HomeNews & Events2014June Snapshots from our MLC Research...
As we prepare to submit our annual reports to our funding agencies, we proudly provide snapshots of the research activities and successes of those who have been involved with us at the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Research Centre.
Laura Berger, MA, a long-time MLC Research Team Member, presented her research on "St. Nicholas Magazine’s Heroines of Service,” at the Northeast Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (NEPCA) Annual Conference, Burlington, Vermont, October 25-26, 2013. The paper is based on the MLC’s ongoing exploration of a rare full print-run of St. Nicholas magazine held at the MLC archives. This project is part of the MLC focus on representations of wartime women of service in print-media.
Dr. Esther Berry, MLC Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (2013–2015), and member of the MLC Executive, presented her research "Hair Work: The Politics of Invisible Labour in Victorian Mourning Jewellery and in the Global Hair Trade,” at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, May 23, 2014. The paper focused on the hairwork industry, which gestated in North America and in Europe during the nineteenth century, culminating in today’s multibillion-dollar global business in Indian hair. Esther’s article "Parts and Labour: ‘Meaningless Biology’ and Mundane Work in Hair India” was accepted for publication in cléo: a journal of film and feminism. She is also at work completing her first monograph, and continues to be a mentor for PUBZ: MLC Writing and Publishing Zone.
Stephen Broomer, Communication and Culture PhD candidate and MLC Doctoral Fellow in Residence, received word that his manuscript, Hamilton Babylon: A History of the McMaster Film Board, has undergone successful peer-review and has been accepted for publication by the University of Toronto Press. The book charts the history of a Canadian student film society, from its origins in the mid-1960s to its collapse in the mid-1970s. The work of this embattled student club was the focus of the country’s first obscenity trial to target a Canadian film; Stephen’s is the first study to account for it in detail. The acceptance of his monograph provides the crown to Stephen’s MLC doctoral residency (2013–2014). He is grateful for the MLC support, which has enabled his exceptional productivity, both in scholarship and creative practice.
Daniel Browne, PhD candidate in Communication and Culture, was awarded a SSHRC grant for his ongoing doctoral research. Daniel has helped forge strong connections between the Communication and Culture Program and the MLC via the successful Cross-Sections exhibition at the MLC Gallery (March 14–26, 2014). Daniel also produced a video about the centre’s SSHRC-funded research on Lucy Maud Montgomery that was rated among the top 25 videos at the inaugural SSHRC Storytellers Competition; Daniel says, "I had the opportunity to present [video] work at the 2013 Congress of the Humanities, and interact with many interesting scholars from other universities. What a fantastic experience!”
Amanda Cosco, MA, who leads the Research Mobilization team at the MLC, has published an article in the Globe and Mail exploring cyborg artist Neil Harbisson. Entitled "Interview with a Cyborg: How Machines Mesh with Mankind,” the piece examines the intersections of technology, art, and body through Harbisson’s case of cybernetically induced synesthesia.
Read the article
Read more about Amanda's research interests
Dr. Emma Doran, newly minted PhD in Communication and Culture, defended her doctoral dissertation, "‘Feeling’ in Modern Dance Print Media: Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, and Maud Allan,” under the supervision of Dr. Irene Gammel. The external examiner was Dr. Carol Simpson Stern (Northwestern University). The defense, which took place in May, was rigorous and Emma garnered accolades for her knowledge and theoretical approach. Emma is now at work translating her research into scholarly publications.
Read more about Dr. Doran's defense
Read Emma's research profile
MLC Research Associate Bruce Elder, Professor in Image Arts, published his new book Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, with Wilfrid Laurier Press (2013). The book explores the intellectual reception of cinema in the early twentieth century and has been praised by critics such as Rudolf Kuenzli (University of Iowa), who writes: "This is that rare book that casts the early twentieth-century avant-garde in a very new light.” At the MLC, Professor Elder also contributed to the Online Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Julia Fawcett, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, has launched the Toronto Performance Studies Working Group, which has been meeting regularly to share recent work and discuss current issues and articles in the field.
