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.

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.

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.

From 2001-2008, Myron Campbell worked with the Trailer Park Boys in Halifax, later moving on to the Banff Centre For The Arts as Lead Designer of the online digital arts + culture magazine, Horizon Zero and as an Interactive Consultant for resident artists and writers.
In 2008, after several years of freelance interactive design and animation, Campbell joined Switch United as their youngest Art Director at 28 years old. He co-created interactive installations for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and in December 2010, he was awarded Best Interactive Designer at the Canadian New Media Awards in Toronto, Ontario.

Campbell completed an MAA with distinction at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2012 and where he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal for academic excellence. He has presented and exhibited internationally.

After 4 years of teaching in the Digital Design Program at the Vancouver Film School, Campbell joined as faculty at the University of British Columbia Okanagan and teaches digital media in the Creative Studies department.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Klara du Plessis is a PhD student in English at Concordia University and the governing board student representative of the SpokenWeb research team. She experiments with a new practice of literary event organization called a Deep Curation, navigating the texts presented and their strategic, thematic arc. Klara’s debut collection of multilingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and garnered much critical acclaim. Her second book-length poem, Hell Light Flesh, is forthcoming, September 2020 from Palimpsest Press.

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

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.

Al Filreis’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.

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.

Geoff Harder contributes expertise in digitization, archiving, digital repositories, and research data management.

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

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.

Madyson Huck (she/her) is an MA student at the University of Victoria interested in women’s contributions to science discourse in the Victorian period. In addition to her work with SpokenWeb, Madyson assists Dr. Jentery Sayers at The Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sean Luyk will work to digitize, preserve, and provide access to U Alberta audio and contribute to research on the use of audio recordings in virtual research environments.

Loryl MacDonald will provide expertise in research data management to this research project.

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.

Hannah McGregor brings expertise in Canadian literature, digital humanities, and podcasting production.

Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. She co-edited with Jason Camlot CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019), and her recent publications include chapters in the books Moving Archives (WLUP, 2020) and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019). Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she is writing a book about women poets on CBC Radio, curating the Audio of the Week Series on SPOKENWEBLOG and producing digital content for the Audio of the Month as part of The SpokenWeb Podcast feed.

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

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.

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 a PhD Candidate and CGS SSHRC fellow in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where her research focuses on the cultural history of data. She is interested in investigating new ways of exploring and modeling audiovisual data.

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.

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.

Andrea (Annie) Murray (Co-applicant) brings essential expertise in archives, multi-format audio preservation, and student training to the project.

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.

Mike O’Driscoll (Co-applicant) brings needed expertise in archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies and strong leadership and organizational skills from extensive administrative experience as a journal editor, national association executive member, project leader, and major conference organizer.

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.

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.

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.

Geoffrey Rockwell directs the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.  His expertise in the development of research tools for the humanities, the design of interactive multimedia, the archiving of digital research data, and the development of data standards for the humanities will support work on prototypes of web interactives and the multiple areas involving data methods for documentation, standards, protocols in our digital archive projects.

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.

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.

Melissa Salrin is Head of Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University. She is an adjunct lecturer for the iSchool at the University of Illinois where she earned an M.A. in history and M.L.I.S. She is interested in outreach, community-based collections, and examining archives as a political space.

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.

Kandice Sharren is a recent graduate of the PhD program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.

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.

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.

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.

Miles Thorogood, a creative technologist with a focus on digital audio, will contribute expertise in sound design and in crowd sourcing platforms for audio tagging.

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.

Leah Van Dyk (she/her) is a doctoral student and Killam Laureate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. She gratefully researches and studies as a settler on the traditional territory of Treaty 7, with her primary research interests located around the environmental humanities and radical revisionings of being in community—both pedagogically and practically—as a model of literary practice. She recently published an article in English Studies in Canada, is passionate about community projects, and is overly fond of coffee. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @leahvandyk.

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.

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.

Ali Azarpanah is a Master student in Digital Humanities at University of Alberta responsible for developing an interface for the web portal.

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!

