Dr. Mathieu Aubin successfully defended his dissertation on Vancouver’s small presses, queer poetry, and lesbian and gay liberation movements at The University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus) in Summer 2019. In Fall 2019, he will be an AMP Lab Fellow and Instructor at UBC Okanagan where he will work with materials in the SoundBox collection. Starting January 2020, he will take on a leadership position within the “Oral Literary History” research component of the SpokenWeb project as a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University. His current research focuses on the ways in which literary events in Montreal have historically functioned as sites of queer cultural activism.

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

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

Ali Barillaro is a first year Master’s student in English Literature at Concordia University. She has previous degrees in both photography and education. Her personal research focuses on deconstructing and reimagining canonical literature, with a particular interest in science fiction. As a member of the SpokenWeb student team, she is involved in the application of the metadata scheme to the SGW Reading Series and would like to research and examine the formal conventions of poetry reading series, while paying particular attention to the treatment of applause in the SGW recordings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Deanna Fong is a PhD candidate in English at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, where her research focuses on the intersections of auditory media, event theory, literary communities, and affective labour. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the audio/multimedia archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah, and has done substantial cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Japanese-Canadian poet and painter Roy Kiyooka. She is the Student Representative on the SpokenWeb Governing Board and a part of the Metadata Task Force. She is also cataloguing the “Readings in B.C.” collection of audio recordings at SFU Special Collections.

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.

Adam Hammond brings expertise in computational humanities and literary modernism.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Bio coming soon.

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.

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.

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.

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 received her doctorate from the University of Toronto and she held a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellowship with TransCanada Institute (U of Guelph), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship with the SSHRC IG-funded SpokenWeb at Concordia University. Her recent publications include a chapter in the book Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, a chapter in the forthcoming book edited by Linda Morra, Moving Archives (Wilfrid Laurier UP), and in the forthcoming book that she has co-edited with Jason Camlot, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP). Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she researches CBC Radio recordings and where she is organizing SpokenWeb’s Ghost Reading Series.

Follow 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.

Bio coming soon.

Bio coming soon.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Holly Pickering is a Master’s student in Digital Humanities, and Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, situated on Treaty 6 territory in amiskwaciy (Edmonton, Alberta). She is primarily interested in the relationships between cyberlaw, neoliberalism, and intersectional feminism, particularly with respect to intellectual property and information laws, the open-source movement, and the production of DIY and remixed culture online. She is also interested in the use of critical pedagogy and media literacy, and in the use of libraries as educational and open-source spaces that enable citizens to critically produce and consume media. Currently with SpokenWeb, she is working on problems of collecting and representing metadata in an online portal.

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.

Andrew Roberge is entering his first year of graduate studies in English at Concordia University. Following a number of rewarding presentations and publications of his own research at the undergraduate level, he is thrilled to diversify his experience and work hands-on as a research assistant with SpokenWeb.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is the E-Research Librarian at University of Ottawa with a portfolio in Research Data Management. She is an occasional visual artist and curator, and has published scholarly writing related to literary archives in anthologies, in Journal of Canadian Art History, Canadian Literature, and Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture.

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

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 is an MA candidate in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, and research assistant on the department’s SpokenWeb project with Dr. Jason Wiens. Their research focuses on the audio recordings housed at the University of Calgary’s Archives and Special Collections for poets and authors such as Robert Kroetsch, Earle Birney, Alden Nowlan, and E. D. Blodgett. Her MA thesis examines water and its environs in contemporary Canadian literature, specifically using theories of elemental ecocriticism and trans-corporeality to discover how water affects, and is affected by, narrative. She also has work forthcoming in the anthology “Feminist Perspectives in Children’s Culture” (Canadian Scholars/Women’s Press).

Bio is coming soon.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Bio coming soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.