More on the Performance Studies group, and information on how to join the group
Read more about Dr. Fawcett's scholarship
MLC Research Associate Dr. Laura Fisher, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, explores sites of literary sociality and social reform at the turn of the 20th century. She published two essays in the online magazine The New Inquiry: "Sparkle, Shirley, Sparkle,” on the manufacturing of Shirley Temple’s child star persona; and "Minor Feelings,” on riot grrrl bands, female rage, and rock musician Juliana Hatfield.
Dr. Irene Gammel, Director of the MLC Research Centre, was the recipient of the Dean’s Experiential Teaching Award (2014), a nomination put forward by doctoral candidate Jason Wang and supported by her students and colleagues. "The Experiential Teaching Award was a highlight of the year,” says Dr. Gammel. "I am extremely grateful to the students for the nomination and the kind support.” Dr. Gammel also had several peer-reviewed papers published or accepted, including "‘Unhinged I Swirled: Performing the Crazed Woman Artist in Weimar Berlin,” in Metropolenzauber: Sexuelle Moderne und Urbaner Wahn, edited by Gabriele Dietze and Dorothea Dornhof (Vienna: Bölau Verlag, 2014); and essays published in collaboration with others cited elsewhere in this update report.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Kellett-Betsos, a Professor in the department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, has published an article entitled, "Maud Graham et l’affaire de la mauvaise mère: Le polar féministe chez Chrystine Brouillet,” @analyses: Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire 8, no 2: 365-385, 2013.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre, Director of L.M. Montgomery Online, launched his new book, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 2: A Critical Heritage, at Congress. The book, which was published by the University of Toronto Press, is a critical anthology of "materials that resituate Montgomery’s critical legacy throughout her lifetime and in the decades after her death.” This new book follows the publication of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, also published with the University of Toronto Press (2013).
MLC Research Associate Dr. Alison Matthews David is the co-curator of Fashion Victims: The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century, which opens at the Bata Shoe Museum on June 18, 2014. Dr. Matthews, who is an Associate Professor in the School of Fashion, is also at work completing her monograph entitled Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present . The exhibit, which is co-curated with Bata Shoe Museum Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack, includes over 90 artifacts from the Bata Shoe Museum’s own collection, as well as materials on loan from private collections.
Dr. Alma Mikulinsky, MLC Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow (2013-2014), had a chapter accepted for publication, entitled "Progressing Backward and Retreading Forward: André Breton’s Surrealist Temporality,” for Time and Temporality in European Modernism and the Avant Gardes, edited by Sascha Bru (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). This chapter expands her paper, "André Breton’s Surrealist Temporality," which she presented at the Time and Temporality in European Modernism and the Avant-Gardes (1900-1950) conference at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, September 16–18, 2013.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Ruth Panofsky, Professor of English, launched her new book, The Collected Poems of Miriam Waddington, at Congress. Published by the University of Ottawa Press in May 2014, it explores modernist Canadian poet Miriam Waddington (1917–2004), whose fourteen volumes of poetry represent an important wave of Canadian modernism.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Liz Podnieks, an Associate Professor of English, was awarded the Outstanding Scholarship Prize (2012-13) by the Women's and Gender Studies Association (WGSRF) at Congress for her edited volume of essays, Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012). The book engages critically with the ways in which the media represent mothering, alternately idealizing and vilifying mothers, and conversely with how mothers negotiate these images and pressures. The book includes chapters by Dr. Podnieks, "‘The Bump is Back’: Celebrity Moms, Entertainment Journalism, and the ‘Media Mother Police,’” and by Dr. Gammel, "Mothering Across Generations: L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables at 100.”
