caracalla (211-217 CE). Despite this, her role in both the establishing and strengthening the Severan dynasty is only barley traceable in the historical accounts concerning this period. These are the epitome of Cassius Dio’s Roman History, the biographies of the Historia Augusta and the History of Herodian. Their reliability and accuracy, however, are still debated. Both the epigraphic evidence and her coinage, on the other hand, attests to the fact that she was the most honoured imperial woman in the course of the Principate, with ca. 600 inscriptions bearing her name and coin types portraying her together with Severus and Caracalla. She appears consequently to be a key figure of this period. This is the interdisciplinary discussion to which my investigation contributes, by combining the examination of literary sources and material culture to provide new insights concerning the agency of this imperial woman. I have also published several articles related to the study of Roman inscriptions, with particular focus on social and military matters concerning the first three centuries of Roman imperial history. Among these, a study on the benefactions by priestesses of the imperial cult in the North African city of Thugga, an investigation on the deities worshipped by soldiers serving in the so-called ‘national numeri’ stationed in the Danubian provinces, and some considerations on a group of military epitaphs from Lambaesis, in North Africa.
2015-2016
Harding, Mark
Graduate Student Fellow 2015-16 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Debating Dialogue: Judicial Review and Elected Responses in Commonwealth Regimes
Within liberal democracies, bills of rights have become the prominent mechanism for rights protection. However, there are many different models of bills of rights, the merits of which are subject to debate. My research concerns the extent of “inter-institutional dialogue” between courts and legislatures in Canada, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand in order to provide empirical evidence for how different models of rights protection affect democratic governance. My dissertation assesses the relationship of the formal structure of rights protection to the reality of political dialogue within each case country. I analyze how judicial power grows in a manner currently overlooked within the literature. In each case country, the judiciary uses the bill of rights to revise other areas of law. This takes place when the bill of rights is used to update common law rules and to reinterpret statutes. This process raises questions about the appropriate division of labour between courts and legislatures.
2014-2015
Harris, Erina
Graduate Student Fellow 2014-15 (Frances Spratt Graduate Student Fellowship)
Persephone's Debt: poetics, Intersubjectivity, and the Crisis of Futurity
Erina Harris’s project begins as a contemporary adaptation of the ancient “Homeric Hymn to Demeter,” a Classical myth in which Demeter, the Goddess of Harvest, mourns over the abduction of her daughter Persephone who is taken into the Underworld by her uncle Hades, and there, seduced or coerced into eating a version of the forbidden fruit. During her daughter’s absence, Demeter ravages the earth with drought in her grief. When Persephone is returned, as a consequence of her consumption of pomegranate seeds, she is indebted to spend a portion of each ensuing year in the Underworld (during which time her mother inflicts the season of winter upon the earth, perhaps especially upon Calgary). Erina’s adaptation of this ancient myth is based on its re-interpretation as an ecological parable, one in which Persephone becomes indebted to futurity through consumption. In addition to contending with an ethics of consumption, Persephone also models a condition of “intersubjectivity” or “interconnectedness” not only with her mother-figure Demeter, but also with the ecological others to whom she and humanity owe the honour of participating in futurity.
2013-2014
Morton, Shawn
Project: Late/Terminal Classic Fluorescence and Decline of Maya Civic-Ceremonial Centres as Attested in Subterranean Site Contexts of the Central Belize, C. A.
Postdoctoral Fellows 2013-2020
Smith, Julia
Project: Gender equality through and within the labour movement in Western Canada between 1965 and 1985
Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship: $140,000
Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship: $96,000
Smith, Julia. “The First Canadian Bank Strike: Labour Relations and White-Collar Union Organizing during the Second World War.” Canadian Historical Review vol. 99, no. 4, Winter 2018, pp. 623–46. Smith, Julia. “The First Canadian Bank Strike: Labour Relations and White-Collar Union Organizing during the Second World War.” Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 623–646.
Sangster, Joan, and Julia Smith. “From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women’s Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 30, no. 2, Summer 2019, pp. 141–61.
Pasolli, Lisa, and Julia Smith. “Challenging Work: Feminist Scholarship on Women, Gender, and Work in Canadian History.” Reading Canadian Women’s and Gender History, edited by Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson, U of Toronto P, 2019, 278–297.
