Agnes Whitfield, a professor in the Department of English, reconnected with surrealism in the early 2020s when she started writing surrealist poetry herself. “The term has been trivialized and so many visual artworks manipulated in advertising that we forget that surrealism originated in the revolt and despair felt by young men and women after the carnage of World War I and how tremendously relevant the creative impulse at its source remains today,” says Whitfield.

Galvanized by André Breton’s famous 1924 manifesto, surrealism became a powerful aesthetic movement, crossing national and artistic boundaries and liberating new creative synergies. Despite its tremendous international reach, however, scholarship on how these unusual and provocative texts were translated from one language context to another is rare.

To fill this gap, Whitfield co-organized a two-day international conference held on Oct. 9-10, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. The conference brought together scholars and translators from 13 universities in five countries and was attended by over 50 colleagues and students in person and another 30 online. “The papers highlighted not only how inventive translators of surrealist texts have been, but also how the questions about the nature of meaning these works raise can bring productive new perspectives to translation theory and teaching,” notes Whitfield.

This project was supported by the Sorbonne Nouvelle, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies Research Events Fund and the VPRI Scholarly Events and Outreach Activities Fund. Whitfield is now co-editing a volume of articles on the topic for the Translation Studies journal Palimpsestes.

Hazal Halavut is a postdoctoral fellow for the 2025-26 year, working under the supervision of Alison Crosby, professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies.

Halavut’s work traces the afterlives of colonial violence and genocide across memory, history and culture, attending to how they are held, denied and reimagined within the psychic, political and aesthetic life of the collective. Her postdoctoral project at 91��ɫ, Georgetown Boys: An Archive of Genocide, Collective Memory, and Canada’s “Noble Experiment”, turns to an extraordinary archive of survival and imagination: Ararat (1926–30), a journal produced by Armenian orphans brought to Georgetown, Ontario under Canada’s assimilationist experiment after surviving the Armenian Genocide. One of the earliest diasporic Armenian archives in Canada and among the very few child-authored genocide archives worldwide, Ararat is a site where boyhood was staged as masculinity, performed by the boys in ways that both reflected and responded to Canada’s demand that they become workers, men and proof of a successful experiment in nation-building. The project investigates how survival, memory and gendered belonging were forged under this assimilationist regime and how fiction, bilingualism and adaptation worked as strategies of refusal and creative survival within the demands of Canadianization.

This research builds on her doctoral dissertation, Archives of Absence: Nation’s Sleep, Perpetrator’s Dream, and Afterlives of Genocide (University of Toronto), now being developed into a book, which argues that absence functions as a generative force in the perpetrator’s national imaginary, a “technology of wakefulness” that organizes law, historiography and aesthetics in Turkey. Moving from the archive of absence in Turkey to the archive of creative survival produced by the Georgetown Boys in Canada, Halavut’s work rethinks trauma in a psychic and political economy shaped by the complicities of states, the demands of labor and the disciplining of gender and unsettled through imagination.

The has unveiled an online exhibit displaying a selection of nineteenth-century books, correspondence and other rare materials held by the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at 91��ɫ Library.

This virtual display follows a successful in-person event, which was co-hosted by the VSNY and 91��ɫ Libraries on April 28 in the Special Collections Reading Room. Faculty, graduate students, librarians and members of the university community gathered to view the items on display, to honour recently retired University Archivist Michael Moir and to hear Joseph Hafner (Dean of 91��ɫ Libraries), Ravi de Costa (Associate Dean Research and Graduate Studies) and Lesley Higgins (Professor in the Department of English) speak to the continuing importance of archival study to both research and teaching.

The VSNY was founded in 2008 to foster a culture of collegiality, interdisciplinarity and research excellence in nineteenth-century British studies (broadly defined). Its members include graduate students and faculty from a range of programs across campus, including English, History, Humanities, Science and Technology Studies and Theatre Studies. It hosts an annual research symposium every fall.

Both the April event and the online exhibit were supported by a Research Assistant Jaymi-Lynn Butler, an MA student in English, who received training from the university’s Media Lab and worked closely with the Special Collections staff. Her placement was made possible through funding provided by the 91��ɫ Research Support Grant, from the office of the Assistant Vice-President Research Strategy & Impact.

Nicole Dufoe is a postdoctoral fellow for the 2025-2026 year, working under the supervision of professor Tina Choi in the Department of English. Dufoe’s current project, “Victorian Fictions of Wellness,” brings together her background in nineteenth-century literary studies and the health humanities to investigate the relationship between Victorian ideals of self-improvement, epitomized by Samuel Smiles’s popular 1859 manual Self-Help, and nineteenth-century fiction. In doing so, she hopes to uncover antecedents to contemporary wellness culture and its industries.

