Yara Ajeeb is a Montréal-based writer and artist. With a background in English literature and French studies from Concordia University, she thrives on creative expression and exploration. Born and raised in Syria, Yara enjoys incorporating her culture into everything she does. She is driven by curiosity and a love for storytelling.

Kelly Baron (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto in Canadian Literature. She’s the former publisher of the experimental digital magazine, The Ex-Puritan, and the co-founder and managing director of Siren Recordings, a sonic poetry label and archive that will launch in Fall 2024.

Gregory Betts is a leading scholar on the Canadian avant-garde, the archivization of experimental literature, and the representation of such work in literary histories. He is the author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (University of Toronto Press 2013), editor of 8 books of experimental writing in Canada, co-editor of the forthcoming Avant Canada: Poets, Prophets, Revolutionaries (Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and serves as the current Curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive. He is the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at the University College Dublin and a Professor of English Language and Literature at Brock University.

Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the nexus of contemporary poetry, film and media studies, and digital humanities. She is part of the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) project created by Dr. Tanya Clement. She currently serves as editor for the SpokenWeb Digital Anthology, which seeks to curate, frame, and share literary recordings annotated by SpokenWeb researchers through AudiAnnotate. She is also at work on a book project, Shooting Script: Poetry, Film, and Form, and a digital project, “The Virtual Poem Embodied on Screen,” about Zoom poetry readings as recorded artifacts.

Megan Butchart is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UBC Okanagan, majoring in English and History. She is interested in the discipline of archival studies, including the physical and digital preservation of archival collections. Her work on the SpokenWeb Project includes processing the SoundBox collection of literary audio recordings and developing pedagogical tools to promote active learning and engagement with the archive.

Jason Camlot (PI and Director) brings extensive experience in the development and management of interdisciplinary, collaborative research teams, expertise in literary sound recordings, and has developed digital artifacts including a sound archive, digital poetry installations, and mobile media apps. He will guide the vision of the program, foster productive working relationships among network participants, help shape and articulate the goals of projects as they are pursued by working groups, facilitate collaboration across institutions, disciplines and communities, advocate for the project in all contexts, and ensure productive and rewarding experiences for students and emerging scholars.

Sarah Cipes is the AMP Lab PRC fellow and a PhD Candidate in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her research combines audio digitization, vocal studies and humour philosophy, and incorporates recorded comedic performances. She has contributed to digitization efforts with the British Columbia Regional Digitized History project. Sarah graduated with a master’s degree in information science (Archives and Record Management focus) from the University of Toronto in 2021. She acknowledges that she lives and works on Syilx Okanagan territory.

Tanya Clement brings necessary expertise in digital sound technologies, data searching and visualization in relation to literary audio corpora, and software development for sound pattern searching.

Constance Crompton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. She co-directs the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project with Michelle Schwartz (Ryerson University) and directs the University of Ottawa’s Humanities Data Lab. She also serves as an associate director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (Victoria). She will be working with Dr. Felicity Tayler on models for linked data integration in Spoken Web.

Cecily Devereux brings extensive knowledge of U Alberta’s collection of cassette and reel-to-reel recordings of Canadian writers from her ten years of work in developing and cataloguing that collection.

Dr. Kristine Dizon is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2026) at Concordia University–Montréal in the Department of English and a Carlos Miguel Prieto Fellow at OAcademy (2025). She is an acclaimed clarinetist, conductor, and entrepreneur. Kristine has taught and performed worldwide, served on international juries, and released award-winning albums. Holding a PhD in Cultural Studies from Universidade Católica Portuguesa, she is also a Fulbright and FCT Scholar. Visit her website at www.kristinedizon.com.

Rebecca Dowson’s research focus on the intersection of libraries and digital humanities, digital cultural heritage projects, and new forms of scholarly publishing will contribute to these three important areas of the program.

Garin Fahlman is an MA student at Simon Fraser University in the English Department. He is studying print culture history with a particular interest early Internet archiving. With SpokenWeb, he is able to further explore and develop digital and multimedia archival practices.

Patrick Feaster, Media Preservation Specialist for Media Digitization and Preservation at Indiana U, Bloomington, Co-Founder of the First Sounds Initiative, and immediate Past President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, contributes significant expertise in the history and digital study of historical spoken recordings.

Nina Fesenko is an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University, pursuing a double-major in English and Communication, along with a minor in Creative Writing. Her interests lie in interdisciplinary fields such as science communication and comparative literature, as she looks to explore the murky territory of where humanistic disciplines converge with one another, and with the social and natural sciences.

Sarah Freeman is an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta, studying English with a minor in Computing Science. Some of her interests include humanities computing, time-based media, and literary sound studies. She is excited to be joining the SpokenWeb team as a Research Assistant.

Carole Gerson brings extensive knowledge of Canadian literature and Canadian book history, and experience in the creation of Canadian digital heritage resources pertaining to these fields to our research program.

Adam Hammond brings expertise in computational humanities and literary modernism.

