CDHI is pleased to welcome Claire Battershill (Assistant Professor, iSchool and English) as Interim Faculty Director, 01 July to 31 December 2024, while Elspeth Brown, takes a six-month administrative leave after the conclusion of her role as Associate Vice-Principal Research (UTM). Claire is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto and holds the Wendy M. Cecil Professorship at Victoria College.
Claire teaches and researches in the areas of book history and print culture; digital humanities with a particular focus on feminist digital archives; 20th-century literature; and interdisciplinary creative practice. She is a Co-Director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a feminist critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishers’ archival materials. With the MAPP team, she co-authored the book Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities (Palgrave, 2017), as well as articles on a variety of topics in critical DH including the relationship between archival research and data visualization; student labour in digital humanities projects; feminist approaches to digital archives; the value of affect and narrative in constructing digital collections’ histories.
Claire is also the co-author, with Shawna Ross, of the pedagogical book Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (revised edition, Bloomsbury 2022) and its associated free online toolkit, teachdh.com. From 2016-2019 she co-directed Make Believe: The Secret Library of M. Prud’homme, an interdisciplinary public art and digital humanities project, with Heather Jessup. She is the author of Circus (a collection of short stories published by McClelland & Stewart in 2014); Modernist Lives(Bloomsbury 2018); and, most recently, Women and Letterpress Printing 1920-2020: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge University Press 2022).
Claire’s current projects include a Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse grant-funded community research project on developing digital tools for book and print artists (in collaboration with Paperhouse Studio); and a SSHRC Insight Development Grant-funded project, “‘Lighting the Windows of the Past’: Feminist and Queer Poetics, Data Visualization, and Creative Engagements with Literary and Historical Special Collections.”
Welcome Claire!