Dr. Barbara Postema, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the MLC Research Centre and the Department of English presented several conference papers: "Family Life in Canada: Exploring Canadian Family,” Canadian Society for the Study of Comics Conference, Toronto (May 9–10, 2014); "Exploring the Family Comics Genre,” Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Louisville, KY (February 20–22, 2014); and "Silent Comics and Reader Empathy,” the University of Toronto’s New Narrative VI conference (May 10, 2014). She also organized the hugely successful lecture by Trina Robbins in the MLC Gallery in conjunction with the Canadian Comics Association (May 8, 2014). Barbara acted as the external reader for an MA thesis at OCAD University and is preparing a graduate course for the Communication and Culture Program, CC8987: Select Topics in Technology in Practice – Comics Studies and Graphic Narrative.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Rahul Sapra, an Associate Professor of English, has been busy as the Managing Editor of the Film section for the Online Encyclopedia of Modernism at Routledge, shepherding hundreds of entries exploring modernist film, with a focus on Indian Modernism. The Encyclopedia is a large-scale online project under the general editorship of Stephen Ross. Dr. Sapra has also contributed a chapter on modernist film to The Modernist World, a volume edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross, scheduled for publication with Routledge in 2015. Dr. Sapra is Vice-President (External) of Ryerson’s Faculty Association.
Amy Smith, MA student in Communication and Culture, was awarded a SSHRC grant for her thesis, which focuses on secondhand clothing and vintage stores in Toronto and Nova Scotia. Amy, who is a long-time MLC member, is very grateful for the MLC support; she writes, "THANK YOU. As you may have heard, my SSHRC application was successful. I am so pleased with this result and cannot thank you enough for your encouragement and support. Interestingly, all of the students who attended the peer-editing workshop at the MLC were successful as well.”
Danielle Van Wagner, MA, Research Assistant and team coordinator for our Mary Riter Hamilton and WWI project, published "(Human) Remnants of Display: Colonial Objectification of Bodies in the Pacific Cultures Gallery” in Museums, Marginality and the Mainstream, online conference proceedings (2012).
Dr. Stephen Voyce, MLC SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow (2009-11), and Assistant Professor of English at Iowa University, published a monograph, Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2013), as well as an edited volume entitled, a book of variations: love–zygal–art facts (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2013). Poetic Community, which Dr. Voyce prepared for publication during his tenure at the MLC Research Centre, was awarded a Choice Outstanding Book Award.
MLC Research Associate Dr. Kimberly Wahl, an Associate Professor in the School of Fashion, published her monograph, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform, with the University of New England Press (2013). The book explores intersections of fashion, art, and Aestheticism during the second half of the Victorian era. Much of Dr. Wahl’s research was archival, completed at the British Library and the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She explains: "I did examine actual garments at a variety of museums in and around London, but my focus was primarily on the ways in which artistic and Aesthetic dress was pictured or portrayed in the print culture of the late 19th century.”
Jason Wang, PhD candidate in Communication and Culture, and member of the MLC Executive, had two papers accepted for presentation: "Baroness Elsa and Her Anti-chic Dada: Locating Anarchist Fashion in Modernist Aesthetics,” to be presented at Modernism Now! BAMS International Conference 2014, the Institute of English Studies, London UK, June 26–28, 2014; and "Performing Coastal Space as Ethnic History: Vancouver’s Chinatown in Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows,” to be presented at the 130th MLA Annual Convention, Vancouver, January 8–11, 2015
Cat Waszczuk, MA student in Museum Studies (University of Toronto) and a Research Team Member at the MLC, collaborated with Dr. Irene Gammel on "‘A Rare Moment of Crisis’: Modernist Intellectual Currents in Europe,” a chapter accepted for inclusion in The Modernist World, edited by Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross, scheduled for publication with Routledge in 2015. She has also diligently supported Dr. Gammel’s editing of over 100 entries for the Online Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
Dr. John Wrighton, MLC Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-13), and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Brighton, UK, published "Ethnopoetics and the Performativity of Place: Jerome Rothenberg and ‘That Dada Strain,’” in Ian Davidson and Zoe Skoulding (Eds.), Placing Poetry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013); and in collaboration with Dr. Gammel, "‘Arabesque Grotesque’: Toward a Theory of Dada Ecopoetics,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Vol. 20. No. 4. pp. 795-816. Oxford University Press, pp.257-281.
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We are very grateful to the Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Programme, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Programme. We are also grateful to the Faculty of Arts and the Vice President, Research and Innovation Office, Ryerson University.