Maia Harris is an FRQSC-funded MA student at Concordia University in the English Literature program focusing on literary theory. With a passion for cognitive perspectives in the humanities and social sciences, her thesis research concerns readerly physiology. Maia also nourishes a deep love for absurdism, postmodern theory, and sound. Apart from her scholarly research, Maia’s creative work has been published in Bloom Literary Magazine (Red Penguin Press), AZE Journal, the UC Review, DEMO Music Magazine, and most recently The Lamp Literary Journal.

Steven High, co-founder of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, has spent numerous years on the development of digital tools that will facilitate the analysis of recorded oral history interviews at varying scales, has developed oral literary history techniques with the PI, and will provide leadership on the oral history component of our program.

UBCO Library’s Archivist and Indigenous Studies Subject Librarian, Paige Hohmann is responsible for the campus’s Okanagan Special Collections and Archives. Her expertise is in the best practices in digitization and representation of primary source materials in an electronic environment, and archival education for historical researchers. She is also a project coordinator for Digitized Okanagan History (DOH), a community outreach project which aims to capture and provide web access to under-utilized archival materials

Ben Hynes is a poet and project manager from Newfoundland and Labrador. Having completed his undergraduate work in his home province, he attended Concordia in 2009 to complete his Master’s degree in English, focusing on Creative Writing. After completing his MA, he ventured West to the Pacific and Simon Fraser University to pursue doctoral studies in poetry. Following his time at SFU, he worked for nearly 5 years as a project coordinator in the construction industry. While working at an engineering consulting firm, he was responsible for scheduling, drafting, executing, and delivering construction documents and studies for over 200 construction projects simultaneously. He acted as the focal point for coordination between the internal engineering team and various external stakeholders, including private-public partnerships, local governments, real estate developers, and private individuals. Here, he gained valuable insight into the flexibility, resilience, and practicality of the strengths and skills he honed during his academic career. He also learned how to somewhat wrangle engineers, which he attests is almost as daunting as poet-wrangling, speaking from experience of years of trying to wrangle himself.  Ben is thrilled to return to a creative and scholarly environment and feels his arrival in Montreal as SpokenWeb’s new project manager represents a return to the field of work and activity he values most.

Chris Ick is a M.S. candidate at NYU’s Center for Data Science, with a focus in music and audio research. His research experience lies primarily in astrophysical data analysis, and has prior experience writing technical manuals and designing educational experiments within NYU’s undergraduate physics program. He plans to work with Prof. Brian McFee to build training materials for spoken work computational analysis techniques, and will use his history developing tutorials and writing signal analysis code to help further the projects long-term goals.

Bio coming soon.

Smaro Kamboureli brings expertise in the areas of Canadian literature, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and theory to our program.  She will initiate research on diasporic voices in literary archives of recorded sound. She is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto.

Linara Kolosov is an MA student at Simon Fraser University in the English Department. As a member of the SpokenWeb team, she hopes to combine her interest in Print Culture studies, poetry, and research while working with the extensive collection in SFU Special Collections.

Michelle Levy (Co-applicant), Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at SFU, brings a strong theoretical background in literary and sound studies, and extensive expertise in data architecture and management that will prove useful for our creation of metadata standards necessary for the aggregation of diverse corpora of recorded literary readings.

Jasmin Macarios is currently a master’s student at uOttawa in information science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations and an MA in anthropology. Currently, she does research on audio digitization and data ethics with the uOttawa library, as well as on neurodivergent accessibility with Carleton University.

Marit MacArthur contributes expertise in voice studies with a focus on the quantification and perception of performative speech patterns and the development and use of digital tools for the analysis of audiotexts.

Corina MacDonald is a PhD Candidate in the Communication Studies department of Concordia University. Her doctoral research explores networked scholarly communication practices in the humanities, using the institutional repository as a site of inquiry to explore relationships between publishing, academic labour, and research infrastructure. As a research assistant with Spoken Web she manages the migration of data into the Swallow2 metadata management system.

Michael MacKenzie is a PhD Student in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, studying the circulation of desires for neotenous embodiment and physical growth resistance in youth across literature, film, video games, and medical discourses. His interests are in psychoanalysis, Do-It-Yourself trans* and queer studies, and speculative fiction.

Thomas “TJ” MacPherson received his MA in English at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is currently enrolled in the English PhD program at Concordia University. His main research interest is in media archeology. Most of his projects such as trying to 3D print a replica of a typewriter from 1910 or creating a podcast and website about celebrating material collections start with the question “what makes this thing so cool?” In his free time he can be found trying to buy fountain pens he will never write with, instruments he can’t play, or cameras he will never shoot with.

Brian McFee is Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Data Science at NYU Steinhardt and the NYU Center for Data Science. He holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science (2003) from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and M.S. (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California at San Diego.

His research lies at the intersection of machine learning, signal processing, and information retrieval, with the overarching goal of developing algorithms to expose latent structure in recorded audio. He is an active developer of open source scientific software, and is the primary maintainer of the librosa package for audio content analysis.