Sadie Barker is a PhD student in English literature at Concordia University and a research assistant for SpokenWeb. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from McMaster University, where she explored the listening practices and decolonial potentials of spoken word sampling, as a negotiation between text and sound, improvisation and structure. Now, she continues to explore ideas of decolonial sensibility through sonic approaches to text, dialogues surrounding public art, and aesthetic perception in the postcolonial more broadly.

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.

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.

Emma Cullen is an MA student in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include experimental poetry and fiction, narrative theory, digital humanities, material culture, and book history. She is currently working on documenting metadata and conducting archival research for UAlberta’s collection of SpokenWeb audio recordings.

Jonathan Dick is a Masters student with the Department of English at the University of Toronto whose research is supported by a generous grant from the Social Science and Research Council of Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Highest Honours from Trinity College and intends to begin his Doctoral work in 2019, following a brief research position at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in April. He is co-author with Dr. Adam Hammond of a chapter on duplication machines, which will be published in the forthcoming Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology (2019). For SpokenWeb, Jonathan analyzes the use of dialect in works of contemporary American fiction and poetry, investigating how such socially constructed traits as race, class, and sexuality can be codified (or obscured) by a performer’s manipulation of nonsemantic qualities like pitch and pause length.

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.

Liz Fischer is a second year PhD student in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies medieval literature, the history of text technologies, and digital humanities.

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.

Cheryl Gladu has accepted the role of a SpokenWeb Podcast Producer, housed at Concordia University. This role will closely work with SFU Podcast Team led by Hannah McGregor, SFU. Cheryl Gladu, BIB, MBA is an Interdisciplinary PhD Candidate at Concordia University (Management and Design). Cheryl’s current research and professional interests include collaborative design and the creation of places and objects that encourage long-term sustainable behavior change. She is also the producer and host of the Worlds We Want podcast.

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. 

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.”

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.

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.

Bio coming soon.

Isabelle Michalski pursues a Ph.D. in English with a focus on Asian American Literature at the University of Calgary, where she investigates the works of Winnifred Eaton, Pearl S. Buck, Louise Jordan Miln, and Han Suyin. She explores the way these authors simultaneously conform and subvert contemporary racial stereotypes, and how their romance fiction presents their readers with a picture of a cosmopolitan and transnational United States.

Her research interests center on questions of passing, cosmopolitanism, racialization, hybridity, transnationalism, gender performances, and their intersection with human rights. Isabelle is a dynamic researcher and community leader, motivated by the desire to create a better understanding of Asian American literature and history worldwide.

Chelsea Obodoechina is a Sociology graduate student at Concordia University. With her research focus on the accessibility of digitized information and knowledge, Chelsea has taken on the role of SpokenWeb’s community collections and festival outreach coordinator with the interest of bringing awareness to the project.

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.

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.

Nour is an Honours English and Political Science major with a passion for literature and art. She is interested in journalism, digital reporting, and the impacts that language and discourse have on perceptions of the world. Nour is also the Copy Editor of The Phoenix News. She is excited to practice attentive listening and explore literary sound through her work as the SpokenWeb UBCO Podcast Producer.

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.

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.

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.

Rodrigo Velasco is a Mexican artist interweaving text, image, rhythm and sound through relational poetics and live coding, etc. Improvisation and collaborative processes are at the heart of the experience, where thought is being transformed into abstract audiovisual experiences. Rodrigo is a student of the Master of Design at Concordia University in the Department of Design and Computation Arts and part of the SenseLab, a laboratory for thought in motion.

His explorations through workshops, non books and audiovisual performances have been shared internationally as part of /vivo/ 2014, Simposio Internacional de Música y Código, Libre Graphics Meeting 2018, Nuit Blanche, NOCHE EN BLANCO : LATINX (RE) MIX – Eastern Bloc + Never Apart, Electronic Literature Organization – ELO 2018, TOPO Digital Writings Laboratory, live => coding music, IMPA ˜ Rio de Janeiro and MUTEK Montréal Edition 19

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.

Kylie Warkentin is a third-year undergraduate student in English at the University of Texas at Austin, and an RA for SpokenWeb and other audio projects. She has focuses in education and the great books, and is interested in interdisciplinary cooperation and the ways in which modern stories echo and edit past works.

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.