This research builds upon Dufoe’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council-funded doctoral project, “Sleep Work and The Victorian Novel” (University of Toronto, 2024), which unpacks how novels, in both form and content, reflect changes in work, rest and temporal experience in nineteenth-century Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She will use this postdoctoral fellowship to continue to explore how Victorian fiction may model rhythms of living that value unproductive periods of recreation and leisure, and foster social and community bonds. In doing so, this project aims to complicate the individual progress narratives behind both the Victorian self-help movement and our current pursuit of so-called wellness.

Read Dufoe’s research in , , and .

Professor Denielle Elliott and team held a film screening and roundtable for Becoming the Butterfly, a film that captures the experiences of those who live with the effects of brain injuries. The film uses research-creation and an arts-based approach to integrate film and ethnographic methodologies to engage people living with brain injuries in all phases of research including design, implementation, analysis, dissemination and evaluation.

The Global Labour Research Centre - GLRC (LA&PS-based ORU) recently hosted it’s 9th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Critical Conversations in Work & Labour.�� More than 50 participants from 91��ɫ and from other universities across Canada attended the symposium. Spread across 13 panels, conversations interrogated the role of artificial intelligence, care work and reproductive labour, migration, climate action, higher education, social and political struggles, and more. Student presenters were invited to submit their research papers to Workplace: a Journal for Academic Labor.

The symposium also featured a �پ��ٱ����,��What is Anti-Racism? And Why It Means Anti-Capitalism, which is now available for viewing.��Closing the conference, the organizing committee hosted a professional workshop about key aspects of academic life and career paths beyond academia.

Kids, KidTech and the Metaverse: Global Childhoods in digital capitalism is a funded project that explores the shift where much of children’s daily lives have moved into online spaces; and in this shifting reality, asks what it means to be a child in these spaces. The team seeks to understand what these digital spaces are, how they are experienced, and how they are shaping children’s social, cultural and economic lives.

There is an urgent need to fully understand these platforms in order to protect children’s digital rights and support parents/caregivers, educators and policy makers as they navigate the rapid changes in children’s digital lives. For these reasons, the project asks three key research questions: (1) what is the Tech in KidTech? (2) What is the Kid in KidTech and (3) How do children and families experience KidTech?

Led by Principal Investigators Natalie Coulter (91��ɫ) and Rebekah Willett (University of Wisconsin-Madison), the project is an interdisciplinary partnership of institutions in Canada, Australia, South Korea and the US. This international partnership allows us to consider different approaches from key stakeholders including governments, industries, NGOs, educators and parents.

At each phase of the project, the research team is dedicated to providing graduate students with opportunities to further develop their research skills. You can find more information on team members and partners on the project website.

LA&PS Professor from the Department of Humanities has co-published a which tackles digital discourse about online privacy through a humanities lens. “,” was published as the lead article of the February issue of Open Access journal First Mondays.��

Professor Lim mentioned that “the aim of “Abolish Privacy” is to free up the massive amounts of research and funding going into internet privacy – which many scholars argue is elusive, unrealistic, improbable and we add, harmful at the social level, spreading paranoia anxiety and mutual mistrust at the expense of solidarity.” Instead, Professor Lim and team hope to re-direct research efforts towards open access, collective, collaborative data infrastructures and a concerted pushback against the corporate privatization of data.

Professor Lim has mentioned that they are a grateful recipient of 91��ɫ’s Strategic Research Appointments Cluster for Critical Data Studies Research Support. They would also like to acknowledge their Research Assistant Sim Zhi Ming (PhD candidate, 91��ɫ Political Science) for their immense skillful help as an RA to their overall research program.

was awarded a Connection Grant for the project "Visualizing Queer Femme Narrative Histories of Toronto Using Digital Mapping," which is a part of a larger project called the Femme Story Archives (funded by a SSHRC IDG: "'On Our Own Terms': An Oral History and Archive of Queer Femme Community in Culture in Toronto, 1990-2000").  

The project is being undertaken with community partner : Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives and (Co-Investigator), alongside Dr. Sarah 91��ɫ-Bertram (Collaborator & . The Femme Story Archives aims to build an archive of femme cultural history in Toronto through the collection of oral history interviews and ephemera, including flyers, posters, publications, photographs, and more. 

Dr. Schwartz stated that "using oral history interviews and digital storytelling media will enable femmes to tell their stories in their own words. This research-creation project will explore the capacity of digital storytelling media to tell nuanced and reparative histories." Additionally, the team will be building a permanent digital exhibit of this archive for The ArQuives website and will be curating an in-person exhibit at The ArQuives in October.

The Connection Grant project will create a digital "storymap" using the oral history interviews and visual ephemera to create a way for the public to access and interact with this history.��