Dr. McFee’s primary contribution to the project will be to design and develop materials for a training workshop on computational analysis of spoken word audio recordings.  In service of this, he plans to recruit a student (masters level) to assist with developing materials and software, which will be of general benefit to the project in the long term.

https://bmcfee.github.io/

Katherine McLeod is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, in the Department of English at Concordia University. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded IDG project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research,” and as part of that project she is writing a book that is a feminist listening to poets on the radio. She has co-edited with Jason Camlot a recent special issue of English Studies in Canada, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” Along with being the managing editor of SPOKENWEBLOG, she co-hosts The SpokenWeb Podcast and she produces the series ShortCuts.

Follow @kathmcleod and check out the site she curates for Montreal readings at WherePoetsRead.ca and @poetsread.

Bio coming soon.

Marjorie Mitchell is the Copyright, Scholarly Communication and Research Data Management Librarian at UBC’s Okanagan Campus. She brings her expertise is in Research Data management to Spoken Web.

Chelsea Miya is an Assistant Professor in the Culture and Technology Studies program and the School of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the cultural history of data with a focus on data ethics, modelling data through visuals and sound, and practices of sonic surveillance.

Nick Mount’s expertise in Canadian letters, and in 1960s Canadian culture, will be invaluable for deciphering the contents of our partner collections. A 3M Teaching Award recipient, and long-time teacher of the course “Literature in Our Time” which integrated readings and conversation with contemporary authors into the curriculum, he will also provide insight on teaching with literary recordings.

Emily Christina Murphy researches digital humanities, 20th-century literature, networks, and movement with a focus on culture and technology that spans these fields. In July 2018, she joined the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia—Okanagan as Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, following a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria with the Linked Modernisms project. She contributes two projects to SpokenWeb. With Dr. Katherine McLeod she collaborates on research creation approaches to dance, poetry, and sound in the archives. With Dr. Karis Shearer and the pedagogy task force, she studies the way that Spoken Web bridges data and archives approaches to pedagogy into the classroom, integrating this study into the Modernist Pedagogy Platform.

Chris Mustazza’s experience in curating and developing PennSound will contribute expertise on the acquisition of hidden collections, and the presentation and use of literary sound recordings in accessible digital environments.

Tomasz Neugebauer brings significant expertise in open digital repositories, information visualization, and open source software development.

Moji Nourafkan is an MA student at Simon Fraser University in the Education Department with a background in Computer Engineering. She has experience of working in an Education Technology team as a CALL (Computer-assisted Language Learning) expert. She was involved in producing education software, particularly for language acquisition purposes. She also has 5 years teaching experience in the ESL field and has been working as an ESL instructor in Canada since 2018.

Tony Power’s extensive knowledge of the Contemporary Literature Collection at SFU, including hundreds of hours of literary audio recordings, will contribute to work on the SFU literary audio holdings.

Louis Rastelli (collaborator) brings extensive experience in the development of a community-focused archive, and will contribute to the digital development of ARCMTL’s holdings, as well as to community outreach and dissemination activities.

Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016) and editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011). He also co-curated “How We Read: A Sensory History of Books for Blind People,” a public exhibition held at the UK’s first annual Being Human festival. He expertise in the history of literature, sound studies, and media history.

Faith Ryan is working on the SpokenWeb project as an RA under Jentery Sayers at the University of Victoria.

Faith is an English MA student at the University of Victoria. She is interested in contemporary culture and politics. Her research aims to investigate representations of autism and the work of autistic writers in the genre of speculative fiction. When she is not reading or writing she is usually eating baked goods or gardening with her three chickens.

Aphrodite Salas is a journalist and professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her most recent work is a short documentary and multimedia collaboration with Canadian Television (CTV) called: “from shore to sky: a reconciliation story.” She is a trained workshop facilitator on issues of combating misinformation and disinformation in news through the international organization Journalists for Human Rights. Aphrodite is also a research associate at the Concordia University Acts of Listening Lab, a member of the national board of directors of the Canadian International Council and a regular member of the Concordia Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism Studies. Her experience as a journalist is extensive, having worked as a national reporter, video journalist and assignment editor at CTV, a senior anchor at Global Quebec and a Parliamentary Correspondent for CityTV Toronto and Vancouver.

Shreya Savant (from Kolhapur, India) is an MITACS-funded graduate research student in the CIISE department at Concordia University. She is currently working on her thesis in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. Contributing to the SpokenWeb project as a Front-End Developer, she is passionate about building accessible, inclusive, and diverse projects. In her free time, she enjoys music, reading and swimming.

Dr. Jentery Sayers researched, published, and taught in the areas of sound studies, media studies, digital studies, and modernist and contemporary literature since 2008. He is experienced in the design and implementation of digital tools for literary and cultural analysis as well as the use of sound and audio as modes of scholarly engagement. As a SpokenWeb project co-investigator, he will be involved in developing the pedagogical elements of the SpokenWeb project.

Maya Schwartz is an MA student at Simon Fraser University in the English Department. Her research interests are in contemporary poetry and poetics. She hopes to explore affect through archive and sound in her research with SpokenWeb and SFU Special Collections.

Karis Shearer, Director of the AMP Lab and the SoundBox Collection, Shearer is an associate professor at UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. She leads SpokenWeb’s Pedagogy Task Force and contributes expertise in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture. She acknowledges that she lives and works on Syilx Okanagan territory.

