NFC Research and Awards

Eligibility

Up to four one-year Fellowships will be awarded for 2024-2025. Applications in Humanities and interpretative Social Science disciplines are welcome, and applications are especially encouraged from candidates who work in the following academic programs and areas of study offered at Victoria College:

• Creative Expression and Society
• Education and Society
• Literature and Critical Theory
• Material Culture and Semiotics
• Renaissance Studies
• Science, Technology and Society

Award Details
These Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowships, valued at $3000 each, are for one academic year (September 1 – April 30). Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellows will be expected to engage with students and the larger intellectual community at Victoria College and present a lecture or seminar related to their research.

Victoria College will provide NFC Doctoral Fellows with a shared workspace, Victoria University Common Room privileges, an allowance of $200 for meals at the Burwash Hall dining room, as well as access to special collections at the E. J. Pratt Library.

Candidate Criteria

Successful candidates will have a strong academic record and show potential for research excellence as well as the ability to contribute to the priority areas of the NFC and Victoria College.

Please note that the Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowships and the Chancellor Jackman Graduate Student Fellowships in the Humanities (Jackman Humanities Institute) are mutually exclusive. Applicants are encouraged to apply to both programs, but may not hold a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Student Fellowship and a Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowship concurrently.

The application for Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowships is distinct from that of Victoria College Junior Fellowships. Applicants may apply to both but may not hold a Junior Fellowship and a Northrop Frye Doctoral Fellowship simultaneously as successful NFC Doctoral Fellow applicants will hold overlapping privileges.

Deadline: Applications for 2024-2025 are now open. The deadline is May 1, 2024. 

Applications must include: 

• a one-page cover letter outlining your qualifications for the Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellowship
• a curriculum vitae
• a one-page summary of your doctoral thesis and progress to date
• a letter of recommendation from your dissertation supervisor

Apply Here

Questions? Feel free to email us at nfc@utoronto.ca

The funds may be taken as a form of stipend while conducting research (ie: while performing archival research and writing, or acting as a research assistant on a pre-existing project) or used to help cover a research trip. In each case, you must have a faculty supervisor who is willing to write a letter of recommendation on your behalf in which she/he comments on the project and approves the proposed budget if required.

If your proposal is successful, in addition to the research funds and mentoring, you will be given the title of “Northrop Frye Centre Undergraduate Fellow” and invited to participate in NFC activities during the academic year following conferral of the award. Additionally, you will communicate the results of your project at an undergraduate research colloquium. Projects that use the resources of the Victoria University Library are encouraged.

Value: up to $2,000

The Northrop Frye Centre is pleased to announce that we are now accepting applications for the 2024-25 Undergraduate Research Awards for Victoria College students interested in research in the Humanities or Social Sciences.

Deadline: Applications for 2024-2025 are now open. Applications are due by May 1, 2024. 

 Apply Here

Questions? Feel free to email us at nfc@utoronto.ca.

The Centre for the Study of the United States and the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College will be making two awards for undergraduate students in the 2024-2025 academic year. Valued at $2,500 these awards will be made to third- or fourth-year students in any discipline with an interest in American culture and society. Applicants are asked to submit a transcript, a letter of reference from a faculty member, and a statement outlining their main intellectual interests in American culture. The undergraduate fellows will be expected to attend seminars at both CSUS and the Frye Centre. 

Applications are closed for 2024. Applications will reopen in early 2025, and should be submitted as a single pdf file. They should be mailed to Professor Rick Halpern, the CSUS Director, at rick.halpern@utoronto.ca. Questions can be directed to this same address.

The Centre for the Study of the United States and the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College will be making two awards for graduate students in the 2024-2025 academic year. Valued at $3,500 these awards will be made to graduate students in the Faculty of Arts and Science in any discipline pursuing research on American culture. Applicants are asked to submit a brief statement of their intellectual interests, a letter of recommendation from their supervisor, and a synopsis of their PhD dissertation. The graduate fellows will be expected to attend seminars at both CSUS and the Frye Centre. They will have access to shared office space at Victoria College and toward the end of the academic year will have the opportunity to present their research at a joint CSUS/Frye Centre seminar.

Applications are closed for 2024. Applications will reopen in early 2025, and should be submitted as a single pdf file. They should be mailed to Professor Rick Halpern, the CSUS Director, at rick.halpern@utoronto.ca. Questions can be directed to this same address.

To apply: please email your Curriculum Vitae and project proposal to nfc@utoronto.ca

Applications for 2024-2025 will be considered on a rolling basis.

About the Program
By affiliating a research project with the Northrop Frye Centre (NFC), Fellows gain access to the following:

1) The NFC covers the residual wages for Work Study Research Assistants (normally one per project and normally a Victoria College student).

2) The NFC provides priority-booking access to the Centre (VC102) for research-related activities. If needed, the NFC will also offer administrative support for affiliated research projects.

Eligibility
You must be a Victoria College Fellow with a research project that requires a Research Assistant.

