Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Launch of Labirento Press
Laberinto Press, launched in June 2020 by Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, is an independent publishing house from Edmonton, AB. specialized in publishing underrepresented writers from diverse cultural backgrounds living in Canada and World Literature in Translation.
Keep your eyes peeled for the next offering launching October 2020, Beyond the Gallery, an Anthology of Visual Encounters, featuring a Latinx only roster of art historians, writers, editors, and designers. It will be Laberinto’s first bilingual anthology (Spanish-English)
For more information click here
Dr. Olga Michael, Postdoctoral Position
Project Title: ‘Reading-Witnessing the Human Rights Violations of “Others” in Anglophone graphic life narratives’
University of Cyprus September 2020—August 2022
This project examines graphic narratives of the human rights violations of people perceived in the West as ‘others’ to argue for the texts’ usefulness in countering injurious mainstream depictions of ‘otherness’ and of the ‘refugee crisis,’ looking at how comics structure stories that cannot be easily communicated to Western audiences because of spatial, linguistic and cultural distance. It will result in a monograph.
Dr. Adan Jarreat-Poole, Postdoctoral Position
Project Title: “Universe Design: The Crip-Girl Cyborg in Speculative Futures”
School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada) Position start date: Sept. 2020
The project explores the relationship between technology, disability, and feminism — looking at disabled feminist media use as forms of community building and collective care, as well as cripping technology in feminist science fiction and imagining more ethical futures.
Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak, MLA Fellowship
MLA Bibliography Fellowship 2020-2023
Institution : MLA, USA
Fellowships are for a three-year period, beginning 1 July 2021 and ending 30 June 2024. The MLA seeks scholars of any level of seniority interested in training as field bibliography fellows. Click here for more information.
Dr. Ricia Anne Chansky, named a Mellon Fellow and awarded the Oral History Association’s Post-Secondary Teaching Award
In 2020, Ricia Anne Chansky was named a Mellon Fellow on the Humanities Action Lab project, “Climates of Inequality and the Covid Crisis,” and a Mellon Fellow for the “Puerto Rican Disaster Archives.” She was awarded the 2020 Oral History Association Emerging Crisis Grant for her research connecting the aftermaths of Hurricane María with the COVID-19 crisis.
She recently concluded her fellowship with Voice of Witness for the oral history project, “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane,” and will be publishing a book of oral histories from Hurricane María with Haymarket Books (forthcoming 2021). Her children’s book, Maxy Survives the Hurricane / Maxy sobreve al huracán, is forthcoming from the children’s imprint of Arte Público Press, Piñata Books. She received the Oral History Association 2019-2020 Post-Secondary Teaching Award for her work on the “Mi María” project. Chansky will also be featured as a climate justice leader in an upcoming digital exhibition on global crises at the Simon Wiesenthal Center / Museum of Tolerance.
Sonja Boon, Winner of The Royal Society of Canada’s Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies
“The Royal Society of Canada’s Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies is awarded biennially to o recognize significant contributions by a Canadian scholar in the humanities and social sciences to furthering our understanding of issues concerning gender. An inter- and multidisciplinarian, Sonja Boon focuses on gender, identity, and embodiment. Her several books have contributed substantively to a broad range of disciplines, as well as to non-specialist audiences around the globe. Currently her work brings gender, race, bodies and colonial encounters into conversation with weather, erosion and water, offering significant contributions to understanding the ways that gender interacts with social, cultural, political, natural and built environments.”
Orly Lael Netzer, Doctor of Philosophy
Project Title: “Beyond Empathy: Reading, Bearing Witness, and Testimony.”
Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada, October 2020.
Beyond Empathy is a dissertation that explores what it means to bear witness to creative testimony, asking how audiences’ ethical responsibilities and political power are framed, mediated, and enacted. Focusing on testimonies by Indigenous peoples and people seeking asylum in contemporary Canada, this project argues that the prevalent modes of affective recognition merely reflect the dangers of political recognition, as both serve to entrench the very colonial trajectories and legacies that testimony protests. To honour testimony’s relational and ethical imperatives, the project proposes to push beyond empathy and promotes a turn to paratext, providing audiences with tangible strategies that can account for implication in structures of oppression and foster complex modes of response through feminist, Indigenous, and other culturaly situated ethics and praxis of care.
Amanda Spallacci, winner of the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship (2020), and the Equity Diversity and Inclusion Award (2020).
According to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Alberta, the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship is “the most prestigious graduate award administered by the University of Alberta.”
The Equity Diversity and Inclusion Awards celebrate achievement in community service, research, and workplace or classroom environments by members of the University of Alberta campus community. They recognize groups or individuals who have gone above and beyond to demonstrate the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion in activities that support the University’s core value for “diversity, inclusivity, and equity across and among our people, campuses, and disciplines.”