Wood, Whitney
Project: A New Way to Birth? Natural Childbirth in Canada and the World, 1930-1990
Tier II Canada Research Chair (2019-2024): $600,000
Wood, Whitney and Joanna Bourke, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Gender and Pain in Modern History,” Gender and History, Spring 2020.
Wood, Whitney, “Shifting Understandings of Labour Pain in Canadian Medical History,” British Medical Journal: Medical Humanities, vol. 44, no. 2, June 2018, pp. 82-88.
Wood, Whitney, “‘Put right under’: Obstetric Violence in Postwar Canada,” Social History of Medicine vol. 31, no. 4, December 2018, pp. 796-817.
Wood, Whitney, “Spreading the Gospel of Natural Birth: Canadian Contributions to an International Medical Movement, 1945-1960,” Undiplomatic History: Rethinking Canada in the World, Asa McKercher and Philip Van Huizen, editors. Queen’s UP, 2019, pp. 137-162.
Dahlberg, Elena
Project: Latin Poetry in the Service of the Swedish State-Building Program, c. 1550-1650.
Sweden-America Foundation Research Grant: $8,000
Dalberg, Elena. “The Library as a Site of Early Modern Ideology: Two 17th-century Latin Poems on Uppsala University Library”, in: eds. Otfried Czaika & Wolfgang Undorf, Beiträge zu schwedischen Buch- und Bibliotheksgeschichte der Früen Neuzeit, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, forthcoming
Dalberg, Elena. “Antiquarianism, politics, and self-fashioning in Magnus Rönnow’s poem Scanicae Runae cum Ense Thorsiöensi (1716)”, in: eds. Bernd Roling & Bernhard Schirg, Boreas Rising: Antiquarianism and National Narratives in 17th- and 18th-century Scandinavia, Walter de Gruyter, 2019, p. 129-150
Dalberg, Elena. Review of The Classical Tradition in the Baltic Region: Perceptions and Adaptations of Greece and Rome, eds. Arne Jönsson & Gregor Vogt-Spira, OLMS 2017, in: Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2018, pp. 175-78. Dalberg, Elena. “Epitafiet som invektiv: Smädeskrifter om Karl XII:s död”, in: eds. Arne Jönsson & alii, Att dikta för livet, döden och evigheten: Tillfällesdiktning 1500‒1800, Makadam förlag (forthcoming).
2015-2016
Loewenau, Aleksandra
Project: The Impact of German Physician Émigrés on Development of Neuroscience in North America
Loewenau, Aleksandra. “Between Resentment and Aid: German and Austrian Psychiatrist and Neurologist Refugees in Great Britain since 1933.” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, vol. 25, no. 3, 2016, pp. 348-62. Web.
Loewenau, Aleksandra, and Paul J Weindling. “Nazi Medical Research in Neuroscience: Medical Procedures, Victims, and Perpetrators.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin Canadien D'histoire De La Medecine vol. 33, no. 2, 2016, pp. 418-46. Web.
Weindling, Paul, Anna Von Villiez, Aleksandra Loewenau, and Nichola Farron. “The Victims of Unethical Human Experiments and Coerced Research under National Socialism.” Endeavour vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1-6. Web.
Oram, Matthew
Project: Mysticism, Clinical Science, and the FDA: LSD Psychotherapy in the United States, 1949-1976
Oram, Matthew. “Efficacy and Enlightenment: LSD Psychotherapy and the Drug Amendments of 1962,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences vol. 69, no. 2, 2014, pp. 221-50.
Oram, Matthew. The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.
2013-2014
Brierley, Meaghan
Brierley, M. and C. Elliot. “Transparent choices: Communicating packaged food content to children.” Visual Communication, vol. 16, no. 1, 2017, pp. 57-74.
Brierley, M. and C. Elliott. “Nutritional components and children’s interpretations of packaged food.” International Journal of Health Promotion and Education, vol. 53, no 5, 2015, pp. 230-43.
Brierley, M. and C. Elliott. “Boys’ healthy packaged food choices.” The International Journal of Men’s Health, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 21.
