Resident Fellows

2024-25 Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow
Associate Professor of Film, Department of Communication, Media and Film

Cinematic Late Style: Last Works and Late Culture

In recent commentaries, filmmakers and scholars have suggested that cinema may be in a
waning phase of development in which the enduring values of an artform will soon be eclipsed. This is a stark forecast for the medium and a significant one for its creative practitioners; whether for a mature director, or in terms of the medium’s evolution, one wonders how the work is transformed by the knowledge that it may be a final creative effort. In response, my research contemplates cinema in its late phase, highlighting the distinctive features of late works and the ways they reflect the values of our contemporary critical practice. It also examines the relationship between the late films of an individual artist and those produced during a late cultural phase, dissolving an artificial divide between aesthetic and cultural analyses. The research interrogates the heuristic value of the concept of ‘late style,’ mobilizing it as a sensitive descriptor for film’s aesthetic, technological, and cultural permutations. Thus, it aims to discover what late and last works mean to us, and to the filmmakers who have created them, during a period of profound change for cinema.

2024-25 Graduate Student Fellow
PhD Student in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Dagugun Woakide Akide Hnebigan Echin Bathtabi (Studying Museums in a Good Way)

Museums are important sites of representation where issues of identity, history, culture, and value are built and entrenched. Yet museums have traditionally been operated by an elite community of scholars, who do not represent the diverse cultures that are put on display. Indigenous people have been diligent advocates in seeking greater control of and access to their cultural belongings. Much scholarship exists on the criticality of this work for Indigenous communities, yet museums still grapple to accommodate notions of ownership and care from outside western norms. Working in the museum field I have learned much about nuanced challenges in supporting Indigenous people towards greater access and control of their material cultural belongings. This research furthers work that I have been doing to steward access and control for the Îethka Nation, and asks: how have formal structures impacted Indigenous access to, and control of, cultural belongings in museums and collections?

2024-25 Resident Fellow
Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History

Resistance Dance: Dolls, Dioramas and the Dutch Atlantic

This project seeks to foreground new types of knowledge that can be gleaned from objects often regarded as lacking scholarly merit: early modern doll houses and dioramas. Placing select doll houses and dioramas in conversation with more traditionally studied media such as paintings will facilitate an expanded understanding of the lived experiences of the enslaved who toiled on Dutch-owned Atlantic plantations. To structure this analysis, dance and the role of the senses will be used as the guiding theme. Dance practices were one of the few remaining links to African traditions and can be regarded as a rare display of bodily autonomy for enslaved men and women working on plantations. Ultimately, this project will contribute to calls for decolonising by demonstrating the importance of the senses to retrieve knowledge about the realities of groups who often left little physical traces such as material culture or texts in the archives.

2024-25 Resident Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

Reimagining Meanings and Expectations around Gendered Care Work in Aging Communities: What can We Learn at the Limits?

What kinds of care stories resist and recast the inequitable histories, relations and meanings that underpin late life care in Canada? This project weaves approaches from the arts, humanities, and social sciences to transform issues in care provision in our aging society into conversations and practices that address complexities and open up creative possibilities. While a range of scholarship examines everyday work and organizational conditions in long-term residential care, to date, few studies have considered how meanings and expectations around gendered care work are actively being rethought and renegotiated, including through expressions of agency and resistance. Responding to this need, this project mobilizes feminist rhetorical and arts-based approaches (involving storytelling workshops and participatory community events) to spark new conversations about care ethics in aging communities. The aim is to learn from the insights of a feminized and racialized workforce, while uncovering and rethinking moral, relational and philosophical complexities.

2024-25 Graduate Student Fellow
PhD Candidate in English, Department of English

Armageddon: A Comic Book History of the Nationalisms that Made the Modern Middle East 

Jews and Arabs have historically enjoyed generally positive relations. However, the last hundred years have been marred by seemingly intractable violence between Jewish and Arab nationalists. My work focuses on how art and literature might better enable Israelis and Palestinians to understand each other’s national narratives. Particularly, I’m interested in how popular history can be re-taught and re-imagined. My research-creation dissertation takes the form of a graphic novel showcasing the emergence of Jewish and Arab nationalisms. I curate the emergence of this nationalist sentiment amidst the backdrop of the First World War, a conflict that saw Jews and Arabs fighting as military allies. Crucially, this graphic history showcases both the Jewish and Arab perspectives of this turning point. Conjoining these narratives will create a singular work of history, deliberating juxtaposing a familiar history with a lesser-known narrative. In doing so, I aspire to the sharing of national stories between Israelis and Palestinians in new and surprising ways. 

2024-25 Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of English

Listening as Pain and Necessity: Ear, Unfolding

My proposed book of poems traces an autotheoretical tension between my reduced tolerance to sound and my accessibility-driven reliance on listening. Exposure to an acoustically-traumatic event, which has triggered a sensitivity to noise pollution, has led to hyperacusis, a condition resulting in pain from everyday sounds. Meanwhile, an eye condition has led me to seek auditory accommodations, including structuring an oral history research project around my accessibility needs. With the improvement of text-to-speech software and the unprecedented rise of audiobooks, listening has become the method through which I access literary and cultural spaces and perform academic work. Drawing on the one hand from my auditory pain experiences and on the other from my oral history research and audio learning, my book of poems will ask what happens when one both has an intolerance to and a reliance on sound, probing the noise pollution health crisis and our collective acoustic futures.

