People

Current NFC Administration and Fellows

The Northrop Frye Centre welcomes scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, areas of study, and experiences. Our Doctoral, Undergraduate, and Visiting Fellows contribute to the rich academic life of Victoria College.

Administration

Professor Robert Davidson, PhD (Cornell)

Director, Northrop Frye Centre

Bob Davidson is Professor of Spanish and Catalan Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Jazz Age Barcelona (U of Toronto Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Canada Prize in the Humanities) and The Hotel: Occupied Space (U of Toronto Press, 2018). His current work includes a study of material culture and early 20th-century Spanish and Catalan narrative (By and About Things) and a new research project entitled The Scent of Spain: Fragrance, Odour and Culture that considers key fragrances and scents that contributed to the Spanish olfactory environment from the beginning of the modern fragrance industry in the country to the early 2000s.

He is the founder and co-editor of UTP’s Toronto Iberic book series and has published work on different aspects of the Castilian and Catalan avant-gardes, cultural theory and film. In addition to directing the NFC, Prof. Davidson currently serves as Chair of the Manuscript Review Committee of University of Toronto Press. He takes his martini with a little extra vermouth and an olive.

Email: robert.davidson@utoronto.ca

Kelly Baron, PhD ABD (Toronto)

Special Projects & Events Coordinator (Research)

Kelly Baron is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Department of English, where she studies contemporary Canadian Literature. She's a regular reviewer for Literary Review of Canada, and her scholarly work can be found in Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, and English Studies in Canada, among others. With Andrew DuBois, she's co-editing Sing in Me, Oh Muse: Music In/As Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her research interests are in contemporary Canadian Literature, Canadian book culture, literary audio, and the connections between music and literature.

Email: nfc@utoronto.ca

Doctoral Fellows

The Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Fellows are doctoral students registered in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto who are in the writing stage of their dissertation. In addition to mentoring undergraduate students and engaging with the intellectual community at Victoria College, the Doctoral Fellows present a public seminar on their doctoral research.

Yizhou Zhang

Supervisors: Antje Budde (Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies) and Julius Heinicke (University of Hildesheim)

Yizhou Zhang is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her dissertation looks at early twentieth-century theatre innovators and their preoccupation with “gesture” as a category for artistic innovation, knowledge generation, and political intervention. Concerned with the moving body’s threefold occupation as material, instrument, and product, the research project asks how theatre practices shape and organize human corporeal capacities, and what new cultural possibilities performance gestures can “embody forth.”

As a theatre artist, Yizhou likes to combine documentary theatre with puppetry and literary adaptation in what she calls “docufiction theatre” to break open the history of oppression. Practicing playwriting, directing, dramaturgy, and design, Yizhou has presented her works in theatres and festivals in China, Canada, the USA, and Germany.

Bard Swallow

Supervisors: Cillian O'Hogan (Centre for Medieval Studies) and Sebastian Sobecki (Department of English)

Bard Swallow (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture. Their dissertation studies the choices made by poets in the multilingual environment of fourteenth-century England: does choosing to write in Latin give poets access to poetic forms and formulas that have no English or French analogues? Bard’s research interests more broadly include manuscript anthologies and how compilers chose their contents, (multilingual) wordplay as used in poetry, and medievalism in modern media—especially video games. Their research has appeared in The Journal of Medieval Latin and Games and Culture.

Sajdeep Soomal

Supervisor: M. Murphy (Department of History)

Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, looks at how modern chemistry altered the way that settler colonists imagined and engaged with the environment in 19th century Canada. He works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical materiality with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. Sajdeep is affiliated with the Technoscience Research Unit at the University of Toronto and serves as board member for InterAccess and Sanghum Film. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.

Marta Rocatin Centelles

Supervisor: Bob Davidson (Department of Spanish & Portuguese)

Marta Rocatin is a PhD candidate in Spanish Literature at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the significance of rage in modern and contemporary Spanish literary texts, examining its connections to social and political change and its role in shaping national identity. Marta teaches Spanish at all levels at the University and collaborates on various research projects in cultural studies and contemporary Spanish literature. Her work has been recognized with the Ontario Graduate Scholarship twice, and she is excited to engage with the vibrant research community at the Northrop Frye Centre.

Chris Aino Pihlak (CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow)

Chris Aino Pihlak is a trans woman, PhD student at the University of Toronto, and social historian of past articulations of trans feminine existence. Before coming to the University of Toronto, she obtained a Master’s in History at the University of Victoria. There the Faculty of Humanities awarded its 2024 Gold Medal for Outstanding Master’s Thesis to Chris, for her thesis titled “A Movable Closet: Constructions of Femininity Among Twentieth Century Transfeminine Periodical Communities.” Her dissertation examines the robust and cross-continental trans feminine subcultural periodical networks that existed from 1960 until the mid-2000s across the Global North. Anchored in oral history, this project thinks through the affective and experiential dimensions of existing in these spaces of care, sociality, and sisterhood. She further studies the socio-intellectual discourses of gender and embodiment found within these American-centred networks. In addition, she is a scholar of 20th-century trans feminine erotica where she works with these texts to think through subcultural and societal notions of trans feminine desirability. Her work can be found, or is forthcoming, in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Abusable Past, Sexualities, and Intersections. She hopes her analyses of the complexities and messiness of past trans lives honours those who built the path she now walks on.