Visiting Research Fellows and Scholar-in-Residence 2013-2021
Visiting Research Fellows
Ferzoco, George (Emilio Goggio Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Toronto) 2021
Busch, Peter (Senior Lecturer, King’s College London, Department of War Studies) 2016
Propaganda Then and Now: War, Terrorism and Global Conflict in Old and New Media
López Lázaro, Fabio (Associate Professor, Department of History, Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) 2015
The Incorporated World: Reflections on How Corporations Have Driven Europe's Impact on the Globe since 1000
Scott, Paul (Associate Professor, University of Kansas, Department of French and Italian) 2013
Surreptitious Subversions: Institutional Code-breaking in Ancien Régime France
Scholar in Residence 2018-2023
Dolata, Petra
(Hi)Stories of Energy Transitions
Sustainability in the Anthropocene
SSHRC Connection Grant, Energy and Scale, 2019-2020: $16,654
SSHRC Insight Grant, The 1970s Energy Crises and Energy Security: A Cross-national and Transatlantic History, 2017-2022: $70,519
Tier II SSHRC Canada Research Chair, The Many Stories of Energy, 2014-2019: $500,000
SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2019 (Co-applicant), The Manhattan Voyage and the Creation of the Modern Canadian North: $63,686
SSHRC Insight Grant 2018-2019 (Co-applicant), The Reconfiguration of Canada-Europe Relations after Brexit: $299,673
Associate, Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University, 2017 to 2020
Senior Research Associate, European Centre for Energy and Resource Security EUCERS, King’s College London, UK, 2014 to present
Co-Convenor, Energy In Society Working Group, Calgary Institute for the Humanities, University of Calgary, 2016 to present
Dolata, Petra. “A global Arctic? Chinese aspirations in the North.” Canadian Global Affairs Institute. 2018.
Dolata, Petra. “Alberta Oil and the Decline of Democracy in Canada.” Canadian Journal of History, vol. 53, no. 3, 2018. pp. 537-539
Dolata, Petra. “Kanada und die USA: Ein ambivalentes Verhältnis.” Länderbericht Kanada, Ursula Lehmkuhl (ed.). Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2018.
Dolata, Petra, Ludger Basten and Peter Dörrenbacher. “Naturräumliche Potenziale und ihre In-Wert-Setzung in Kanada.” Länderbericht Kanada, Ursula Lehmkuhl (ed.). Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2018.
Dolata, Petra. Powering Up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600. RW Sandwell, ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. pp. 733-736.
Dolata, Petra. “Energy and Resource Security.” Palgrave Handbook of Intelligence and Security, Rob Dover, Huw Dylan, and Michael S. Goodman, eds. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Dolata, Petra. “Review Essay: Canada and/in the World.” Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017. pp. 351-367.
Dolata, Petra. Energy Security. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. pp. 47-62.
Dolata, Petra. “A Global Arctic? Chinese Aspirations in the North.” Policy Perspective (Ottawa: Canadian Global Affairs Institute/Institut canadien des affaires mondiale, October 2018)
Dolata, Petra. “Understanding the Shift in Energy Security.” 2017 Energy Series (Ottawa: Canadian Global Affairs Institute/Institut canadien des affaires mondiale, April 2017)
Government, Community and Media:
Invited Expert, Environmental Scan on Global Trends, Department of Global Affairs Canada, Foreign Policy Research and Foresight Unit, CMSS, Calgary, 22 November 2019
Invited Expert, Roundtable Discussion on Brexit and UK’s External Relations, Department of Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa, 26 October 2018
Invited Expert, Discussion on the International Dimension of the Arctic Policy Framework, Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa, 23 November 2017
Invited Expert, “Germany After the Election: Analysis and Outlook,” co-sponsored by the Jean Monnet Chair “Democracy in the European Union” in the Centre for European Studies (CES) at Carleton University, the Centre for International Policy Studies (CIPS) at the University of Ottawa, and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Ottawa, 25 September 2017
Podcast, The Global Exchange - A CGAI Podcast: “The Shifting Tides within Canada's Energy Industry,” 5 May 2017 https://soundcloud.com/user-609485369/energy-series-episode-2-the-shifting-tides-within-canadas-energy-industry
