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.

Clint Burnham’s knowledge of modern and avant-garde Canadian poetry and poetics, combined with academic/pedagogical praxis in Marxism/psychoanalysis and digital theory will contribute unique expertise from the perspective of both practitioner and theorist.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As Head of Reader Services at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto, Roma Kail participates in and manages operations and services related to reference, research, instruction, access and circulation. She enjoys working with a diverse range of researchers and learners. Her current research and coursework involves completion of a certificate in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. She enjoys working at Victoria University Library because it is part of a College environment and has a deep and carefully cultivated Special Collections of rare books and archival fonds.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Bio coming soon.

Zoe Mix is a Métis multidisciplinary artist from Tacoma, Washington. She is currently completing a Master of Publishing at Simon Fraser University. Previously, she attended University of British Columbia, where she graduated with a double major in creative writing and opera performance. She hopes to pursue a Doctorate focusing on Indigenous publishing practices and decolonizing the publishing industry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Her writing has recently appeared in Momus, C Magazine, The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review and is forthcoming in the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize anthology. She is the author of Port of Being, a book of poems drawn from field recordings, overheard conversations, and the performance art of Vito Acconci to reclaim her experience of being stalked.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jonathan Sterne, a leading expert in the discipline of sound studies, and a founder of the field of format studies, will apply this expertise to our study of analogue media formats in relation to digitized audio collections.

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.

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.

Andrew Whiteman is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, researching the myth-oriented vocalities of the writers Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, Edward Sanders, Maggie O’Sullivan and others. He creates “Sonic Poetry”, writing and producing recordings of Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Jacob Wren, Michael Nardone, and others. He is currently building an online/digital Sonic Poetry boutique, a welcome hub for everyone interested in this most ancient of intermedia.

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.

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!

Maddie Beaulieu is a fourth year English and Art, Design, and Visual Culture undergraduate student at the University of Alberta. Their research interests include materiality, feminism, and collaboration in small press; visual and concrete poetry; and contemporary speculative fiction. As part of the SpokenWeb team, she assists with locating and reproducing ephemera related to the literary audio collection.

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.

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.

Piyusha Chatterjee is a PhD student in the Individualized Program at Concordia University. Her research interests are oral history theory and practise, political economy of the city, sounds, and media in the public sphere. For SpokenWeb, she is exploring the possibility of using oral history methodology to engage with literary audio recordings digitized in the collections.

Stacey Copeland is our Podcast Project Manager and a current Communication Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She received her MA from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program and a BA in Media Production from Ryerson University where she studied with a focus on audio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies.

Some research areas of interest include feminist media, oral/aural histories, queer cultural studies, media history, sensory ethnography, and cultural heritage.

http://staceycopeland.com/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bio coming soon.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emma Telaro is a Master’s student in English literature at Concordia University, and a research assistant for Spokenweb. She is interested in the interdisciplinary potential of literature and sound studies and is eager to think about this in relation to an aesthetics of silence, and of its not-so-opposite speech. She likes to listen to things.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Shakiya is currently an undergraduate student at Concordia University, pursuing a B.A. in English literature. Although she is new to the literary world, her research and writing interests focus on things that are close to her heart, such as Black feminism and intersectionality, mental health and sexuality.

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.