Post Doctoral Fellows & Other Affiliates

  • Stacey Zembrzycki

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    Stacey Zembrzycki is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University and a teacher at Dawson College. An award-winning modern Canadian oral and public historian of ethnic, immigrant, and refugee experience, she is the author of According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (UBC Press, 2014) and its accompanying website: www.sudburyukrainians.ca, and is co-editor of Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).expand

    Zembrzycki’s current SSHRC funded project, Mining Immigrant Bodies, uses oral history to explore the connections between mining, health, and the environment and their impact on postwar immigrant communities in Sudbury, Ontario. She is also completing a book entitled Chaperoning Survivors: Telling Holocaust Stories on the March of the Living, which uses multiple, life story oral history interviews to understand how five Montreal Holocaust survivors give testimony, remember in-situ, and educate others about the horrors they witnessed in Poland.
  • Joseph Rosen

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    Joseph Rosen writes about how cultural memory and historical trauma affect contemporary politics. He is currently bringing his research into mainstream media and public forums. “The Third Solitude” re-assesses myths of anti-Semitism in Quebec, and was nominated for Best Essay by the National Magazine Awards 2016. “The Israel Taboo” addresses why it is so difficult to talk about Israel in Canada, and was nominated for Best Essay by the National Magazine Awards 2015.expand

    Since then, Rosen has hosted public dialogues about Israeli-Palestine in various forums, including a public talk by Ari Shavit. He has also engaged in political discussions of Israel and Canadian politics in The Walrus and in The Harper Decade. Rosen has engaged in public conversations with novelists Yann Martel, Ayelet Tasabari, (a Yemenite-Israeli author), and Assaf Gavron (an Israeli author who has written novels about suicide bombing and settlements). During an FQRSC postdoctoral fellowship at CEREV Rosen focused on the role of trauma and testimony in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
  • Leila Qashu

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    Leila Qashu is a 2016-2018 Banting postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS). She is interested in theoretical and practical intersections between the expressive arts, women’s rights, vernacular feminism, legal pluralism, and vernacular belief. With a commitment to community-driven research, she is looking for ways to apply participatory, practice-based methodology.expand

    She has been working with the Arsi Oromo in Ethiopia (the Arsi are a subgroup of the Oromo ethnic group) and conducting fieldwork since 2002, independently and in conjunction with a French research team and the UNESCO – Norway funds-in-trust project on Ethiopian instruments, music and dance (2005-2009). Her PhD research, for which she held a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship (2010-14) and was a member of the SSHRC – MCRI project, Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing, she focused on ateetee, an Arsi women’s sung dispute resolution ritual; the dissertation examined how an expressive form enables women to peacefully protect, promote and claim their rights in a rapidly changing social environment. Her current research project focuses on marriage by abduction and other challenges facing young Arsi women, and their strategies – especially the use of expressive arts – for questioning, resisting and changing cultural practices. She plans to use collaborative, participatory video work as a primary medium to create collaborative representation of Arsi stories. Her aim is to create a research-creation dissemination model that will constitute action for young women and includes ethnographic research, multimedia collaborations, and representations of the women’s expressions.

     

     

  • Virginie Soulier

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    Virginie Soulier is associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Perpignan Via-Domitia (UPVD). Co-directoring the Professional Master in Heritage, she teaches Museology, Cultural Mediation and History of Art. Dr. Soulier also works at the Centre de Recherche Sur les Sociétés et Environnements Méditerranéens – Axes Patrimoines (UPVD) and the Laboratoire de Recherche Sur les Publics de la Culture at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR).expand