Lauren St. Clair is an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, studying Computer Science and Data Science. Lauren is interested in data science and its intersections within the digital humanities. She has acted as Events Coordinator for the Quantitative Sciences Course Union (QSCU) and will act as QSCU President for the 2019-20 academic year. Lauren is conducting UX research to inform web development for SpokenWeb. She will also work on the development of the UBCO SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection page.

Felicity Tayler, MLIS, PhD is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa. She is an occasional visual artist and curator, and has published scholarly writing related to literary archives in anthologies, and in venues such as the Journal of Canadian Art History,Canadian Literature, and Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture.

Asia Tyson is an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria, majoring in English, and a member of The Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, directed by Dr. Jentery Sayers.

Kayleigh Voss is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is pursuing a master’s in Information Studies and a master’s in English literature. In addition to working with SpokenWeb, Kayleigh is a graduate research assistant at UT’s Harry Ransom Center. She’s interested in promoting access to and greater understanding of archival material, especially with digital tools.

Darren Wershler’s expertise in Contemporary Poetics, Media history and theory, digital humanities, copyright, and in questions of digital economy, will be of benefit to critical and digital aspects of the program.

Jason Wiens’ expertise and program work focus on Canadian poetry and teaching with archives.

Jared Wiercinski’s contributions will focus on interface design and tools for the presentation and use of digitized literary audio.

Trent Wintermeier is a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is working as a Graduate Research Assistant for the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) project created by Dr. Tanya Clement. His research focuses on the integration of digital information and communication technologies in Cultural Rhetorics and Popular Culture & Cultural Studies.

Mahshid is currently a first-year M.A. student in the Digital Arts and Humanities Interdisciplinary Graduate program at UBC’s Okanagan campus. She comes from a background in Computer Science and is interested in audio signal processing and music information retrieval. She has joined the team to research the methods of processing the content of the literary recordings collected by SpokenWeb.

Shannon Bain has started her new role as a SpokenWeb Graphic/ Web Designer, housed at Concordia University. This role Shannon is an interdisciplinary designer from Montréal. She helps organizations build authentic identities to launch impactful projects, with human-centred design thinking at the heart of all of her work. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Design at Concordia University.

Mahtab Banihashemi is a Master of Building Engineering Student at Concordia University with a background in Architecture. She gained a professional Project Management and Facility Management experience during her involvement in successful projects such as improving the performance of Concordia building elevators.

Currently, as a SpokenWeb Office Interior Designer, she implements interior designs and performs design feasibility assessments and cost estimation. As a SpokenWeb Project Associate, she plays an active role in mobilizing events under the supervision of Yuliya Kondratenko, SpokenWeb Project Manager.

Ali Barillaro is a second year Master’s student in English Literature at Concordia University with previous degrees in both photography and education. As a member of the SpokenWeb student team, she has worked on processing and cataloguing the Words and Music Show collection and has been researching audience response in the context of recordings of poetry readings. She also works as our social media manager, so be sure to come say hi on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

Ahlam Bavi is a conceptual artist, industrial designer, and a digital humanist. Ahlam’s visual artworks consist of conceptual sonic sculptures, digital remediate artworks, 3D calligraphy, and algorithmic 3D printed sculptures.

Nick Beauchesne studies the poetics of mysticism and modernist periodical culture as a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is also a poet, vocalist, and performance artist. Nick thoroughly enjoys honing his craft listening to the spectral voices preserved on magnetic tape through the efforts of the SpokenWeb project!

Evan Berg is an emerging artist based in Kelowna, British Columbia. He holds a certificate in Documentary Film Production from Capilano University and is working on a BFA in Visual Art at UBC Okanagan. He is interested in digital cultures and their role in contemporary life. He explores this theme through the mediums of video, sculpture, sound, animation and installation. As an RA for the SpokenWeb project, Evan has produced artistic work and design including co-creation of the SpokenWeb logo. Evan has exhibited work both locally and internationally.

Teddie Brock is an MA student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, theories of listening, and the relationship between urban space and digital infrastructure.

Judith (Judee) Burr is a MA Candidate in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Her research uses audio media and storytelling tools to examine the complexities of human culture in fire-adapted landscapes, connecting to the rich world of the digital environmental humanities. She has worked as an environmental researcher and writer on projects including the Value of Rhode Island Forests report and the Forestry for RI Birds project. She also co-founded the live lit reading series Stranger Stories in Providence. She graduated with a BS in Earth Systems and a BA in Philosophy in 2012 from Stanford University, where she contributed to the podcasts Generation Anthropocene and Philosophy Talk.

Alexandre Bustamante is a second-year Master of Design student at Concordia University with previous degrees in both Architecture and Design Arts. As a member of the SpokenWeb team, he works as a UX (user experience) Designer for the Archive of the Digital Present project, facilitating a participative, user-centred design for the online platform. Besides that, he researches interactive and playful tools for education on the topic of digital media literacy and disinformation awareness.