2022-23 Projects

Edward Jones-Imhotep | "The Black Androids"

This project explores the black technological experience in 19th and early 20th century America through a history of automata in the form of black humans. From the 18th century onwards, hundreds of black androids were produced, purchased, and displayed across five continents. In the United States, these machines formed part of a culture of minstrelsy concentrated along Broadway Street in New York City. Using the technologies of the time — steam, mechanics, electricity — these American androids portrayed black people in pastoral, leisurely, and non-technological roles, supporting the myth that technology is opposed to blackness. The androids' surface, however, masked how those same technologies featured centrally in the lives, imaginations, and self-identities of black New Yorkers. This project examines that duality: how the technologies that drove the androids' racist depictions also figured crucially in black technological experiences, agency, and selfhood in 19th and early 20th century New York. Focusing on the period from 1830 to 1930, the project analyzes archival collections, material artifacts, court documents, city records, periodicals, and sound and image repositories to produce the first history of android technologies as both race-making objects and central elements in the technological experiences of African-Americans. 

Julia Forgie | Examining Self-Efficacy for Online Teaching in the University Context

Given that few research initiatives (virtually none!) have investigated university instructors’ efficacy for online teaching, particularly under the circumstances faced during the pandemic, this study will give insight into how university instructors’ efficacy is different in the online context from the in-person context and specifically, if any areas of teaching efficacy (efficacy in classroom management, instructional strategies, student engagement, technology use) are lacking in the online context. The results of this research can help to shape professional development and institutional training efforts that can target the actual needs of instructors to help build instructor efficacy for online teaching in the places where it’s really needed, and ultimately positively enhance the learning outcomes of their students. 

Employing a mixed-methods approach utilizing quantitative survey and validated rating scales, and the use of in-depth interviews, the study aims to explore university instructors’ self-efficacy beliefs about their online teaching practice.  As such, the study seeks to assess instructors’ feelings of efficacy in classroom management, instructional strategies, student engagement, and technology use in teaching in an online format.  

Karina Vold | Human Learning From Deep Learning (DL) Systems

This project explores the possibility of humans learning from deep learning (DL) systems. It does so by utilizing historical and philosophical perspectives on human learning through human-computer interaction (HCI) and cognitive scaffolding to inform current possibilities for learning from contemporary DL systems. The project examines detailed case across different epistemic domains (e.g. scientific discovery, mathematical theorom-proving, game-playing). This project is relevant for researchers in philosophy, cognitive science, and in the fields of explainable and interpretable AI. 

Rebecca Woods | Frozen Mammoths

Until the late 20th century, frozen mammoths were an extreme scientific rarity: only one was collected from the permafrost of Siberia in the 19th century, and by the late 1940s, a mere handful of such creatures had been found in Alaska and the Soviet Arctic. Recently, though, such remains have become more common. No longer limited by species or to the frozen depths of Siberia, Pleistocene-era wolves, caribou, and horses —along with woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses—now emerge from the circumpolar Arctic each summer. With increased human activity in the Arctic, global warming, and melting permafrost, what were once the most singular scientific specimens are now almost commonplace. My work traces this trajectory, examining how, why, and where the fragmented remains of these creatures—bits of hair, pieces of flesh, segments of organ—traveled throughout transnational networks of naturalists in the 19th and 20th centuries; how they contributed to the formation of scientific knowledge; and how they figured as archetypes for understanding the planet’s past, present, and possible futures. Formerly the most elusive of scientific specimens, frozen mammoths have become bellwethers for a warming planet, even as evolutionary biologists and futurists pursue controversial efforts to resurrect the extinct species, ostensibly to halt Arctic warming. Motivated by a sense of climate urgency, my work excavates a useable past for the sake of the planet’s future. 

Sarah Dowling | Figure & Ground: Representation in the Down Times

This project examines an array of well- and lesser-known contemporary texts by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Ottessa Moshfegh, Claudia Rankine and other writers. I show that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present, responding to the proliferation of contemporary forms of oppression and grounding. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, this book reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, maximally dependent on, and undetachable from the earth. I show that supine and prone figures present a striking contrast against the dominant, upright version of the human that we have received from western philosophy and art, and that continues to undergird humanistic inquiry. I therefore argue that recumbency is not just a kind of content, something that happens in or is represented by a text. Rather, it constitutes a sophisticated formal engagement with the figure of the human as we have received it, and with that figure’s relation to the ground that supports and subtends it. What these supine and prone bodies figure is a crisis in the representational enterprise as it is typically understood, where a singular entity emerges as significant and worthy of attention against a general, and less relevant or noticeable ground. Across the texts that I discuss, representational processes of abstraction and substitution are interrogated, parodied, critiqued, and refused. In their place is a proliferative poetics predicated on relations of embedding, overlaying, lying with, and laying out. In other words, these bodies on the ground are indicative of a reconfigured relationship between literature and its world.   

