Recent
Research
Awards
“We’re Still Here”: Amplifying Urban Indigenous Stories in Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and St. John’s through Indigenous-led Partnerships
Kristina Bidwell, Principal Investigator
SSHRC Reconciliation Network Grant, 2024
This collaborative project aims to amplify stories of Indigenous communities that have been excluded from processes of reconciliation and, in response to Call to Action 65, expand public and scholarly understanding of reconciliation. It focuses on the challenge of understanding what reconciliation means for the Métis of the prairies and for Newfoundland and Labrador Indigenous peoples, both of whom were left out of federal processes of reconciliation. These communities have experienced efforts at assimilation and erasure in ways that are distinct within Canada and often not understood by scholars or the public. Both have called to be considered through an expansive reconciliation grounded in Indigenous voices, knowledges, and stories. Responding to these calls, we will show how a practice centred on Indigenous storytelling can transform settler-centred narratives of belonging, ownership, and reconciliation in three distinct communities – the cities of Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and St. John’s. Our Indigenous-led network includes four Indigenous community organizations; two Indigenous-led arts organizations; two universities; and a team of 17 scholars, storytellers and students, of whom the majority are Indigenous.
Non-Separatist Separatists: A European Tendency
Jerry White
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2024
This project examines groups whose tactics and rhetoric resemble those of separatists but who are actually seeking closer integration into their nations. It has three strands: the Gaeltacht civil rights movement in Ireland, where the residents of Irish-Gaelic-speaking communities sought to shore up those communities and their place in Irish life as a whole; the Jura separatist movement, which sought a new Francophone canton of Jura that would be separate from the majority-German canton of Berne, but which never sought to leave Switzerland and indeed relied on idealism around federalism as central to Swiss identity; and Catalan speakers in France, whose activists have long criticied any attempts to conflate them with the Catalan separatists just south of them and have sought instead greater recognition of their place in the culture of France.
The Hard Press: Allotment Debates in Indian Territory Newspapers, 1866-1906
Jenna Hunnef
SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2023
Dr. Jenna Hunnef’s project, “The Hard Press: Allotment Debates in Indian Territory Newspapers, 1866-1906,” examines newspaper articles and editorials in order to understand how Indigenous peoples responded creatively and intellectually to the United States’ General Allotment Act. The project focuses on the perception, promotion of, and resistance to the policy and how responses were framed and expressed in writing. It seeks to establish the literary contours of Indigenous contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, situating them within existing scholarly discourses about Indigenous nonfiction writing.
Intertidal Polyphonies: Sound, Text, and Art
Joanne Leow
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2021
Dr. Joanne Leow’s five-year project, "Intertidal Polyphonies: Sound, Text, and Art," will develop new methodologies of recording, understanding, and analyzing the coastal ecologies of Singapore, Vancouver, and Hong Kong. The intertidal zone---its beaches, ports, harbours, swamps, wetlands, and dykes---is one of flux, ecological richness, nationalist and capitalist infrastructure, complex histories, and also environmental devastation. Each of these sites, whether island, continent edge, or archipelago shares the common histories of imperialism, development, land reclamation, and dispossession. By reading and listening intently to these spaces, and through respectful collaboration with scholars and artists living in these sites, Dr. Leow will seek to represent and reimagine these spaces in decolonial ways. Her research will create strong, transnational networks between humanities scholars and arts practitioners, centering the role of the humanities in a time of climate catastrophe. It seeks to produce new collaborations between scholars, writers, and artists in archiving, critiquing, and responding to the rapidly changing coastlines of these transnational cities.
Indigenous-led Collaboration in Indigenous Literary Arts in Canada
Kristina Bidwell and Sophie McCall
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2020
Dr. Kristina Bidwell’s three-year project with Dr. Sophie McCall of Simon Fraser University will research the history of Indigenous literary collaboration to understand how co-authors, translators, editors, publishers, and other mediators have affected creative expression and publication for Indigenous storytellers and writers. The project will document and analyze the collaborative relationships of a number of Indigenous writers in Canada, and will work on individual Indigenous community-led editions of early Indigenous texts in Labrador and British Columbia.
Early Modern Manuscript Sermons 1530-1715: Collaborative Research Applications
Brent Nelson, Anne James, and Jeanne Shami
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2020
Dr. Brent Nelson is co-applicant and collaborator with Dr. Anne James and Dr. Jeanne Shami (Principal Investigator) on the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (GEMMS), a SSHRC-funded project to create an open-access, group-sourced, comprehensive, fully searchable, online bibliographic database of early modern (1530-1715) sermon manuscripts from the British Isles and North America. The database is a finding aid for all types of manuscripts related to sermons, including complete sermons, sermon notes and reports of sermons, held in numerous repositories in the UK, Ireland, the USA and Canada. GEMMS endeavours to make manuscript sermons more accessible for a wide variety of researchers, to encourage research on manuscript sermons and to provide a forum for the development of an online community of sermon scholars.
Implementing Open Scholarship: Foundations for Social Engagement at Scale
Brent Nelson (collaborator)
SSHRC Partnership Grant, 2020
Dr. Brent Nelson is co-applicant and collaborator (with Dr. Ray Siemens, Principal Investigator) in the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, a North American-based research network with the goal of fostering open social scholarship: academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways. Dr. Nelson’s sub-project is on “Prototyping the Literary Archive,” taking digital materials related to poet and preacher John Donne as its case study.
