Meet our Team

On research leave, 01 July 2024 to 01 January 2025

Dr. Elspeth H. Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where she teaches queer and trans history; the history of US capitalism; oral history; and the history and theory of photography. Her digital humanities research has focused on queer and trans archives and oral history. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2000 and is the author of (most recently) WORK! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Feeling Photography (2014, Duke University Press with Thy Phu). She is the principal investigator for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a team-based project and virtual working space where members come together to share work, ideas, and new knowledge about the creation of LGBTQ oral histories in the digital age. She is an active volunteer and former Co-President of the Board at The ArQuives, Canada’s Lesbian and Gay Archives, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ community archive.

You can learn more about her work at https://www.elspethbrown.org and sometimes find her on Twitter at @ElspethHBrown. For email please use: dhn.director@utoronto.ca.

Claire Battershill, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, specializes in book history, digital archives, and Modernist Literature. In 2023–24, she holds the Wendy M. Cecil Professorship at Victoria College. Battershill co-directs The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive of 20th-century publishers’ records. Her work encompasses feminist perspectives on digital humanities, affect, collaboration, student labor, and the interplay between digital and material archives, and she has authored numerous articles and books on these subjects. She’s also the author of Circus (McClelland & Stewart 2014); Modernist Lives (Bloomsbury 2018); and, most recently, Women and Letterpress Printing 1920-2020: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge University Press 2022). 

You can reach Claire at claire.battershill@utoronto.ca.  

Danielle Taschereau Mamers is the Managing Director of the CDHI. Danielle received her PhD in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario in 2017. She has previously held postdoctoral fellowships at McMaster University (ECS), the University of Pennsylvania (WHC), and the University of Toronto (JHI). Danielle’s research identifies critical and creative strategies for destabilizing authority structures reproduced by documents, images, and their archives. Her first book, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing (Fordham UP, 2024), investigates Indigenous artists’ engagements with settler documentation of Indian status in Canada. Alongside her work with CDHI, Danielle facilitates strategic planning, partnership ideation, and team building sessions. As a visual thinker with a career in words, she sneaks in images and illustrations wherever she can.

You can learn more about her work at www.dtmwrites.com and on LinkedIn. For email please use: d.taschereau@utoronto.ca.

Julia Gruson-Wood is a Research Associate for the VP Office of Research & Innovation and CDHI. She is an interdisciplinary critical health scholar and received her PhD in Science & Technology Studies from York University. Julia previously held two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Guelph: one focusing on the impact of parents’ gender relations in the largest longitudinal family-based health study in Canada; and the other, an arts-based intersectional SSHRC-funded project studying Ontario 2SLGBTQI+ parenting experiences in a post-legal parity context. Julia also collaborates on critical autism and neurodiversity-related grants and is currently completing her first book, Remaking Therapy, Reshaping Autism: social relations and the governance of applied behaviour therapies (UBC Press). Julia currently serves as an Adjunct Faculty member for both the Social Practice and Transformational Change PhD program, and Re·Vision: the centre for art and social justice (University of Guelph).

You can reach Julia at julia.grusonwood@utoronto.ca.

Alisha Stranges is a queer, community-based, public humanities scholar and multi-modal artist. Currently, she serves as a Digital Research Creation Specialist here at CDHI and as the Research Manager and Project Oral Historian for the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory (PI, Elspeth Brown).

Alisha holds an M.A. in Women & Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, with a collaborative specialization in Sexual Diversity Studies (2020). Before entering the academy, she received a Diploma in Theatre Performance from Humber College (2006) and spent a decade devising original plays within Toronto’s queer, independent theatre community. From 2010 to 2015, she returned annually to Buddies in Bad Times Theatre as a teaching-artist and co-facilitator for PrideCab, an intensive training program in collective creation and performance for queer, trans, and gender variant youth. In 2019, she launched the Qu(e)erying Religion anti-Archive Project, which blends elements of oral history with the art of whiteboard animation to document 10+ years of supportive programming for life-giving, queer spirituality at the University of Toronto.

You can reach Alisha at alisha.stranges@mail.utoronto.ca

Chris Miller is a sociologist of religion and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. He previously was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Nonreligion in a Complex Future project at the University of Ottawa. His current projects examine death, dying, and nonreligion, through analyses of obituaries, Death Cafés, and green burials. In other research projects he explores broader themes including New Religious Movements, popular culture, and social media.

You can reach Chris at chrisdaniel.miller@mail.utoronto.ca