2021-22 Projects

John Zilcosky |  Wrestling: A Cultural History
"Why do we wrestle? Why was this humanity’s first sport? Scholars of antiquity claim that we needed wrestling to honor the gods. Scholars of today’s “professional” wrestling argue that it satisfies our desire for melodrama. In this first book examining wrestling’s historical arc from Plato to Hulk Hogan, I claim that its defining quality is the enwrapping of bodies, resulting in a delirious mixture of violence and sex. When primitive humans made grappling a sport, they aimed to stage and contain these desires: Two men embraced aggressively yet did not try to kill or rape the other. The strangeness of this attracted observers and explains why wrestling still draws great crowds – thus demanding a cultural analysis. We watch, amazed, as two people try to hurt and not hurt each other, returning us to the ambivalence that made us human and gave birth to civilization. Appealing to scholars, athletes, and general readers, my book will catalyze new thinking about sports and civilization."

 

2020-21 Projects

Julia Forgie | Teachers’ Efficacy for Online/Distance Teaching during the COVID-19 Crisis
"This project examines the self-efficacy beliefs of teachers as they navigate the world of online-teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a mixed-methods approach utilizing quantitative measures including survey and self-reported efficacy scales, and the use of qualitative interviews, this study aims to explore the range of self-efficacy beliefs that public and private/independent schoolteachers in Ontario hold about their teaching practice.  As such, the study seeks to assess teachers’ feelings of efficacy in classroom management, instructional strategies, student engagement, and technology use in teaching in an online/distance format. This study will also examine how teachers’ efficacy beliefs when teaching via an online/distance mode compare to their efficacy beliefs when teaching in a traditional, in person format. Finally, this study seeks to explore the curricular decisions of teachers as they plan and implement online/distance learning and examine any relationships between self-efficacy and teaching practices.  

Omar Hussein was an engaged and effective research assistant for this project. They meticulously coded the survey data results from over 300 respondents. Omar was also involved in the recruitment, scheduling and administration of 20 interviews with teachers. They also transcribed 20 interviews with enthusiasm and precision. Omar made several important contributions to this study, and I am grateful to the Northfrop Frye Centre Research Affiliate Program for the opportunity to engage Omar in this research."

Shaun Ross | Digital Edition of the Aeneid
"A team of four extremely capable undergraduate researchers - Chiara Campagnaro, Lucy Faria, Noah Stevens, and Veronica Spada - worked collaboratively in the ongoing creation of a digital edition of the Aeneid charting the poem’s reception in the late middle ages and Renaissance. These student researchers, who were focusing on Book 4 of the Aeneid in 2020-21, traced and schematized the influence of Virgil’s epic on works including Dante's Commedia, Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Ercilla’s La Araucana, Camões’ Os Lusíadas, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Building on work begun with the help of undergraduate RAs during the Scholars-in-Residence program in 2020, these students also played the groundwork for a series of critical/thematic articles that will function as a supplement to the final version of the digital edition. The NFC provided important support for this project by allowing for the hire of students with a wide range of disciplinary and language competencies necessary for this evolving research project."

 

2019-20 Projects

Anne Urbancic | Mario Pratesi
"Ryan Hamilton was an outstanding participant in the Fall/Winter 2019-20 Work Study Program through the NFC Affiliation. He completed all the tasks indicated in the job proposal. My studies on the letters to and from Tuscan author Mario Pratesi were immensely helped by Ryan’s diligent research and careful transcription of original and rare manuscript materials. His work clearly indicated his interest in and commitment to the project. In fact, at our meetings, our conversations tended to go on as we discussed all aspects of the author, the sociopolitical environment in which he wrote, his works and his correspondents. Thank you so much for the NFC Affiliation opportunity."
 

John Zilcosky | Literature, Trauma, Modernity
"This project examines literary representations of trauma from the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars to the aftermath of World War I, when “shell shock” came formidably to the public eye. First, I ask the pressing question of representability and doubt in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical literature: If we can find no somatic source for trauma, how do we know that it even exists? Then I investigate the literature of this period – “modernism” – which both reacted to and shaped this discourse. Rarely focusing explicitly on traumatic events, this literature only hints at traumatic occurrences – foregrounding instead the problem of representability at the heart of the modern age. Just as the traumatized body no longer pointed back to a physical pathology, so too did language itself now seem to be severed from the object it aimed to describe. 

Andreas Motsch | A Critical Edition of Joseph-François Lafitau's Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains Comparées aux Mœurs des Premiers Temps (1724)
"Isaure Vorstman was already familiar with my research thanks to a JHI-scholarship which saved us much time. Besides the mundane tasks of organizing material (copying, scanning and filing texts) and finding and ordering rare books, we concentrated on two areas. We collaborated on a new electronic database on jesuit sources, the Digital Indipetæ Database, an open access database with collaborators from many different countries. The goal was to learn more about Jesuit Studies as a research field and to improve paleographic skills. Isaure transcribed and proofread about twenty 19th century letters from French Jesuits requesting permission from the order's superior to join the overseas mission. Besides transcribing the letters themselves this required researching and preparing metadata for publication. It also comprised providing critical feedback to the editors to improve the beta version of the database. Isaure will be given credit in the database as transcriber as soon as these letters are published. 

To apply: please submit a short abstract about your project along with a few lines about how collaborating with the NFC and/or employing undergrad RAs would benefit your work. Please send your application to nfc@utoronto.ca.

Applications for 2024-25 projects are now being accepted. The deadline to apply is June 17, 2024.