Invited Participant, Canada’s Science Review, Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Calgary, 29 September 2016
Interview, Radio SRF (Swiss National Radio) “Tagesgespräch: Brände in Kanadas Ölprovinz,” 11 May 2016, http://www.srf.ch/sendungen/tagesgespraech/energiehistorikerin-petra-dolata-braende-in-kanadas-oelprovinz
Co-organizer, International Conference: Energy and Scale, Calgary and Banff, 18-21 September 2019
Co-organizer, Workshop: Energy Transitions – Histories, Cultures, Politics, University of Calgary & Fort McMurray, 21-24 June 2018
Organizer, Workshop: Arctic Science, University of Calgary, 28 November 2017
Co-organizer, Workshop: Global Energy Transition, University of Calgary, 18-19 October 2017
Co-organizer, Lecture Series: Energy In Society, University of Calgary, 2016-2018
Organizer, Public Event: Is Oil a Dirty Word? Stories from the Humanities, Congress 2016, Theatre Junction Grand, Calgary, 29 May 2016
Scholar in Residence 2012-2014
Elliott, Charlene
Nutritional Components and Children's Interpretations of Packaged Food
Tier II CIHR Canada Research Chair (2011-2022): $500,000. Food Marketing, Policy and Children’s Health
CIHR Project Grant 2019-2024 (Co-investigator): Protecting children from unhealthy food and brand marketing in the digital age: A novel artificial intelligence system to assess food and brand marketing on digital media: $725,770
SSHRC Exploration Grant: Frontiers in Research Grant, 2019-2020 (Co-investigator): Protecting children from unhealthy food and brand marketing in the digital age: A novel artificial intelligence system to assess food and brand marketing on digital media: $250,000
SSHRC Insight Grant 2015-2018 (Co-investigator), Law and the regulation of the Senses: $173,288
Alberta Innovates Health Solutions Grant, Operating Grant, Media Literacy and Food Marketing: Packaging, taste preference and children's perceptions of healthy food. $90,100
BMO Research Prize in Healthy Living 2013-2016 (Co-investigator): $300,000
Election to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, Royal Society of Canada (Honour) 2016-2023
Elliott, Charlene. “Grab Gatorade! Food marketing, regulation and the young consumer.” European Journal of Marketing, vol. 52, no. 12, 2018, pp. 2521-2532.
Elliott, Charlene. The Nutritional Quality of Gluten Free Products Targeted at Children. Pediatrics, vol. 142, no. 2, 2018.
Elliott, Charlene. “Curating for children: Critical reflections on food, taste and food literacy in the museum.” In N. Levent and I. Mihalache (eds.) Food and Museums. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 40-56.
Elliott, Charlene. “Big Food and ‘Gamified’ products: Promotion, packaging and the promise of fun.” In S.D. Williams and M. Nestle (eds.) Big Food: Critical perspectives on the global growth of the food and beverage industry. Routledge, 2016, pp. 123-135.
Elliott, Charlene. “Find Your Greatness: Consumer responsibility, policy, and the problem of childhood obesity.” In J. Ellison, D. McPhail and W. Mitchinson, eds. Obesity in Canada: Historical and Critical Perspectives. University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 272 -290.
Elliott, Charlene, ed. How Canadians Communicate about Food: Promotion, Consumption, and Controversy. Athabasca Press, 2016.
Elliott, Charlene. “Beauty and the Banana: It’s a commercial promotion, not a public health campaign.” Canadian Journal of Public Health, vol. 103, no. 3, 2016, no. 436-438.
Elliott, Charlene. “Milk in a glass, milk in a carton: The influence of packaging on children’s perceptions of the healthfulness of milk.” International Journal of Health Promotion and Education, vol. 56, no. 3, 2018, pp. 155-164.
Truman, Emily and E., Raine K, Mrklas K, Prowse R, Carruthers Den Hoed R, Watson-Jarvis K, Loewen J, Ricciardi C, Tyminski S, Elliott C. (2017). “Promoting Children's Health: Toward a consensus statement on food literacy.” Canadian Journal of Public Health, vol. 108, no. 2, 2017, pp. 211-213.
Elliott, Charlene. “Knowledge needs and the savvy child: Teenager perspectives on banning food marketing to children.” Critical Public Health, vol. 27, no. 4, 2017, pp. 430-442.
Truman, Emily and Lane, D. and Elliott, C. “Defining food literacy: A scoping review.” Appetite, vol. 116, 2017, pp. 365-371.
