Funded Research

Wanted: A Life Narrative in Deadwood, Laura Beard
SSHRC Insight Grant, (2019-2024)

“Wanted: A Life Narrative in Deadwood” is both a new project and a new research direction, requiring new research methodologies. To gain a deeper insight into how life narratives and heritage tourism may contribute to understanding of the past and the processes of accessing the past, I focus on the 1939 memoir, "Pioneer Days in the Black Hills," by John S. McClintock. My research involves close reading of the memoir, archival work in the Homestake Adams Research and Cultural Center, the Deadwood Public Library and the Deadwood City Archives, interviews with participants and organizers of the Days of 76 events in Deadwood, observations of these heritage tourism events in Deadwood, readings in Black Hills history, and immersion into Deadwood popular culture. The project draws on my expertise and interests in life narrative, the construction of national identities and more, but it requires a more ethnographic and a more archival turn than much of my earlier research.”

Harold De Campos: Innovative Poetics for a Plural World, Odile Cisneros
SSHRC Insight, (2021-2025)

This project proposes a reading of the work of the eminent Brazilian poet, critic, and translator Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003). Widely considered one of the most influential poets and intellectuals to emerge from Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century, he became internationally recognized as a founder of the concrete poetry vanguard in the 1950s. His prolific subsequent oeuvre---over 40 books of poetry, criticism, and translation---spans the literature of the world, from China and Japan to Europe, North and South America, and from ancient Chinese poetry, Homer, and the Bible to Russian Futurism, Anglo-American modernism, and the avant-gardes. Through an ambitious examination of the scope and depth of Campos's critical and creative work, including essays, poetry, and translation, this project aims to shed light on his unique poetics of innovation for a plural world.

RCEH - Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, Odile Cisneros
SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals (2022-2025)

Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (RCEH) was founded in June 1975 as a joint project of Carleton University and the Canadian Association of Hispanists (ACH). Its inaugural issue published in Fall 1976 featured the Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz. RCEH is the ACH’s official publication. Each yearly volume consists of 3 issues. Starting with volume 24, RCEH produces one special and two regular issues per year. Currently volumes span approximately 600 pages, up from 400 in earlier volumes, which speaks to the journal’s academic reach and number of submissions it attracts. From its founding, RCEH’s mandate has been to provide a Canada-based international forum for research exchange and academic inquiry in Hispanic Studies. We welcome a wide range of methods and approaches. Our goal is to showcase high-quality work by both young and established Canadian and international scholars, including exceptionally gifted graduate students. We attract between eighty and one hundred submissions per year from scholars worldwide (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, United States, Turkey, Colombia, etc.). RCEH publishes original articles on Hispanic cultures, including research on the national literatures of Spanish America, Spain, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and, more recently, Spanish African and US Latino culture. Of the circa 100 submissions we receive per year, only 20 are selected for publication (on average, an 80% rejection rate). Articles undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review by two or three top specialists in the field.

Ideologies of English in the Linguistic Landscape, Jennifer Daily – O’Cain
SSHRC Insight Gran, (2023-2025)

People across the world are using English in their daily lives--but how are they doing this, and why? Sociolinguists know differences exist in how people in various societies use English, as well as how they feel about the central role it occupies. In Germany, both the use of English and attitudes towards that use are in flux, making the country a superb "living laboratory" to study this shifting phenomenon while it is in progress. In particular, German young people are driving the emergence of a permissive ideology of English that breaks down its traditional associations with the US and the UK; it is coming to be viewed as a culturally neutral language that anyone may use. More generally, "linguistic landscapes"--or publicly visible language use--are a powerful means to explore the complex interplay of socio-historical and ideological influences on languages (including language policies), and how those influences become anchored within physical space. To better understand the ideologies that shape these dynamics, we will employ an innovative methodology that pairs interactional sociolinguistics with focus group data, tying the analysis of language ideologies directly back to visible language use. This unique integration of techniques will enable us to trace how participants' stances relate specifically to images of the linguistic landscape, while also modelling a novel sociolinguistic research approach. Our results will inform theories of transnational English while also helping sociolinguists better understand the link between language ideologies and linguistic landscapes.

