For 2011-12, EMiC has awarded five one-year graduate-student stipends ($12-15K) and one two-year ($63K) postdoctoral fellowship. For more comprehensive descriptions of these projects, see the newly revamped Projects page on the EMiC website. For bios of the stipend and fellowship recipients, please visit the About Us page of the website.
Vanessa Lent
EMiC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012-14
University of Alberta
Research supervisor: Paul Hjartarson
Project: Wilfred Watson, Cockrow and the Gulls
In January 2012, Vanessa will be leaving her post as EMiC Project Administrator for her new position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. Her postdoctoral project proposes to engage in a much-needed reassessment of Wilfred Watson by creating a hybrid print/digital edition of Cockcrow and the Gulls (1962). This project will be nested within a larger scholarly initiative at the University of Alberta where Paul Hjartarson leads the joint digitization of the Wilfred Watson Fonds, held by the University of Alberta, and of the Sheila Watson Fonds, held by St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Her project adds to this work by initiating the digitization and analysis of Wilfred Watson’s dramatic works, a project that aligns with the first stage of the Wilfred Watson digitization initiative that runs from 1951 (when he was hired by as an English Professor by the U of A) to 1962, the year in which Cockcrow was mounted.
Kristin Fast
EMiC PhD Stipend, 2011-12
University of Alberta
Research supervisor: Paul Hjartarson
Project: Sheila Watson, A Genetic Study of Three Short Stories
This project is a genetic study of three short stories by Sheila Watson: “Brother Oedipus,” “The Black Farm,” and “Antigone.” The genetic study has a key role to play in the digital development of the Editing Sheila Watson and Editing Wilfred Watson projects underway at the University of Alberta. It will use the detailed knowledge of the archives built in the course of the genetic study as a driver for the digital implementation of the Watson projects online. This study is central to developing a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Sheila’s archive and Wilfred’s during this period. It will ensure that the EMiC UA team can design technological infrastructure to reflect the inter-related nature of these two archives; it will also guide design of an interface that makes these relationships visible to our users.
Melissa Dalgliesh
EMiC PhD Stipend, 2011-12
York University
Research supervisor: Stephen Cain
Project: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition
The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition will be an “archive of editions” of Wilkinson’s poetry. Rather than attempting to supplant or replace the existing editions of Wilkinson’s work, my edition seeks to encompass them; in so doing, the digital Complete Poems will illuminate the composition, transmission, and reception history of Wilkinson’s poetry, an ongoing process of which the published editions are material manifestations. The digital edition will present Wilkinson’s complete published and unpublished poems in all of their variant forms as marked-up images. The digital format of the Complete Poems will also allow readers to compare multiple versions of the same text so that they can examine the evolution of each work, in all of its variant forms, over time; readers will be able to select which versions of the text they choose to compare, providing them with control over their reading experience and selection of material for analysis. Alongside the variant and bibliographic markup, the poems will also include links to extensive explanatory notes. These notes will cross-link to other related poems, and as the collection expands, to Wilkinson’s letters, journals, juvenilia, and prose.
Reilly Yeo
EMiC MA Stipend, 2011-12
University of British Columbia
Supervisor: Mary Chapman
Project: Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Selected Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Journalism: A Digital Edition
This project will produce a digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton that will push the edges of this EMiC’s digital initiatives by integrating innovative approaches and tools from both inside and outside the academy. This digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far will have three primary goals: (1) bridge academic and public conversations about Canadian modernism and multicultural contributions to Canadian literature by experimenting with a “duplex” website, with one half targeted to academics and one half targeted to the interested public, connected through multiple opportunities for dialogue and exchange; (2) explore ways to innovate on the interface design for digital editions in order to allow the reader/user to have more authority in designing his or her reading experience; (3) bring the digital edition into the 21st century by making it a rich multimedia experience. This project will help EMiC be at the forefront of the movement to change readers’ relationships to texts through their digitization, to make reading Canadian literature an interactive, immersive experience that can rival other, more pop‐cultural online experiences that dominate the bulk of what Canadians now do online.
Leah Ellingwood
EMiC MA Stipend
University of Victoria
Project: Wyndham Lewis, Tarr Resources
This project will contribute to the mandate of increasing the accessibility of Wyndham Lewis-related texts to those interested in unravelling his role in modernism. It will generate a Tarr Resources website with annotations of works relating to Tarr that are included in the C.J. Fox Collection housed at University of Victoria’s Special Collections. The Tarr Resources site will provide a description of longer works related to Tarr from the archive, including different editions and collections of criticism. In addition to summarizing each of the collection’s Tarr resources, this project will also involve digitization of materials relating to Tarr in the UVic Wyndham Lewis collection and works that are not already digitally available elsewhere. The Tarr Resources site is part of UVic’s Modernist Versions Project (MVP), a digital processing framework that will produce digital critical editions with searchable databases of variants. The 1918 and 1928 editions of Tarr are the first texts this project will digitize, and the resultant MVP Tarr editions will be invaluable and powerful digital tools for scholars interested in comparative analysis. The resources website will supplement the MVP as a starting point for critical inquiries on Tarr.
Jana Millar Usiskin
EMiC MA Stipend
University of Victoria
Supervisor: Stephen Ross
Project: Audrey Alexandra Brown, Collected Poems: A Digital Edition
This project will make Audrey Alexandra Brown’s work more accessible to modernist scholars and the general public by converting the published and unpublished poems to digital form. She published five volumes of verse and a prose diary in the 1930s and 1940s and her poems were published in newspapers across Canada. She won the Lorne Pierce medal in 1944 for “distinguished contributions to Canadian literature” as well as awards from the Royal Society of Canada (1948) and Canadian Women’s Press Club (1936). Given Brown’s success in the 1930s and 1940s, surprisingly little critical work on her poetry has been done, while other female writers such as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Louise Morey Bowman, P.K. Page and Edna Jacques have enjoyed renewed scholarly interest. Working closely with Brown’s archive in the University of Victoria Special Collections, this project will enhance the digital form of her work with hypertext links to contextualize it. It will explore the social and political conditions that allowed Brown to achieve relative success in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the changes in those conditions that prevented her work from being recognized and discussed in subsequent academic discussion. In addition to the digitization of the poetry, this project will address three sets of questions. First, how did Brown see her own work in the context of the political and social conditions under which she wrote, and did changes in these conditions lead to Brown’s disappearance from literary publication? If so, how? Second, to what extent did Brown’s later poetry change with the Canadian literary landscape? Finally, how does her poetry submit to or transgress definitions of modernism and how can further study of her work contribute to the modernist project?
Congratulations to all of the award recipients. Many thanks to all of the students who submitted impressive application dossiers and supervisors who wrote letters of support for these highly competitive awards. We hope that prospective graduate fellows and postdocs will submit applications next year and that the website will provide more information on how graduate students at partner institutions can take advantage of EMiC’s training program.
Special thanks to the Fellowships and Stipends committee chair, Paul Hjartarson, and committee members, Alan Filewod and Neil Besner, for their work in adjudicating this year’s competition. We all look forward to hearing more about these projects at future EMiC events and reading about them on the EMiC community blog.