Digital Arts and Humanities graduate student Craig Carpenter is an AMP Lab Research Assistant and co-producer of the second season of the Soundbox Signals podcast. A storyteller, poet, folk and experimental musician and sound designer, over the past two decades Craig worked as a journalist, production sound mixer, a literary editor, field recordist, foley artist and carnival photographer. A deep interest in the intersection of sound, spirituality, listening and voice, his graduate work will explore through new digital oral histories and archival analog recordings, the influence of the medium of magnetic tape on the 1950s-60s TISH and Black Mountain poets. He currently lives and serves at the Vipassana meditation centre in the mountains outside Merritt, BC.

Atmaza is a fourth-year BA student majoring in Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. She is an international student from Singapore and is currently living as an uninvited guest on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Syilx Okanagan Peoples. Atmaza is interested in researching India’s decolonial feminist and queer thoughts/movements that lie within the country’s history, geography, cultures, and bodies. Through her engagement with various campus partners, Atmaza strives to make space for intersectional voices within academia and advocacy. She has also contributed to the book Practicing Social Justice in Libraries (Routledge, 2022) by examining her experience of doing social justice work within colonial institutions. Her chapter, co-written with Sajni Lacey and Taya Jardine, is called “Creating EDI Internships within the Academic Library — A Case Study.” Atmaza loves spending her time reading books, watching Korean dramas, and wishing that she could own a cat.

Jon Corbett is a nehiyaw-Métis digital media artist, computer programmer, and expert in supply chain and logistics systems. He earned a Diploma of Fine Art from MacEwan University (Edmonton, AB), a BFA from the University of Alberta (Edmonton, AB), an MFA from the University of British Columbia – Okanagan (Kelowna, BC), and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in IGS Digital Art and Humanities at UBCO.

Jon’s Ph.D. research focuses on Indigenous cultural representation in programming languages. As part of this work, he has defined an Indigenous Computing Framework, developed a culturally informed keyboard for Plains Cree, and constructed a digital storytelling platform that includes a computer programming language that uses the Cree language and syllabary.

Jon’s visual artworks are computational reimaginings of traditional Indigenous culture art forms, algorithmic visualization of big data sets, and explorations in decolonial computing.

Professionally, Jon had a career with United Parcel Service, spanning almost three decades. He is an expert in developing decentralized web and cloud-based logistics portals, visualization, and automation of business supply chains, and integrating big data analysis to promote and improve models of predictive logistics and digital twinning.

Kelly Cubbon is a current student in Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing program. She is a content marketing specialist and perpetual history nerd who is passionate about the transformational power of storytelling in environmental, disability, and social justice.

Diya Dekhar-Powell is a third-year undergraduate, completing an Hons. B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Film Studies. Although she was born and raised in London, her French-Algerian and Jamaican roots have led her to develop a keen interest in Afro-centrism in both film and literature. She is also a representative for the Black Student Council at Concordia University.

Miranda Eastwood is a Montreal-based transmedia artist studying towards their master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Focused on sound design, they are developing a radio drama for their thesis, and is the audio engineer for the SpokenWeb Podcast.

Aida Eftekhari has started her new role as a SpokenWeb Project Associate, housed at Concordia University. This role will closely work with the Project Management Team led by Yuliya Kondratenko, SpokenWeb Project Manager.

Aida is currently pursuing a Master of Engineering degree focused on Project Planning and Management at Concordia University. She also has a B.A. in Architectural Engineering and Design Management.

Ian Ferrier brought expertise in coordination and collaboration among literary community organizations relevant to our program.

SpokenWeb Mourns the Loss of Ian Ferrier

Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where her research project, “Towards an Ethics of Listening in Literary Study” intersects the fields of Oral History and Literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices. She directs the digital archive of Fred Wah, and has done significant cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Roy Kiyooka. Her critical work appears in the recent publications Canlit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Pictura: Essays on the Works of Roy Kiyooka (Guernica Editions, 2020). With Karis Shearer, she co-edited Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks, 2020).

Theodore Fox is an Undergraduate Student at Concordia, studying English and Creative Writing, whose research interests include collaborative learning, book clubs, science fiction, and gamer utopianism. He’s the author of five chapbooks of poetry, and was the 2015-2016 Writer in Residence at Latitude 53 Gallery. Theodore is also a 2022 Undergraduate Fellow at the Milieux Institute, researching collaborative learning in Minecraft for the Media History Research Centre.

Julie M. Funk is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. Her research interests are in posthumanism, biopolitics, and biohacking, focusing on digital interventions on body-as-text. She completed her MA in Experimental Digital Media at the University of Waterloo. Julie’s background in English equips her with a critical lens to evaluate rhetorics of remediation, taxonomizing and archiving.

Frances Grace Fyfe is an MA student in English at Concordia University. As a Research Assistant, she has treated metadata in the Archive of the Digital Present, digitized tapes for the Words & Music collection, and produced audio for the SpokenWeb podcast. She is interested in the history of poetry and poetics, reading, writing, and listening. Her master’s thesis-in-progress treats communication difficulties in modern poetry—how poets represent what is too hard to say in the first place.