Elliott, Charlene and Carruthers Den Hoed, R. “Do apples need an Elmo Sticker?: Children’s classification of unprocessed edibles.” Critical Public Health, vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 617-627.
Brierley, Meghan and Elliott C. “Transparent choices: Communicating packaged food content to children.” Visual Communication, vol. 16, no. 1, 2017, pp. 54-74.
Elliott, Charlene and Conlon, M. “Packaged baby and toddler foods: Questions of sugar and sodium.” Pediatric Obesity, vol. 10, no. 2, 2015, pp. 149-155.
Brierley, Meghan and Elliott C. “Nutritional components and children’s interpretations of packaged food.” International Journal of Health Promotion and Education, vol. 53, no. 5, 2015, pp. 230-243.
Brierley, Meghan, and Elliott C. “Boys’ healthy packaged food choices.” International Journal of Men’s Health, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp. 21-37.
Elliott, Charlene. “Governing taste: Packaged foods, inscription devices, nutrition and the child.” In M. McAllister and E. West, eds. Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, 2013, pp. 267-282.
Elliott, Charlene. “The complexity of choice: Food promotion and our modern foodscape.” In J. Greenberg and C. Elliott (eds.), Communication in Question: Competing Perspectives on Controversial Issues in Communication Studies, 2nd Edition. Nelson, 2013, pp. 81-88.
Elliott, Charlene. “‘Healthy food looks serious’: How children interpret packaged food products.” In A. Strickland (ed.), Annual Editions: Nutrition 11/12, 23rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012, pp. 7-17.
Elliott, Charlene, Carruthers Den Hoed, Rebecca and Conlon, M. “Food Branding and Young Children's Taste Preferences: A Reassessment.” Canadian Journal of Public Health, vol. 104, no. 5, 2013. pp. 364-368.
Elliott, Charlene. “Parent's choice: Examining parent perspectives on regulation and child-targeted supermarket foods.” Food, Culture and Society, vol. 16, no. 3 (2013): pp. 437-455.
Elliott, Charlene and Cook, B. “Not so Grreaat: Ten important myths about food advertising targeted to children in Canada.” Childhood Obesity, vol. 9, no. 4, 2013. pp. 1-6.
Carruthers Den Hoed, Rebecca and Elliott, Charlene. “Parents' Views of Supermarket Fun Food and the Question of Responsible Marketing.” Young Consumers, 2013.
Invited Expert by Health Canada to provide strategic advice on Strengthening the Evidence Base on M2K – Invited as the only academic expert to provide policy advice and a research design/recommendations for a study to strengthen the evidence base when it comes to packaged foods targeted at children. May 24, 2109
Invited Expert to Health Canada’s Best Brain’s Exchange, to address the topic of “Establishing Methods to Monitor Digital Marketing to Children” Hosted by CIHR and the Health Products and Food Branch. Ottawa, ON. Nov 7-8.
Invited Speaker, World Health Organization. Invited to speak on my research on food marketing to teenagers at the Meeting of the WHO Action Network on Reducing Marketing Pressure on Children, Dublin, Ireland. May 10-11, 2018.
Invited Speaker, World Health Organization. Invited to speak on my research on food marketing to teenagers at the Meeting of the WHO Action Network on Reducing Marketing Pressure on Children, Dublin, Ireland. May 10-11, 2017.
Invited Speaker, World Health Organization. Invited to speak on my research on baby and toddler food and labelling regulations at the Meeting of the WHO Action Network on Salt Reduction, Dublin, Ireland. May 8-9, 2017.
Invited by Health Canada’s Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion to participate in expert roundtable on developing effective policy. for food marketing to children in Canada. Ottawa, ON. November 8-9, 2016.
Lead-Author, Policy Brief: Food Marketing to Children for the Heart & Stroke
Foundation and Childhood Obesity Foundation (2015).
Conference Chair and Organizer for the How Canadians Communicate About Food Conference, Banff, AB. May 9-12, 2013.
CIH Community Forum. Do-It-Yourself Health (Co-Organizer). University of Calgary. May 16, 2013.
