Graduate
Graduate Opportunities
Digital Storytelling Workshop, 24-26 November 2023
The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI), a tri-campus research initiative funded by the University of Toronto’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) program, is pleased to announce a 2.5 day in-person digital research storytelling workshop from Friday Nov 24-Sunday Nov 26, 2023, at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus (location TBD, Friday afternoon) and the Collaborative Digital Research Centre (CDRS) at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) campus (Sat. and Sun.).
Graduate Student Fellowships
In collaboration with our divisional partners, we will be awarding 12 graduate fellowships ranging from semester-length RAships of $4000 to longer term $10,000 fellowships. These fellowships are designed to support graduate students working on faculty DH projects and/or, in some instances, to support PhD students in completing their dissertations.
Graduate Fellows (2023–2024)
Amrita Kumar-Ratt is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography studying with Katharine Rankin (FAS). Amrita’s project titled, “‘Our Bodies Our Voices’: The Feminist Political Geographies of Reproductive Control & Justice in ‘Punjabi Canada’,” combines academic research methods with photography, poetry and performance arts, transformative justice action, and storytelling.
Christine Tran (she/they) is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information studying with Nicole Cohen (iSchool/UTM) and focusing on gender, race, and labor dynamics among professional game streamers on Twitch.tv. Their interactive project titled, “Amid the Pink Collar: Dressing Up Against Precarity & Patriarchy in Game Streaming,” examines how webcams and Zoom add-ons like background and filters gamify how we come to look and look at each other.
Elio Colavito (he/they) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History studying with Elspeth Brown (FAS/UTM). Their research explores twentieth-century Canadian and American transmasculine histories of care, mutual aid, and community formation. Dedicated to making historical narratives more accessible to trans communities, Elio uses digital archives and ArcGIS Storymaps chart these histories.
Ellen Forget (she/they) is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information and Book History and Print Culture collaborative program studying with Alan Galey (iSchool). Ellen’s research focuses on braille, accessible book production, contemporary publishing, and speculative fiction genres. They are intrigued by the potential of textual encoding, particularly TEI, in addressing accessibility and serving disabled readers. Their project titled, “Disability Representation in DH: Textual Encoding Initiative Schema for Braille Materials,” is focused on developing guidelines for working with braille in TEI (text encoding initiative).
Janani Mandayam Comar (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department for the Study of Religion studying with Srilata Raman (FAS). Her research, situated at the intersection of religion, literature, and performance focuses on how caste is tied to ethical discourses in Tamil communities. She is exploring the print and oral traditions of two mythological figures in Tamil culture. She will use a variety of digital tools to expand her exploration of Tamil literature including Tamil Python, OCR software, and natural language processing.
Mathew Iantorno (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Information studying with Julie Yujie Chen (iSchool/UTM). His research project, “System Imaginaries: How Service Sector Automation is Sold,” examines the impact of retail automation on employment and public space. New forms of retail automation are reconfiguring the workplace, consumer responsibility, and public space in ways that are often incongruous with their advertising narratives. He uses data visualization tools such as ArcGIS to locate and catalogue the marketing materials, provenance documents, and technical specifications of individual retail technologies.
Réka Patrícia Gál (she/they) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information studying with Sarah Sharma (UTM) and M. Murphy (UTM). Their research charts the environmental consequences of SpaceX’s rocket launch facility in Boca Chica, focusing on human-machine interdependence’s environmental and labor justice implications. Their research practices include using mapping programs and GIS in conjunction with ethnographic interviews and Critical Discourse analysis of archival materials, popular culture texts, and industry materials.
Roxana Escobar Ñañez (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Human Geography studying with Matt Farish (FAS). Building on her previous studies in Peru, her research centers on the livelihoods of Afro-Peruvian populations focusing on the music and performance of Afro-Peruvian women in Lima. She seeks to connect sonic and performance archives with the concept of Black Geographies from the South, and to understand how music and performance contributes to Lima’s cultural identify formation.
Graduate Fellows (2022–2023)
Alisha Grech is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, studying with Dr T Nikki Cesare Schotzko (CDTPS). Alisha’s project, titled: “HelpForHer: Feminist Activist Data Strategies for Mapping Gender-Based Violence in Canada”, explores the process of collecting data from an activist, intersectional-feminist perspective.
Bradley Clements is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information, where he studies the roles of Canadian and American heritage institutions in relation to treaties with Great Lakes Indigenous nations. Over his CDHI Fellowship, Bradley will be theorizing and digitally curating a timeline of Great Lakes treaty history in collaboration with GRASAC (the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures
Mariba Douglas is pursuing her PhD in the department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. Mariba is fascinated by the global circulation of emancipatory ideas, from Black student activism in North America to the rich countercultures of the Caribbean and beyond – all of which highlight the creativity and exuberance of Black radical thought and resistance. Mariba’s research examines the expansion of “equity, diversity and social inclusion” initiatives in higher education as a feature of the persistence of anti-Blackness, contrasting these institutional accounts with vibrant histories of Black struggle and placemaking on Canadian campuses.
Matt Coleman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History. His project, entitled “Seeing Beyond the Classical Tradition, Then and Now: The Diversity of Viewer Experience in Hellenistic Art,” supervised by Prof. Björn C. Ewald, looks to treat the ways of seeing ancient material culture through time more accessibly by investigating our popular ancient sources for visuality, through corpus linguistic strategies, and comparing them to modern viewing practices, through participatory visual study.
Melanie Ng is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto studying the transpacific history of Chinese paper family migrations to and through North America. Weaving together archival documents and oral histories, her dissertation analyzes clandestine Chinese migrants’ contestation and subversion of legal/illegal categories and their impact on Chinese community identity, Chinese racialization, and trans-imperial legal formation.
Natalie Leduc is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and part of the Book History & Print Culture program at the University of Toronto. Their project e.lit.ish is an app for those who self-identify as 2SLGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, or persons of color, and/or disabled to publish and engage with poetry.
Siddharth Sridhar is a 5ᵗʰ year PhD Candidate in the Department of History. His research studies the role of the rubber industry and its associated networks of commerce, labour, and authority in the reproduction of British Imperial space in the Bay of Bengal during the Great Depression and Second World War.
Sophia Jaworski (she/her) is a settler on Dish With One Spoon Territory and is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology. As part of the CDHI Grad Fellows program, the “Chem Map” project will expand an existing a digital dataset of over 900 points on a Google Map representing the historical and present petrochemical infrastructures in Tkaronto, into a public art exhibition. It will include new media art and interactive components with the intention to create a space for co-producing feminist and anti-colonial knowledge about petrochemicals geared towards environmental data justice.