Resident Fellow
Associate Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Linguistics and Culture

Sages, Skeptics, and Pietists: The Culture of Debate in the Abbasid Empire (750-1258)

I propose to study the culture of debate in the Abbasid empire as a cultural, social and literary phenomenon, and to produce either two articles or an article and a monograph. Thematically, I will study the culture of debate from two perspectives. First, I will explore it as a cultural and social phenomenon and I will try to answer the following questions: What were the historical possibilities for the rise of the culture of debate? What was its place within the broader social fabric? How were debates conducted? What does all of this teach us about class, cultural expression, patronage, and approaches to knowledge in the Abbasid empire? Secondly, I will study the descriptions of debates found in primary sources as literary artefacts, in order to study the formal characteristics of these descriptions and the values which they articulated. These two approaches will complement and illuminate each other.

Resident Fellow
Professor, Department of Philosophy, Department of Classics and Religion

The Joyful Sage: Renunciation and the Good Life in the Mahābhārata

This book project investigates the apparent tension between renunciation and the good life  in the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata. The good life, in this sense, is a life that is intrinsically good for the person whose life it is. It is a life high in welfare value. In abandoning worldly pleasures, desire satisfactions, and the pursuit of worldly goals more generally, the renunciates of the Mahābhārata seem to forsake their own welfare. The Mahābhārata allows that a renunciate might live the good life after all, however, so long as they enjoy the world without wanting it and act in the world without desire. This project is aligned with some of the earliest discussions of the status of the renunciate in South Asian literature. It invokes the distinction between the good life and the moral life to clarify and advance current debates about the contemporary relevance of renunciation.  

Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow
Assistant Professor, Department of History

Norman Consolidation and Communication in Kent

Normanization of the English landscape after the Conquest of 1066 included a widespread building program, destroying Anglo-Saxon cathedrals and replacing them with dominating Norman structures. This development has been studied as a vehicle of colonisation and legitimation on a grand scale; however, the same rebuilding can be seen on a more thorough level across the countryside with the rebuilding of parish churches at all nodes in the transportation and communication network. This made Norman rulership omnipresent at the local level. This development can still be seen in the rural churches in the bishopric of Rochester, many of which were rebuilt during the episcopacy of Gundulf, the first Norman bishop there. This study aims to recover the range of local landscape control in the bishopric of Rochester, thereby piloting a local history study with national implications for England and possibly for other areas of Norman dominance such as the medieval Mediterranean.

Resident Fellow in Applied Ethics
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy

Telling a Better Story of Who We Are: A New Ontology and Ethic of We-Agency

The collective agent “we” are who make or break the world. We are a force of unity and solidarity, mobilizing progressive movements and inspiring sacrifices in times of crisis. Yet, we can be a force of exclusion and division, animating xenophobia and tribalism. Even though we are central to political life, the individualistic orientation of Western philosophy has impoverished our understanding of who we are, and how we can improve. To correct this anomaly, this project will bridge the cross-disciplinary scholarship on narratology, social ontology, and political philosophy, and develop a novel narrative theory of we-agency. Ontologically, it will show that stories and storytelling practices are what make and shape us. Ethically, it will articulate a new theory of joint narration, called we-reasoning, to guide we-agents to tell and enact better stories of who we are. We-reasoning will reframe political problems of populism, reconciliation, and migration and narrate new solutions.

Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow
Professor, School of Languages, Literatures, Linguistics and Culture

The Emergence of the Modern Writer and the Shifting Semantics of Obedience, 1750-1850

The decades around 1800 mark a crucial period in the emergence of the modern literary writer in German culture. A market for literature developed that allowed writers to live independent of traditional patronage. This independence began to include also women writers, who gained a significant foothold in this period. Additionally, through the prominent debates on artistic genius, an image of the writer as independent from traditional precepts took hold. Yet this simple narrative fails to consider both the longevity of some of the old forms of authority under which writers operated (such as poetic rules), as well as the new forms of authority that came to replace the old (such as market pressures and audience expectations). This project, therefore, focuses on the shifting pressures of authority under which writers worked. Moreover, by investigating how writers defined their own practice through their relative submission to—or transgression of—the existing demands, this project explores the pressures of authority not only as a burden to the artist, but also as a formative force.

Graduate Student Fellow
PhD Candidate in Communication and Media, Department of Communication, Media and Film

“The Stuff of Reality”: Towards a Materialist Theory of Animated Documentary

My research focuses on artisanal animation techniques used in independent animated documentaries (anidocs) of the 2000s. I explore how material-based animation practices, such as stop-motion animation, along with the processes of painting on glass and tracing over live-action footage affect the representation of ‘invisible’ aspects of human reality. In the last two decades, cinema scholars have noted the proliferation of documentary animation—a film genre that presents factual content in a fictional form. Animated documentaries are most often produced by independent filmmakers and work with narratives absent from conventional non-fiction cinema (e.g. representation of mental health conditions, traumatic experiences, and stories of vulnerable populations). Yet while the themes and contents of animated documentaries are widely discussed by the experts of the field, tendencies in animated documentary production stay overlooked. Thus my dissertation aims to fill this gap in film studies literature. I intend to examine Canadian and international production practices of contemporary documentary animation by asking the question: how do material-based animation techniques affect the interpretation of the topics that the films address?

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.

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.

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.

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.