Fellows 1978-2013
Post-Doctoral Fellows, 1978 – 2013
Philip Alperson, Music as the Paradigmatic Art
Martha Anders, Dual Organization, Calendars, and Azngaro
Gary Arbuckle, Dong Zhongshu and Former Han Confucianism
Karin Beeler, Canada in European Literature
Edward Bell, Social Classes and Social Credit in Alberta
Jonathan Bordo, Threats to Moral Standing. Family and Community in the Construction of the Yucatec Maya Cultural Landscape
Pippa Brush, Women and the Workplace in Canadian Magazines, 1900-1930
Kathleen Buddle, Trans-tribal flows and the social construction of the aboriginal mediascape in Canada
Michael Burgess, A Theoretical Basis for the Integration of Empirical and Ethical Analysis in Medical Ethics
Pauline Butling, Play and Carnival in the Formation of a Postmodern Aesthetic: A Study of Robert Duncan, Phyllis Webb and b.p. Nichol
Donald Childs, The Religious Dimensions of T.S. Eliot
Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science
Leonard Curchin, Monograph on The Local Magistrates of Roman Spain
Lobsang Dargyay, History of Madhyamika Philosophy in Tibet
Richard Davis, Voyages of Discovery
Michael DeRoche, Analysis of the Narrative (Genesis 11:27-25:11)
Shiraz Dossa, The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt
Warren Dow, Content and Psychology
Peter Emberley, Pornography and Obscenity
Marcia Epstein, Prions en Chantant
Lyle Eslinger, Individual Techniques of Hebrew Narrative
David Evans, The Eco-theology of America
Dino Felluga, The Novel Poet: Structuralism, Dialectics and the Instability of Genre, 1789-1900
Toby Foshay, Wyndham Lewis
Robert Fowler, Homeric Epithets in Greek Lyric Poetry
Gordon Hamilton, Palaeography of the Earliest Alphabet
Michael Hymers, The World, Others and the Self: Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses
Carolyn Johnston, Working-class Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Paris
Richard King,Alexander the Great in Opera
Lynda Lange, Women and Democratic Theory
Michael Mack, The Enlightenment and Other Enlightenments: The Pseudo-Theological Paradigm of Anti-Semitism in German Idealism and its German-Jewish Response
Robert McKim, Berkeley on the Will
Elinor Melville, Ecological and Social Change in the Valle del Mezquital
Lucinda Neuru, Carthage Coarsewares
Ekaterini Nikolarea, English Receptions of Greek Tragedy: Sophocles' Oedipus the King
Julia Offen, Beyond the Ring: The European Traveling Circus
Caterina Pizanias, The Postmodern Turn and Feminist Cultural Politics
Don Randall, Representations of Empire and Adolescence
Allan Reid, Communication and Cognition in Bakhtin and Lotman
John Schellenberg, Reasons for Evil
Adrian Shubert, The Social Origins of Labour Militancy
Nora Stovel, Symbolism in the Novels of Margaret Drabble
Winnifred Tomm, Spinoza, Hume, and Vasubandhu
Virginia Tumasz, Process Philosophy and Absolute Idealism
Jan van Voorst, Event Structure
Michael Willis, The Temples of Gopaksetra, Dasarna, and Jejakadesa
Alison Wylie, Positivism and the New Archaeology
Philip Zachernuk, Intellectual Life in a Colonial Context
Boaz Zissu, Rural Settlement in the Judaean Hills and Foothills from the Late Second Temple Period to the Bar Kokhba Revolt
Annual Fellowships 1978 – 2013
Ian Adam (English), Commonwealth Literature
Maria Bakardjieva (Communication and Culture), The Structures of the Life-world Revisited: A Critical Phenomenology of the Internet
Barry Baldwin (Classics), English Translation of the Timarion
Pamela Banting (English), The Riggall Family: A Biography
Bart Beaty (Communication and Culture), Me Am Not Art: Comics Enter the Art World
Susan Bennett (English), Contemporary Women's Drama
Ronald Bond (English), Tuning the Pulpit
Augustine Brannigan (Sociology), The Origins and Nature of Multiple Discoveries in Science
Douglas Brown (Kinesiology), Sport, Space and Everyday Life
Michael Burgess, Bio-Medical Ethics
Helen Buss (English), Contemporary Women's Revisions of the Memoir Form of English
Glen Campbell (French), The Poetry of Louis Riel