    Her projects include the mediation of sensitive heritage (aboriginal and immigration heritage) and social museology. Her present primary focus concerns the internment camp patrimonialization from the Spanish Civil War. Dr. Soulier completed postdoctoral research during two years (SSHRC) at UQTR and UPVD. She holds a doctorate degree in Sciences of Information and Communication from the University of Avignon and a Ph.D. in Museology, Mediation and Heritage from the University of Quebec at Montreal. She analyzed collaborations in polyphonic exhibits between aboriginal communities and Canadian museums. Her research identified the museum as a recognition place of heritage. http://www.theses.fr/2013AVIG1129. During her studies, Dr. Soulier has received 22 fellowships in Canada and France. In 2013, the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada presented her with the Alice Wilson Awards of the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Soulier has developed several projects during the last decade. She curated seven exhibits in France, Spain and Canada. She was the President of Special Interest Group on Education and Mediation in Museums from the Canadian Educational Researcher’s Association and Canadian Society for the Study of Education. She was the director of the review L’interprétation du Patrimoine. In addition Mrs Soulier published ten papers, presented 45 communications and organized more than 15 seminars in France and in Québec.
  • Shauna Janssen

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    Shauna Janssen is a Montreal-based urban curator with a background in professional theatre practice, and interdisciplinary studies. Within the context of urban change, in her curatorial practice she works with artists to create site responsive performances, interventions, installations, and collaborative community projects. In 2010, she founded Urban Occupations Urbaines, a curatorial platform for artists, communities and the public to creatively and critically engage with cities and urban change. Her curatorial work involves long-term documentary and site-specific research projects.expand

    In her practice she asks how critical curation can be a mode of intervention in the public realm, and how neighbourhoods in transition might be active collaborators, with artists, in the surfacing of significant pasts, sublimated political positions, and forms of cultural agency, including the agencies of the built environment itself. She is working with oral history, critical post humanist thought, feminist and queer theory to rethink sites, discourses, and themes such as spatial agency, the public sphere, gender, class, race, gentrification and the right to the city.  Her ongoing research addresses the cultural politics of postindustrial urban spaces, and the role of art/ists in creating politically engaged communities in these spaces. She is currently undertaking research on the role of digital and new media in the public sphere in relation to expanded scenographic practices and concepts such as spatial dramaturgy and performative urbanism. She received her Ph.D in Humanities (2014), Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, where she has also taught in the Departments of Theatre and Art History.
  • Stephanie Tara Schwartz

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    Stephanie Tara Schwartz was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at CEREV (2015-2016), and is Research Director at the Museum of Jewish Montreal (MJM) and co-editor with David S. Koffman of Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes. Her current project “Mapping Moroccan Jews in Montreal: A Social and Digital History” seeks to explore the influence of Moroccan Jewish artists and activists on the city. Through her work with MJM she curated the exhibits Sacré/Profane: Samy Elmaghribi (2015) and Parkley Clothes: 1937 (2014) at Nuit Blanche à Montréal, expand

    designed and taught the museums’ tour guide training and summer fellowship program, and helped lead and produce physical and digital walking tours on themes including Hazzanut and Jewish social service in Montreal. She is co-editor with May Telmissany of the book Counterpoints: The Legacy of Edward Said (2010). Her articles on Jewish diaspora, the literature and film of Arab Jews and Jews and multiculturalism in Canada have been published Borderlands e-journalCanadian Jewish StudiesComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and Critical Inquiries: A Reader in Studies of Canada. She is also Research Associate at the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.
  • Jessica Roda

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    Jessica Roda is a 2016-2018 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at CEREV & CaPSL in collaboration with Heyman Center for Humanities, Columbia University. With a background in musicology, ethnomusicology and anthropology from France and Canada, her research interests centre on the creation and the representation of ethnic and religious identities after social rupture of filiation in the aftermath of war, omission and repression, on heritage-making as well as on intercultural and interreligious dialogue.expand

    At CaPSL she will investigate the ruptures and reconstruction of kinship ties among Ex-Ultra Orthodox Jews of Montreal and New York City. An author of over twenty articles, Jessica presents at conferences regularly in French, English and Portuguese as a guest researcher (USA, Brazil, Japan, France) and as a speaker in the academic, associative, community, and cultural milieu. Co-editor with Daniela Moisa of the book Heritage and Cultural Diversity (2015, Presses de l’Université du Québec), she is also Research Associate at the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies and the Groupes Sociétés, Religions et Laïcités (CNRS, GSRL). She has a long experience in collaborative research with festivals and museums promoting Jewish identity in France and Canada.