On November 16, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council announced the recipients of the Insight Development Grants. The SSHRC Insight Development Grants are awarded to support research in its early stages by emerging and established scholars alike.
This year, eight researchers from the Faculty of Arts were awarded Insight Development Grants. We asked some of the recipients to share the importance of their research with the Arts’ community.
Here is a list of this year’s recipients:
Dr. Wendell Adjetey, Department of History and Classical Studies
Project Title: The 1826 Battle of Katamansu Revisisted"
"My research on nineteenth-century African warfare along the Gulf of Guinea Coast will contribute to our understanding of how Africans relied on their indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies to articulate notions of just war theory to resist the genocidal commerce of transatlantic slavery. Pre-colonial African states, in other words, had a sophisticated grasp of statecraft and geopolitics, including the need to establish regional balance of power to mitigate imperialism and militarism."
Wendell Adjetey is an Assistant Professor of post-Reconstruction U.S. and African Diaspora history and William Dawson Chair.
Dr. Charles Boberg, Department of Linguistics
Project Title: A New Survey of Canadian English: Fifty Years of Language Change
"Fifty years ago, a landmark survey of Canadian English by M.H. Scargill and H.J. Warkentyne (1972) showed how schoolchildren and their parents in every province of Canada differed regionally and generationally in their choice of words, grammatical forms, pronunciation and spelling. The passage of five decades, or about two generations, since that study presents a rare opportunity to see how Canadian English has evolved over the intervening period by asking the same questions of today's Canadian population. In carrying out a new Survey of Canadian English, this project will examine not only how today's speakers of Canadian English compare to the earlier sample, but whether Canadian English is converging with American English and whether regional differences are getting larger or smaller."
Charles Boberg in an Associate Professor specializing in language variation and change, dialectology, and North American English.
Dr. Megan Bradley, Department of Political Science
Project Title: Miscarriage and the politics of early pregnancy loss
Dr. Frédéric Charbonneau, Dept. des littératures de langue françaises
Titre: Le Fabrique des temps reculés
«Mes recherches portent sur le développement au XVIIIe siècle en France et ailleurs en Europe d’une conception du passé étendu jusqu’à donner éventuellement naissance à la notion de préhistoire, grâce à la collaboration de réseaux savants appartenant à plusieurs disciplines — archéologie, géologie, paléontologie, astronomie, etc. L’une des suites de ce processus sera le divorce de la littérature et de l’histoire, étroitement associées depuis l’Antiquité, et le rattachement ultérieur de l’histoire aux sciences positives : cette genèse des savoirs modernes présente un grand intérêt pour de nombreuses spécialités.»
Frédéric Charbonneau est professeure titulaire et enseigne la littérature française du XVIIIe siècle.
Dr. Samuele Collu, Department of Anthropology
Project Title: The Affective Experience of Bing-Scrolling on Social Media: From Affective Governance to Subjective Experience
"The research explores the psychic impact of binge-scrolling on social media–the practice of scrolling through potentially infinite feeds for extended periods of time.Through an innovative methodology that brings together ethnographic and computational methodologies the research project specifically focuses on the affective experience of college students while they are binge-scrolling on TikTok."
Samuele Collu is an Associate Professor and his research is at the intersection of medical/psychological anthropology, critical media studies, and affect theory.
Dr. Christopher Howard, Department of Philosophy
Project Title: Towards an Ethics of Emotions: Adjudicating Conflicts of Fittingness and Prudence
" Ethical theory has traditionally focused almost exclusively on what we should do—how we should act. But recent trends in moral philosophy reflect that how we act is only part of our ethical lives. An equally important part concerns our mental constitution and, in particular, our emotional state. Theorists have thus begun to investigate the question of what factors can affect how we ought to feel, and how to make trade-offs among those factors. The research I’m doing contributes to this effort: I aim to develop an ethics of emotions that accommodates and explains our considered judgments about when our emotions are justified or called for by our circumstances."
Christopher Howard is an Assistant Professor focusing his research on the intersection of normative ethics and metaethics, and political philosophy, moral psychology, and the history of ethics.
Dr. Alexander Manshel, Deptartment of English
Title: Race and the Formation of the Contemporary Literary Canon
"My project, 'Race and the Formation of the Contemporary Literary Canon', investigates the implicit criteria that U.S. cultural organizations—from the National Endowment for the Arts, to the Pulitzer Prize, to university English departments—have used to evaluate racially minoritized writers over the last fifty years. By closely examining these literary institutions, my research uncovers not only how the newly inclusive literary canon came to exist, but also what, and who, it still excludes."
Alexander Manshel is an Assistant Professor specializing in 20th Century and Contemporary American Literature.
Dr. Setrag Manoukian, Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Islamic Studies
Title: Ashura Online: An Ethnography of Poetry, Technology and Ritual Presence in Iran
"Ashura Online studies online streaming of Ashura, the main ritual among Shi‘i Muslims in Iran. The research aims to understand what it means to feel present in these online rituals. Do online Ashura performances provide participants with a sense of being present in the ritual as offline performances might? What are the characteristics of online presence, and what role has the poetry sung in these performances and the audiovisual technology used to produce them in making one feel present? Given the ubiquity of online events such questions will shed light not only on the existential dimensions of Shi‘i Islam but more generally on the changing meaning of presence and its relationship to technology."
Setrag Manoukian is an associate professor with a Joint Appointment with the Institute of Islamic Studies.