The JHI is pleased to announce the Chancellor Jackman 6-month Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities for 2025-26.
Tenured faculty at the University of Toronto, each six-month Faculty Research Fellow receives a half-year leave from the normal teaching and administrative duties to undertake research (including travel) on the project proposed in their application. They are chosen for demonstrated excellence of their record of scholarship and the merit of the research proposal. Six-month fellows are invited to participate in the intellectual life of the JHI in the year following their fellowship, often by contributing a short talk to the JHI’s YouTube channel.
6-Month Faculty Research Fellows
- Heather D. Baker, Associate Professor, A&S Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
- Laura Colantoni, Professor, A&S Department of Spanish & Portuguese
- Angela Esterhammer, Professor, A&S Department of English
- Marleen Rozemond, Professor, UTM Department of Philosophy
- Shiho Satsuka, Associate Professor, A&S Department of Anthropology
- Sherry Yu, Associate Professor, UTSC Department of Arts, Culture & Media
Heather D. Baker
Heather D. Baker (D.Phil. University of Oxford, 1999) is a historian of the ancient Near East. Her research interests include the social, economic, and political history of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. She is especially interested in integrating textual and archaeological data in the study of how the Babylonians lived. She has published extensively on Babylonian urbanism, including her article “The Later Phases of Southern Mesopotamian Urbanism: Babylonia in the Second and First Millennia BC” in Journal of Archaeological Research (2023). Her current SSHRC-funded project investigates the connection between inheritance and inequality in urban Babylonia.
Fellowship Research Project—Being a Neighbour in Urban Babylonia
Residential neighbourhoods were an important element of the Babylonian city, yet there is little consensus as to their character. Using cuneiform tablets from 1st millennium BCE Babylonia that record urban property transfers, this project analyses small-scale communities of property owners and their neighbours. It studies the interactions of people living in face-to-face communities, their family relationships, and their markers of identity (personal names, status, professions, official titles, and ethnic and geographical designations). This approach promises to shed new light on the social composition of urban neighbourhoods in Babylonia.
Laura Colantoni
Laura Colantoni (Ph.D. 2001, University of Minnesota) researches sound change, categorization and the bilingual acquisition of variable phonetic parameters. She co-authored Second Language speech: An Introduction and two edited volumes on laboratory phonology and Argentine Spanish, in addition to over 70 refereed articles and book chapters. Her ongoing SSHRC-funded collaborative project focuses on the impact of phonetic variability on the acquisition of grammatical properties in Spanish- English bilinguals. She is also collaborating on an electropalatographic study of crosslinguistic assimilatory patterns and on an investigation on the semantics and audiovisual prosody of biased questions.
Fellowship Research Project—Mixed Worlds: Linguistic Outcomes of Spanish Colonialism
This project focuses on the largest unsupervised experiment of cultural and linguistic contact in history: the Spanish conquest of America, with the goal of exploring two questions: What strategies do speakers use in contact situations involving unrelated languages and mutually unknown cultures? How did contact evolve from the first bilinguals to the development of new linguistic varieties? To answer these questions, I will study primary sources representing different stages in the contact history, which will be analyzed with theoretical frameworks from experimental linguistics, including theories of cross-linguistic influence, second language acquisition and the role of gestures and prosody in communication.
Angela Esterhammer
Angela Esterhammer (Ph.D. 1990, Princeton University) works in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that highlight varieties of performance and performativity. Her books include The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000), Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (2008), and Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (2020). In addition to serving as Principal of Victoria College from 2012 to 2024, she is the Founding Director of the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program and the General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt.
Fellowship Research Project—John Galt and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Economy
My project analyzes the cultural transformations of the post-Napoleonic era through a focus on the Scottish-born writer and entrepreneur John Galt (1779–1839). Galt’s experiments with new periodical media, his idiosyncratic use of narrative voice and perspective, his hybrid forms of history and fiction, and his expansive geographies gave a new profile to nineteenth-century authorship. I explore the insights Galt’s work provides into the changing relationships of authors and reading publics and the print-culture networks that linked Britain to continental Europe, America, and colonial spaces in his increasingly mobile and globalized age.
Marleen Rozemond
Marleen Rozemond (Ph.D. 1989, University of California-Los Angeles) has held positions at Kansas State University and Stanford University and visiting appointments at the École normale supérieure in Paris, the University of Groningen, and the University of California at Berkeley. Her research centres on early modern discussions of the question whether there is nothing beyond matter or whether there are immaterial beings such as souls or minds. Her publications include her book Descartes’s Dualism (Harvard University Press, 1998) and a number of articles on Descartes and other early modern philosophers.
Fellowship Research Project—Beyond Mechanistic Matter: Activity and Immateriality in Early Modern Philosophy
Is there only matter or are there also immaterial beings in the world? When we think of this question, Descartes’s dualism tends to come to mind: for him only human intelligence and consciousness call for an immaterial entity, the human mind. But many early moderns thought that vastly more, or perhaps all, natural phenomena require immaterial entities. They often invoked an “Activity Argument”: for them matter was passive, and they saw a need for active beings, which consequently had to be immaterial. My project investigates this important but neglected episode in the perpetual debate about immaterial entities.
Shiho Satsuka
Shiho Satsuka (Ph.D. 2004, University of California-Santa Cruz) researches the politics of knowledge, environment, science and capitalism. She is the author of Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies (Duke University Press, 2015) and coeditor of The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds (Routledge, 2019). As a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group she has been following the global scientific and commercial networks of matsutake mushrooms funded by SSHRC Insight Grant.
Fellowship Research Project—Undoing the 20th Century with Mushrooms: Toward New Forms of Environmental Ethics
This project traces the activities of scientists and citizens who engage with matsutake mushrooms in Japan. It explores how this charismatic fungus inspired people to develop new social imaginations and environmental ethics. How do their engagements with matsutake develop critical reflections on the history of the twentieth century, especially, the industrialization and the colonial legacies in Japan and beyond? How does the matsutake guide people to develop new forms of environmental ethics in post-industrial society? This project contributes to environmental humanities by exploring the new direction of environmental movements, more-than-human ethics and knowledge production in the so-called Anthropocene.
Sherry Yu
Sherry Yu (Ph.D. 2012, Simon Fraser University) is Program Director of Journalism Joint Program in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and holds a graduate appointment with the Faculty of Information. Her research explores multiculturalism, media, and social integration. She is the author of Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora: Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles (2018, UBC Press) and the co-editor of Ethnic Media in the Digital Age (2019, Routledge) and The Handbook of Ethnic Media in Canada (2023, McGill-Queen’s University Press). Her research also has been published in scholarly journals such as Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, Journalism Studies, Television & New Media, Canadian Journal of Communication, Journal of Global Diaspora & Media, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Canadian Ethnic Studies. In 2021-2022 she held the JHI-UTSC Early Career Digital Humanities Faculty Fellowship.
Fellowship Research Project—Digital Diasporic Youth Media and Intercultural Dialogue
The proliferation of digital media platforms has created opportunities for diverse interest groups to form communicative spaces of their own. Diasporic communities in Canada are no exception, especially diasporic youth living ‘in-between’ two or more cultures of ‘where they are’ and ‘where they (or their parents) are from.’ While there is growing research attention to conventional diasporic media, less attention has been paid to diasporic youth media, when racial conflicts involving diasporic youth are rising. This study aims to map ‘digital diasporic youth media’ originating in Canada (tentatively defined as digital communicative spaces created by diasporic youth) and explore their potential to serve as critical agents in facilitating intercultural dialogue.