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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Olivia Hornacek is a third year undergraduate student in Honours in English and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Her current writing interests are in short fiction and she is enjoying exploring magical realism and elements of horror. She is working as a research assistant on the Archive of the Digital Present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

David Seubert, Acting Head of Special Collections at the Davidson Library, UCSB, has served as PI on some of the world’s largest projects of cataloguing, digitizing and preserving analogue sound recordings.  His expertise and extensive experience working with sound recordings in archaic formats represents a vital resource to our program.

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.

Bio coming soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jakob Knudsen is an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University majoring in First Nations Studies and minoring in Legal Studies. He is of Métis, Danish, Stó:lō, and Dakelh ancestry. He is interested in the perpetuation of colonial ideology and neoliberal hegemony in progressive discourse via Eurocentric thought. He is interested in the development of Trickster methodologies of reading and writing as a means to subvert the contradictions of reconciliatory rhetoric towards restitution and justice for Indigenous peoples. He is currently archiving metadata of the Hartmut Lutz Collection – recordings of lectures, readings, and interviews with Indigenous thinkers and artists from the 1970’s to 1990’s. Jakob lives and work on unceded Indigenous territory belonging to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skxwú7mesh (Squamish), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwitlem) peoples. The settler colony of British Columbia was created using various forms of strategic violence and dispossession, which has structured our society and created lasting injustices that today persist. He acknowledges that, in the present, new forms of colonial violence and dispossession continue to be established on these territories.

Bio coming soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.