Deserae Gogel is an M.A. English candidate at UBC’s Okanagan campus, where her research focuses on performance and on social justice and/in contemporary Canadian theatre. She completed a B.A. and B.Ed. in English at the University of Lethbridge (2016), after which she taught at the high school level in Canada and England. Deserae will be contributing to the pedagogy task force by facilitating the SpokenWeb “Press Play Workshops Series” in the AMP Lab at UBCO, and conducting research on pedagogy and the digital archive.

Bio coming soon.

Samantha Greco is a first year MI student at the Faculty of Information, specializing in Archives and Records Management with a collaboration in Book History and Print Culture studies. She has a background in English and Drama Production (sound design), which grounds her research in literature and sound studies. Her research is currently focused on an exploration of the modernist period in relation to digitally archived oral histories to examine how audio artifacts add layers to written texts and play a role in archival memory making. 

Bio coming soon.

Stefan Higgins is a Research Assistant for Dr. Jentery Sayers, at the University of Victoria, and a second year MA student in English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. His research is at the intersections of cultural studies, new media studies, and image studies. He is currently working on a thesis that intersects a genealogy of “memes” with academic narratives about “science” and “culture.”

Xiao Xuan / Sherry Huang is a poet whose work expands through sound, performance, and printed matter. As an M.F.A. student in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBCO, she is currently writing a collection of lyric fragments accompanied by a series of screen-printed broadsides.

Her first full-length book of poetry and auto-theory, titled Love Speech, was published by Metatron Press in 2019. Her ongoing research interests include: “reparative reading” practices (coined by Eve Sedgwick,) literary aurality, écriture féminine, and love.

Manami Izawa is an undergraduate student at Concordia University, pursuing her passion for industrial design. She has professional experience in education and graphic design. Her goal is to help create a better user experience with her background in B.A. of Linguistics, certificate of Pedagogy and Graphic Design.

Rohan Ben Joseph is a second-year undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University, majoring in Computing Science and Linguistics. He is interested in Natural Language Processing and Data Analysis. He has experience as a research assistant for the SFU iXLabs working on Human-computer interaction under Dr. Parmit Chilana. His research on Software Daemons and Background Processes was published in the SFU Scientific Undergraduate Research Journal. He is currently working on Metadata processing and data visualisation in the SpokenWeb Project. He enjoys spending his spare time performing spoken word poetry, playing Minecraft and taking care of Artemis, his pet cocker spaniel.

Richard Kim is an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis studying Computer Science and Linguistics. He has experience as a research assistant for the Computational Linguistics Lab under Dr. Kenji Sagae and Language, Multimodal and Interaction Lab under Dr. Zhou Yu. In addition, he worked as a student developer for Data Science Initiative and Information Educational Technology. Currently, Richard is involved in two grant projects, a NEH grant project (Tools for Listening to Text-in-Performance) and a SSHRC Partnership grant project (Spoken Web), designing programs to assist in editing poetry recordings, provide data analysis and visualization, and calculate new methods for analyzing pitch and timing in speech. His research interests include natural language processing, acoustic analysis, and human-computer interaction. In his spare time, he enjoys playing soccer, reading, and taking naps.

Wade Klaver works for research computing at UBC’s Okanagan campus serving researchers there as well as the greater research community at UBC. Wade began his career in Canada’s oil and gas sector, eventually coming to UBC after more than a decade spent with various high tech start-ups in the Okanagan Valley where he worked in several technical and managerial roles.

A science enthusiast from an early age, Wade’s varied interests and technology experience have prepared him well as a science communicator, effectively bridging the gap between science and technology on one hand and laymen and, whenever possible, the young, on the other.

Bio coming soon.

“Ariel Kroon is a recent graduate of U of A. Her PhD thesis studied narratives of crisis in Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction from 1948-1989, and what contemporary Canadians can learn from them. She is interested in the ways that the attitudes of the past shape our future-oriented imaginaries and actions in the present. She has published in SFRA Review and The Goose, and is currently a non-fiction editor at Solarpunk Magazine. Research interests of hers include post-humanist feminist theory and philosophy, ecocriticism, and solarpunk. Connect with her on YouTube, at Academia.edu, or her personal blog.”

Yasaman Lotfizadeh is a Digital Arts and Humanities student at UBC Okanagan. She is a professional Graphic Designer and Art History enthusiast with five years of experience as a university lecturer. Her current study focuses on applying DH theories and tools in connection with the sixteenth-century Persian illustrated manuscripts. Yasaman is the manager of the AMP Lab at UBCO, collaborating both with the SpokenWeb and the Aga Khan Gardens Projects.

Eva Lu, currently an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, will soon be pursuing graduate studies at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information in the Library Concentration. She is interested in the circulation and preservation of information, especially those that are digital.

Cole Mash is a PhD student Simon Fraser University in the English department. His poetry has been published in Forget Magazine, The Eunoia Review, Papershell, and OK Magpie and his critical work has been published in Scholarly and Research Communication. He has worked on a number of major digital research projects as both RA and investigator. He is co-executive director of non-profit organization The Inspired Word Café and Managing Director of Kelowna Poetry Slam. His work centres on Performance Poetry in the traditions of Spoken Word and Slam, and their exclusion from the critical canon. Through digital methods, he hopes to bring that work into the canon whiles simultaneously studying how performance poets notate the paralinguistics of performance onto the page. Currently he is working in the Contemporary Literature Collection (CLC) at SFU’s Special Collections, and cataloguing the current collection of sound.