Linda Carreiro (Art), What Lies Beneath: Gender Inscriptions within Flap-Anatomy
Sarah Carter (History), The National Policy of Domestic Conformity:Marriage and Family in Western Canada, 1875-1915
Eung-Do Cook (Linguistics), Chipewyan Evolution and Variation
Barry Cooper (Political Science), Action in Nature
Hallvard Dahlie (English), Exiles in Canadian Literature
Nicholas David (Archaeology), Analogy and Metaphor: Comparison in Ethnoarchaeology and Regional Cultural Studies
Wayne Davies (Geography), The Welsh in the Development of Canada
Richard Davis (English), The 1819-22 Franklin Land Expedition and Understanding Expedition Journals: Australia and New Zealand
Michael Dobrovolsky (Linguistics), Chovash Phonology and Modern Phonological Theory
Shadia Drury (Political Science), Radical Anti-modernism
Charlene Elliott (Communication and Culture / Kinesiology), Eatertainment and the Marketing of Children's Food
Jim Ellis (English), The Uses of History: Derek Jarman vs. The English Nation
Marc Ereshefsky (Philosophy), Biology and Philosophy of Classification and The Many Faces of ‘Natural’
Lyle Eslinger (Religious Studies), Hebrew Bible
Frank Eyck (History), Religious Division and German Unification
Penny Farfan (Drama), Feminist Discourse Through and About Performance, Late Nineteenth Century to Early Twentieth Century
Louise Fothergill-Payne (Spanish), Unity and Multiplicity in the Spanish Theatre
Arthur Frank (Sociology), The Self-Experience of Illness
Antonio Franceschet (Political Science), Kant and Cosmopolitan Coercion
John Graham (Social Work), Islam and Social Work
Eithne Guilfoyle (Linguistics), The Syntax and Acquisition of Functional Categories in VSO Languages
Aaron Hughes (Religious Studies), Jewish Philosophy, Aesthetics and Bible Translation
Valerie Haines (Sociology), Evolutionary Theorizing and the Debate on Canonicity in Sociology
Ishtiyaque Haji (Philosophy), Freedom's Fragile Steps: Authenticity, Education, and Responsibility
Waldemar Heckel (Classics), The Successors of Alexander the Great
Irving Hexham (Religious Studies), Social and Religious Change in South Africa
Harry Hiller (Sociology), The Sociological Theories of S.D. Clark
Verena Huber-Dyson (Philosophy), Monograph on Goedel's Theorems
Thomas Hurka (Philosophy), Perfectionism and Value theory from Sidgwick to Ross
Lisa Hughes (Classics), Representations of Non-elite Roman Women on Augustan Funerary Monuments
Nancy Janovicek (History), Conflicts and Coalitions in the Back-to-the-land Movement, West Kootenays, British Columbia, 1950-1990
Keith Johnstone (Drama), Book on Acting
William Jordan (Music), Remembrance Day, a Music-Theatre Piece
Morny Joy (Religious Studies), Narrative Identity in the Work of Paul Ricoeur and Ethics and Imagination
Leslie Kawamura (Religious Studies), A Study of Mi-pham's mKhas-'jug
Herman Keahey (Music), Text Underlay in Late Fifteenth-Century Music
Jane Kelley (Archaeology), Capitan North Archaeological Project
Inder Kher (English), The Poetry of Theodore Roethke
Terry Klokeid (Linguistics), A Grammar of the Language of the Nitinaht Indians
Rainer Knopff (Political Science), Human Rights and the Pursuit of Equality in Canada
Herman Konrad (Anthropology/History), Ecological Transitions in the Tropical Forests on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico
Noa Latham (Philosophy), The Variety of Causal Notions
Gregory Levin (Music), The White Goddess II
D. Lorne Macdonald (English), Geneva in 1816: A Group Biography
Jack MacIntosh (Philosophy), Identity and Possibility and Robert Boyle's Views on Atheism
Alexander Malycky (German and Slavic), The German-Canadian Community in Alberta
Lorraine Markotic (Philosophy), Configurations of the Feminine
John Stephen Martin (English), Vision and Visibility
Geoffrey McCafferty (Archaeology), Cholula, The Rome of Anahuac
Pamela McCallum (English), Narrative Form in Carlyle, Michelet and Carpentier
Roderick McGillis (English), Literary Theory and Children's Literature
Dennis McKerlie (Philosophy), Justice Between Generations and Age-Groups