Hacking Our Bodies. A Health Humanities Internship with the OPEN Project Exploring Novel Do-It-Yourself Artificial Pancreas Systems, Dr. Daniel Laforest and PhD student Jonathan Garfinkel
MITACS Accelerate Grant (2021-2023)

Au-delà des 2 solitudes dans le monde canadien des comics, Christian Reyns
SSHRC Insight Grant, (2022-2025)

Hot Flicks in the Cold War, Victoria Ruetalo
SSHRC Insight Grant, (2022-2026)

If "there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation," then why are political ideologies slipping between the sheets with porn stars? In the context of the Cold War, an explosion of films featuring nudity and soft-core sex was produced in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. This developed against the background of growing totalitarian state governments in Latin America with links to the United States' regional agenda. This agenda brought the looming threat of censorship, creating two streams of explicit films: The "hot" versions introduced simulated sex acts and exposed breasts, making their way to Hispanic and sexploitation markets in New York, California, and Texas, and the most alluring of them even to Canada. "Cold" versions with less visible sex scenes and covered bodies were simultaneously distributed to nations with more conservative boundaries. Did censorship only target the sex or was politics also a consideration? To shed light on this under-researched domain, the project will explore the distribution throughout the Americas of 1960s and 1970s Mexican, Argentinean, and Brazilian sex films to understand how sex was used as a tool for ideas, and as Cold warfare.

Public Environmentalism in Post-Socialist Democracies of Central and Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland and Ukraine; Irene Swywenky
SSHRC Insight grant, (2023-2028)

While the pressing environmental issues in the age of the Anthropocene have captured international public attention and are at the forefront of the news as well as political and economic debates, in a geopolitically hierarchized global context not all regions receive equal attention. The environmental legacy of socialism has had a lasting impact on the societies of the former Eastern Bloc, but it is Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine that further brought into focus the vulnerability of the natural environment and the high-stakes interests underlying the control of mineral-rich territories. Its strategic weaponization of fossil fuels, jeopardizing nuclear energy safety, and serious disruptions to global food supply have had reverberations beyond the wider region of Central and Eastern Europe. Environmentalism has been consistently on the rise in the countries of post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe; however, socio-cultural representations of environmental issues in the region have remained on the fringes of the academic discourse and have not been systematically examined. This study addresses this challenge by focusing on the development of public environmentalism in post-socialist Poland and Ukraine.

Canadian Review of Comparative Literature; Irene Sywenky
SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals, (2022-2027)

The first issue of the CRCL/RCLC appeared in the winter of 1974; it is a quarterly (with 4 issues per year) double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly journal that uses both English and French as its main languages. Published on behalf of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association / Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (CCLA/ACLC). The CRCL/RCLC provides a forum for scholars engaged in the study of literature from both an international and an interdisciplinary point of view. The editors define Comparative Literature in the broadest manner. The journal publishes articles on the international history of literature, theory of literature, methods of literary scholarship, the problematics of translated literature and translation studies, literature and the other arts, and the relations of literature with other spheres of human expression. The journal encourages different methodological approaches and interests including new experiments and innovations, welcomes articles on comparisons of the Canadian literatures, promotes the study of literatures beyond the major European literatures and in a global context, publishes issues devoted to special topics, supports articles of an exploratory nature that present new directions of research and new working hypotheses, provides sections such as “Forum” and “Dialogues Across Theory and Practice” that contain contributions on the present state of research in certain areas of Comparative Literature, review articles, and shorter reviews of individual books, particularly those published in Canada and/or by scholars working in Canadian universities. Preference is given to manuscripts of 6000 to 8500 words, but the journal accepts a limited number of substantial studies which treat topics comprehensively. Reviewers of books are encouraged to go beyond reporting and to engage in a critical dialogue with the publications under review. The editorial team has gradually increased the number of topical issues.

Decolonizing the Jesuit Relations from New France, Micah True
SSHRC Insight Grant, (2021-2026)

When politicians, novelists, and scholars want to know what Indigenous people said and thought when French settlers arrived in Canada, they always turn to the Jesuit Relations. These annual reports written by missionaries in what is now eastern and maritime Canada were published in Paris annually for forty years in the 1600s. They have served as inspiration and a source of information for novels like Joseph Boyden's The Orenda (2013), Brian Moore's Black Robe (1985), and William T. Vollman's Fathers and Crows (1992). Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gifted a set of them to the Pope in 2017 while asking for an apology for the Church's role in Canada's residential school system. And new scholarship drawing on them to illuminate Indigenous cultures at the point of first contact with the French appears every year. The value of these texts in documenting Canada's early colonial history is undeniable. And yet, the frequent use of texts written by French priests to bring to light Indigenous perspectives on colonization and other subjects sits uneasily with the current political and cultural moment, in which long-silenced Indigenous voices are increasingly being sought and brought into the conversation in the hope of righting past wrongs. This project reconceives of the Jesuit Relations as the result of dialogue instead of the sole labour of dedicated, scholarly priests. It seeks to account for how the Jesuits' Indigenous interlocutors contributed to the texts, and how those contributions were subsequently masked by missionary authors and editors.