Jennifer McDevitt (she/her) is an MLIS/MA Digital Humanities candidate at the University of Alberta. Her research investigates how rural public libraries might use young adult fiction featuring social activism narratives to engage with youth and empower them to actively create change in their communities. For SpokenWeb, she works on metadata and website interface design.

Samuel Mercier is finishing a PhD at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the linguistic divide in Québécois and Canadian literary histories. He published the poetry collection Les Années de guerre (2014) at the Éditions de l’Hexagone and his next book is set to be published next fall. He was Chief Editor of Magazine Spirale, is a nonfiction critic for Lettres Québécoises and a frequent writer for Nouveau Projet. His fields of interest are Québec literature, nationalism studies and cultural history. He will be developing the French archives for SpokenWeb​ while working on a audiotextual history of poetry events in Montreal focusing on francophone performances.

Kate Moffatt is a recent graduate of the MA program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research interests lie primarily with women’s pedestrianism in the Romantic period, and she brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.

Zach Morrison is a PhD student in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His research interests include late twentieth century American culture and criticism, psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic theory, anti-psychiatry, and affect theory.

Erin O’Neil is a white settler living in amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton) on Treaty 6 and Métis territory. She is in her second year as a master’s student in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, specializing in Gender & Social Justice Studies and is the 2020 Wikipedian in Residence for University of Alberta Library. Her research interests centre on how the phenomena of apathy and ignorance have evolved in digital spaces. As a research assistant with SpokenWeb, she will be supporting the creation of a SpokenWest project website.

Aaron Obedkoff is in his first year in the MA Literature program at Concordia, where he studies the intersection of geography and politics in contemporary American literature.

Faith Paré is a third-year undergraduate completing an Hons. B.A. in English and Creative Writing with a minor in Art History at Concordia University. Her current research interests include Black interdisciplinary poetics, Afro- and Indigenous futurisms, and archival studies. She is also a poet, receiving the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2020 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers.

Rachel Pickard is a settler on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Syilx/Okanagan People and is completing a Bachelor of Arts in English and Cultural Studies at UBC Okanagan. She is currently holding an executive position in the Cultural Studies Course Union and works for The Phoenix News, UBC Okanagan’s student newspaper. In 2022, Rachel had the honour and privilege of receiving an Undergraduate Research Award and the Sharron Simpson Family Community Engagement Endowment Fund, providing her with an opportunity to pursue her interests in oral histories and sound by researching and creating a multimedia digital edition of The Pocket Desert radio documentary under the supervision of Dr. Emily Murphy and Dr. Kerrie Charnley as well as a series of blog posts documenting her findings, learning, and research. Rachel is thrilled to be joining the AMP Lab and the SpokenWeb team as an Undergraduate Research Assistant.

Isabelle Devi Poirier is an undergraduate student at Concordia University pursing a major in Journalism and a double minor in Professional Writing and Law and Society. Her interests include researching the evolving media landscape and social justice. As a research assistant, she creates and edits audio/visual content for the SpokenWeb website.

Stéphanie Ricci is a fourth-year undergraduate student completing a journalism major with a sociology minor at Concordia University. She is responsible for planning, implementing and monitoring SpokenWeb’s social media strategy and elevate its online presence as the social media coordinator. Passionate about storytelling in all forms, Stéphanie is particularly interested in writing about arts and culture and creating original content. She previously worked as a student-reporter and researcher for the Institute for Investigative Journalism, as a staff writer for The Link and as a volunteer copy editor for Her Campus Media. She has also interned at CityNews Montreal in summer 2020 assisting producers and reporters in midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Andrew Roberge is a Research Assistant working towards his MA in English at Concordia. His personal research interests include contemporary poetry and intersectional trans studies.

Eden Rosenbloom is in her final year of her undergrad in English Literature at Concordia. As a research assistant for SpokenWeb, she works to create the online catalogue of SpokenWeb’s AMPLab physical media. She has keen interests in ecopoetics and folk music, has recently rediscovered her long-lost loves of baking and painting, and spends a good amount of her time walking in tree-covered spaces and wondering about how art can save the world. 

Ariella Ruby (of Ottawa, Canada) is a second-year prose fiction student in the MA Creative Writing program at Concordia University. When she is not being the social media coordinator at Spoken Web or “working on her thesis, as such,” she can be found over at Headlight being a fiction editor, in a classroom being a TA and/or an active seminar participant, or, possibly, in a coffee shop or a park somewhere, letting her mind wander/ponder. She likes to write, read, and hear about/listen to what other people are writing or reading at any given time.

Megan Ryland is completing her Master of Arts in Educational Studies at UBC. Her thesis focuses on media and digital literacy, informal learning, Twitter, and hashtag activism. Her work as a research assistant for Dr. Hannah McGregor (SFU) supports the production of a literary podcast that will act as a public platform for distributing the audio and analysis created or surfaced from archives as part of SpokenWeb.