John McLaren (Law), Legal Regime for Pollution Prevention
Ken MacMillan (History), Idea of Conquest in England and Atlantic, 1450-1750
Anne McWhir (English), Marginal Voices and English Romantic Literature
Francine Michaud (History), Dying at the Time of the Black Death
Leslie Miller (Sociology), The Family Firm in Good Times and Bad
Mark Migotti (Philosophy), Ethics and the Life of the Mind: A Study of Nietzsche's Moral Theory
Elizabeth Montes Garcés (Spanish), Corporeal Imaginings in Latin-American Women's Writing
Ted Morton (Political Science), The Poetics of Rights
Eva Neumaier (Religious Studies), The Tibetan Concept of Divine Kinship
Margaret Osler (History), Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God and Human Understanding in Early Modern Europe (2007-2008); Teleology and Divine Providence: The Reinterpretation of Final Causes in Seventeenth Century Natural Philosophy (1997-1998); Gassendi, Descartes, and Mechanical Philosophy and Teleology and Divine Providence: The Reinterpretation of Final Causes in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy (1987-1988)
Howard Palmer (History), Nativism and Ethnic Tolerance in Alberta: 1880-1977
Mary Pavelka (Anthropology), Menopause in humans and nonhuman primates: A comparative life history perspective
Roger Peattie (English), Edition of Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti
Douglas Peers (History), Decolonizing the Military History of South Asia
Jeanne Perreault (English), Hysteria and the Discourse of Whiteness
Dominique Perron (French), Analysis of the text of Hydro-Québec's advertising from 1964-2000 (2001-2002); Le temps d'Hydro-Quebéc (2009-2010)
Anthony Petti (English), The Journals and Papers of Sir John Franklin
Victor Ramraj (English), The Concept of the Universal in International English Literature
Donald Ray (Political Science), African Traditional Leadership and the State: Indigenous Legitimacy, Authority and Sovereignty in the Age of Development and Democratisation
Elizabeth Ritter (Linguistics), Pronouns from the inside out
Claude Romney (French), Written Testimonies by Auschwitz Prisoner Doctors
Joan Ryan (Anthropology), Lubicon Lake Cree Community
Eliezer Segal (Religious Studies), Talmudic Commentary to the Book of Esther
Jewel Spangler (History), The Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811 in History and Memory
Patricia Srebrnik (English), Popular Fiction by Women
Colleen Stainton (Nursing), Early Human Attachment
Hank Stam (Psychology), History of the Body in Psychology
Robert Stebbins (Sociology), Modern Amateurism
Charles Steele (English), Canadian Authors' Paper
Florentine Strzelczyk (German), From Hitler to Hollywood
Alexie Tcheuyap (French), Maghrebian Novels o the Screen
Jean Tener (University Library), Canadian Authors' Papers
Annette Timm (History), Lebensborn: Myth, Memory and the Sexualization of the Nazi Past
Charles Travis (Philosophy), The Concepts of Truth and Identity
Aritha Van Herk (English), Australian/Canadian Fiction and The Eloquence of Laundry: A narrative reading of the presence of laundry in literature, art and the everyday world
Fred Wah (English), A Collection of Essays on Contemporary Poetics
Michael Walbank (Classics), Surviving Athenian Proxeny-Decrees
George Wing (English), The Victorian Novel
John Yardley (Classics), Translation and Commentary of Quintus Curtius' History of Alexander
Kevin Young (Sociology), Living with Injury: Sport and Pain the Lives of Athletes
Richard Zach (Philosophy), The History of Logical Metatheory, 1900-1940
Mathew Zachariah (Education), A Comparative Study of Sarvodaya and Conscientization andTransformative Non-Formal Education for (Re) Building Sustainable Communities
Nicholas Zekulin (Russian), Narrative Techniques in Russian Literature
Linda Carreiro (Art): What Lies Beneath: Gender Inscriptions within Flap-Anatomy
Geoffrey McCafferty (Anthropology): Cholula, The Rome of Anahuac
Margaret Osler (History): Reconfiguring the World: Nature, God and Human Understanding in Early Modern Europe (2007-08)