Women of the Apocalypse: Writing the End of the World in Canada
Wendy Roy
Dr. Wendy Roy’s three-year project investigates apocalyptic and dystopian fiction in Canada. It argues that end-of-the-world fiction is a commentary on the present, asking readers to consider environmental, technological, and political developments in the world today, and the devastating impacts these may have on the world of the future. Dystopian and apocalyptic fiction by Canadian women writers explores the nature of understanding and of expressing humanity in a world in crisis, through a focus on the value of language to being human, including various cultural forms, oral and written communication, and what cannot be said.
The Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities
Brent Nelson and Craig Harkema
Dr. Brent Nelson’s three-year project with Craig Harkema of the University Library and collaborators Jon Bath and Lisa Smith explores early modern collectors and collections of curiosities (precursors of the modern museum). Instead of focusing on exchange between owners and collectors, this project puts the emphasis on the objects, to consider how they were understood and regarded in these changing circumstances. Focusing on an extensive body of materials related to collection of curiosities in England and Scotland from 1580-1600, this research uses computer-assisted network analysis to examine the development and definition of these networks of exchange, tracing the “life stories” or “biographies” of these curious objects.
Water, Sand, Steel, and Glass: Urban Ecologies and Literary Speculations
Joanne Leow
SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2017
Dr. Joanne Leow’s two-year project will explore how “nature” is constructed in hypermodern urban sites through their ecologies, and their literary and cultural forms. This multi-site study will examine contemporary cultural and literary texts in conjunction with urban developments in three global, port cities: Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vancouver. These texts will be read in tandem with hyper-modern coastal developments in all three cities that seek to emulate the natural world. The investigation will ask: How have new urban ecologies been constructed and how do literary and cultural forms anticipate or perhaps become retrograde because of these new developments? What alternatives or possibilities are imagined by these texts?
Topographies of Literature in 18th-century London, A Social Edition
Allison Muri
Dr. Allison Muri's four-year project will develop a digital “social edition” of 18th-century London as a network of documents with social, spatial, and textual or artistic relationships. It aims to demonstrate how we might reconceive scholarly editions, and in particular, how a digital environment for reading, annotating, and establishing connections between books, text, images, and maps can establish a framework for editions based on networks and spatial relationships of literature and culture. This research builds on earlier work on “The Grub Street Project” funded by SSHRC and CFI. The edition will ultimately link four main categories of information: printed publications, people, places, and trades.
Buffalo Stories of the International Buffalo Treaty
Tasha Hubbard
SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2016
The goal for Dr. Tasha Hubbard's research project is to raise buffalo consciousness in the northern plains. According to Dr. Leroy Little Bear and other Indigenous elders, the health of both the land and Indigenous communities is dependent on renewing the relationship with the buffalo. The project will explore how the use of digital media can assist in that goal. The research goal is two-fold: to follow the long-term evolution of the Buffalo Treaty, recently signed between ten Indigenous Nations; and to record and respectfully disseminate these Nations’ stories of the buffalo, with the participation and guidance of the Nations’ elders and knowledge keepers. Dr. Little Bear and Amethyst First Rider are the emissaries of the Buffalo Treaty and are collaborators on this project.
Medieval Codes
Yin Liu
Dr. Yin Liu won a SSHRC grant in 2014 for her project, “Medieval Codes.” By drawing on case studies from medieval English writing, the project explores ways in which medieval textualities created the initial environment for information processing in Western societies. For more information, see medievalcodes.ca.
English Manuscript Sermons and Sermon Notes 1530-1715: Interpreting the Archive
Brent Nelson (collaborator)
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2014
Along with co-applicant Dr. Anne James (University of Regina), collaborator Dr. Jon Bath (University of Saskatchewan), and Principal Investigator Dr. Jeanne Shami (University of Regina), Dr. Brent Nelson was a collaborator on a SSHRC-funded project entitled “English Manuscript Sermons and Sermon Notes 1530-1715: Interpreting the Archive.” Dr. Nelson is also a collaborating network investigator on GRAND-NCE (http://grand-nce.ca/), which supports the Digital Humanities project (http://dighum.artsrn.ualberta.ca/).
The Canterbury Tales, Phase 2
Peter Robinson
SSHRC Insight Grant, 2014
Dr. Peter Robinson, appointed to the Reginald Bateman Professorship, was at work on a five-year SSHRC-funded project on The Canterbury Tales. Professor Robinson aimed to complete the transcription of all 88 manuscripts and pre-1500 printed editions of the Canterbury Tales: some 30,000 manuscript pages in all. To achieve this aim, his project deploys crowd-sourcing techniques across some fourteen transcription teams in North America and Europe.
The Note Books of a Woman Alone
Ella Ophir
SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2013
In 2013, Dr. Ella Ophir received a two-year SSHRC grant for a digital edition of The Note Books of a Woman Alone, the personal notebooks of a British single woman living in London between 1914 and 1934. Dr. Ophir’s work on this rare book promises to shed light on the life of an unmarried woman in the early twentieth century. View the book here.