Hannah Sabourin is a social media coordinator. She works with journalists and crafts social media posts to spread the word about SpokenWeb. Hannah is a Journalism Graduate student at Concordia University. She also has B.A. degree in English Literature from the University of Ottawa. During her undergraduate degree, she interned with various communications teams at the Government of Canada. She also worked as an editor for the Fulcrum. Now, she writes for The Link and The Concordian.

Alex Sanchez is a Research Assistant and MA student of English & Film at the University of Alberta. He graduated cum laude from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, with a B.A. in English Literature and Society and a minor in American Studies. His personal research interests include zoopoetics, empirical ecocriticism, and the intersection of paleontology and cultural studies. He also has experience in ESL, having taught in Prague for five years.

Bindu Shankara Reddy is a graduate student at Concordia University pursuing Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is currently a Project Associate in the Spokenweb project. Her goal is to take up teaching profession and to do research in Integrated Circuits. She has also interest in History and Geography.

Bio coming soon.

Angus Tarnawsky is an artist, researcher, audio engineer and PhD student at Concordia University. His research-creation practice focuses on understanding diverse listening orientations to offer generative possibilities for engaging with issues of cultural representation and settler colonialism. For his doctoral project, he is working on site-specific sound installations that productively ‘unsettle’ common spaces in the built environment. As part of SpokenWeb, he currently coordinates an online sound map and is working to facilitate the production of handmade lathe-cut records for future projects.

Amy Thiessen is an undergraduate student in English at UBCO, and an RA for SpokenWeb as the UBCO team project manager with particular focus on pedagogy and research creation. She is interested in studying poetry, and its relationship with the digital audio world.

Catalina Torres-Benjumea, an Edmonton-based communications professional, has experience as a bilingual publisher and book editor focusing on Latin American markets. Currently pursuing an MA in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, as a Research Assistant at SpokenWeb, is actively exploring minimal computing as a decolonizing tool. She integrates her editorial skills and artistic passion, delving into critical cataloging and intersectional feminism to further decolonization efforts in Prison Literature. Her career spans roles as an independent editor, ghostwriter, and Senior Editor/Publisher.

Safi Ullah is a full-stack developer and a dedicated student pursuing his Masters in Computer Science at Concordia University. Hailing from Pakistan, his work includes in developing adaptive and personalized learning solutions for students based on machine learning. Armed with a passion for creating web development, he is thrilled to leverage his skills in making our digital landscape more dynamic and accessible.

Leah Van Dyk (she/her) holds a PhD in English Literature (University of Calgary, 2023) and works for Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary. She is a member of the UCalgary SpokenWeb team and is coordinating the 2024 SpokenWeb Conference to be held at the University of Calgary.

Varshini Vankayalapati is a graduate student in Software Engineering at Concordia University. She was born and raised in India. For two years she worked as a Software Developer at JP Morgan Chase & Co. During her two years with Chase she was able to become a full stack engineer and scrum master. Reading, cooking, and travelling are some of her favourite pastimes. She enjoys meeting new people and learning about different perspectives.

Caitlin Voth holds a Master’s in English with a research focus in print culture and Canadian small and private presses. She is the AMP Lab manager and an RA on the SpokenWeb project who works on branding and design, including the SpokenWeb logo. In her spare time, she works in her own letterpress print shop and runs Bite Harder Press.

Isabella Wang is a second-year undergrad, pursuing a double major in English and World Literature at SFU. Her research interests include studies in contemporary eco and urban poetics, Persian and Urdu poetry, poetry in translation, and specifically with SpokenWeb, the digital archives of the TISH poets and Phyllis Webb. She is the author of two poetry collections, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press 2019), and Pebble Swing (Nightwood Edition forthcoming 2021).

Tina Wayland is completing her Creative Writing MA at Concordia University, where she won the department’s McKeen Award in 2021 and 2023. She’s been published in carte blanche, Headlight Anthology, and the upcoming Soliloquies Anthology, as well as longlisted for the 2021 CBC Non-Fiction Prize and shortlisted Room Magazine’s 2022 Short Forms Contest.

Salena Wiener is an emerging poet and scholar pursuing her Masters of Arts in English Literature at Concordia University. Her research interests include women’s writing in the Romantic period, and archival studies. She is a former Prose Editor for Soliloquies Anthology Magazine, and her poetry appears in Honey & Lime Magazine’s poetry blog Oceans & Time, Pulp Poets Press, Peculiars Magazine, Graphite Publications, and elsewhere. She has been featured in the “Young Writers” interview series for Prism International, the “Pieces of Process” reading series, and the Argo Reading Series. Instagram: @salenaw_poems.

Masoumeh Zaare, a PhD student in Educational Technology at Concordia University, is working closely with the Project Management Team under the supervision of Yuliya Kondratenk, SpokenWeb Project Manager. While developing her management skills, she is also helping with knowledge mobilization events.

As a TRAC Delegate in the Department of Education since May 2017, she has reached out to Teaching and Research Assistants at Concordia, assisted with promotion, organized department meetings and solved work issues of her peers. As a Graduate Students Association (GSA) director in Faculty of Arts and Science, she has supported orientation events, workshops, and general assemblies as well.