Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs) in London Ontario are a success story of architectural heritage preservation. There has been a rapid expansion of designated districts in the city, with the first appearing in 1992 and six more in the years since, with seven more currently on the books. This research will consider residents who relocated outside […]

Amaratunga Railton’s proposed project is to take a leading role in curating the capstone public output of Landscapes of Injustice (LOI). LOI is a 7-year, intersectoral community-engaged research project exploring the dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s. LOI illustrates (1) the violation of human and civil rights at a time of perceived insecurity; (2) […]

Since the 19th century, Chinese men and women have migrated to small towns and cities throughout places such as Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America in search of better opportunities, bringing with them many traditional cultural practices, values and customs that evolved over time and space. How did early migrants retain cultural heritage […]

This is a project to update the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec’s permanent exhibit, Doing Time: The Quebec City Common Gaol (1808 – 1867). Since the exhibit was launched in 2011, much research has been done on the history of the gaol.  Doing Time is seen by some 25,000 visitors per year. For some, […]

The proposed research project will determine the significance of and catalog historic papers and documents held by the National History Committee (NHC: established 1983) of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE: established as the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers in 1887). These records have been rather haphazardly stored by various Chairs of the NHC […]

This project will complete an urgently needed feasibility study linking researchers and graduate students from the University of Guelph with the Lucy Maud Montgomery Museum and Literary Centre (LMMMLC) in Norval. Together, this team of researchers and community partners will define current best practices in museum design to create a plan for the LMMMLC to […]

The Greater Saint John area struggles. Too many people are leaving, not enough people are moving in. If this continues, governments will have great trouble. It will be hard to pay for road repairs, keeping schools open and so on. Likewise, employers already struggle to find people for the positions that do open up. Locals […]

This project will involve the research and production of micro-histories of non-profit humanitarian organizations based in Canada. By examining small moments in the foundation and work of these organizations, our goal is to contribute to a better understanding of the role of Canadian civil society organizations in international humanitarian programs. Our partners work in a […]

My dissertation investigates the narrative photography emerged in the US around the 1970s and its influence on the formation of photographic discourse in France throughout the 1980s. By narrative photography, I refer to the photographic experiments that appropriate certain qualities of narrative forms, ranging from books to theater. With the financial support of Mitacs Globalink […]

Precisely what a nation finds scandalous says a great deal about the shared values of the population, and should indicate something about the nature of political culture within that community. The Profumo Affair in Britain, and the sex scandals of a variety of American politicians – from Jefferson’s slave mistress through Anthony Weiner’s most recent […]

Baroque is defined as an irregular pearl, and it is described as an oddity. This oddity or kink, as defined in the dictionary, hints at how the baroque that Spain created transcended an artistic style. In Spain during the XVI century, including the conquest in 1521 in Mexico all the way to the beginning of […]

My research traces how Brazilian artists first grappled with their relationship to modernism as they sought to break out of narratives imposed by the West, and later with a contentious history and culture formed under military regimes. I am analyzing the social and historical stakes around the term “los desaparecidos” as many people went missing […]