Lilika Ioki Kukiela (CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow)

In Lilika Ioki Kukiela’s dissertation “Honorary Brownness: Racializing Japan in Multiethnic America,” she explores the figuration of Japan as an “honorary brown”—in contrast to its legal interpellation as an “honorary white”—in the multiethnic literary and cultural archive of American Orientalism. She argues that multiethnic American literature and culture in the late twentieth century has imagined interracial and transnational kinship and belonging through an orientation toward Japan that is positioned against white American imperialism. Her dissertation asks: why is Japan such a powerfully desired figure for interracial encounter in the United States? What are the consequences of imagining Japan as an alternative to American empire? Is imagining alternatives to American empire commensurate to imagining the end to empire or something else? She argues that because of Japan’s history as a non-white empire turned postwar ally to the United States, multiethnic literary and cultural figurations of Japan as an “honorary brown” fail to firmly critique imperialism because these literary and cultural texts imagine Japan through Orientalism that functions as an extension of American empire or through Japan’s own legacies of imperialism and contemporary allyship with the United States. Her research is thus informed by and engages with the fields of Asian American studies, critical ethnic studies, the study of global Asias, and critical race theory with attention to questions about power, comparative racialization, and transnational tensions between the United States and Japan.

Undergraduate Fellows

The Northrop Frye Centre Undergraduate Fellows are undergraduate students at the University of Toronto working on an independent research project in the humanities or social sciences. In addition to conducting their research and engaging with the intellectual community at Victoria College, the Undergraduate Fellows will communicate the results of their research project at Vic Research Day at the end of the winter term.

Ariel Wang

Ariel Wang (she/her) is a fourth-year student studying Literature and Critical Theory and East Asian studies. Under the supervision of Professor Linda Feng, she will be building upon Frye’s theories of the double vision and the educated imagination by examining individual perspectives in the context of cultural studies, exploring the cultural foundations of our imaginations in a state of self-recognition as a conscious subject. Her project centralises upon the theme that is the juxtaposition between the supposed eternity of the natural world with the ephemerality of human life.

Rick Wei

Rick Wei (he/him) is an incoming fourth year student studying History with a focus in law and East Asian Studies. His research explores the role and value of womanhood in wartime China, specifically within the context of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Through the comparative analysis of three prominent figures in Chinese history, he aims to explore how women navigated gendered expectations, shaping their paths to agency, and how their identities were constructed within nationalistic narratives. This research project will also examine the influence of "fandoms" on their public memory through a social lens of gender/queer history.

Milena Pappalardo

Milena Pappalardo is a fourth-year student majoring in Political Science. Her research project with the Northrop Frye Centre, supervised by Professor Dina Georgis, investigates tensions and fears surrounding pregnancy as symptoms of our contemporary socio-economic environment. In particular, she is interested in the resurgent promotion of “traditional” feminine roles online, as well as theories on abjection, submission and power. Outside of academic life, you can find Milena dancing her heart out to house music or doodling fervently in her sketchbook.

Kyra Menezes

Kyra Menezes is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. She is pursuing an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Ethics, Society, and Law (ES&L) and Peace, Conflict, and Justice (PCJ) with a minor in Philosophy. Her primary academic interests are focused in the areas of social justice, political philosophy, and global economics. As a NFC researcher under the supervision of Professor Laura Garcia-Montoya, Kyra will conduct research on the relationship between motherhood, migration, and militancy in Latin America. The focus of her research is to discuss the various ways that Latina women break cultural expectations of remaining close to their children and instead mother from afar in order to provide for them financially and give them a better future.

Eunice Der

Eunice Der (she/her) is a fourth-year student majoring in English, and double minoring in Material Culture and Semiotics, and East Asian Studies. Under the supervision of Prof. Catherine Sutton, Eunice will be continuing her research on the heirlooms of “Operation Oblivion,” a group of thirteen Chinese Canadian soldiers who served in the Second World War. In this phase of her research, she will be working closely with various archival collections to uncover more heirlooms and material culture that may have been donated to institutions by the members of “Oblivion.” She also hopes to meet and interview community members that are closely connected to this unfamiliar part of our Canadian history. The research project, aptly named “Lost From Oblivion,” was originally presented at Victoria College Research Day 2024, and was awarded the E.J. Pratt Library Primary Sources Prize. She also has published works in Ricepaper Magazine, Muse Magazine of the Canadian Museums Association, and the university’s material culture and semiotics journal, The Material Merge.

Noah Sokoloff (NFC/CSUS Undergraduate Fellow)

Noah Sokoloff is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto studying History, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and American Studies. His research focuses on American History, its cultural and social justice movements, and their music, tying together themes of hope and resistance. He plans to continue his research on the ability of music to challenge the American project by creating communities of hope. In his third year, he wants to expand his research focus to include American Elections and their impact on social movements. He is the 2024-2025 VP Academic of the Undergraduate Society of American Studies, where he plans to curate a lineup of academic events for the American Studies and University of Toronto community.

Joy Xu (NFC/CSUS Undergraduate Fellow)

Joy is a third-year History, Cinema studies, and English student at the University of Toronto. Rooted in a curiosity for her family’s lineage and intergenerational micro-histories, broadly speaking, her main research interests are modern Chinese history, looking at both the Western semi-colonial period as well as Communist China under Mao. She is intrigued by the shifting Sino-US relations and its impact on the perceptions of Chinese (American) women by both Chinese and American societies. Joy aims to explore the ways that orientalism is both internalised and manifested in both nations, thus, looking at its contribution to the subjugation of Chinese American women. She applies various lenses of postcolonial and gender theory, as well as themes of femininity, motherhood, respectability, transnationality and migration to explore the integration of western culture through literature, visual arts, film, media, propagandistic manhua and ceramics. Joy is interested in the way that domestic material culture is reflective of our day to day lives and exchanges- and how it ritualises and enforces patriarchal violence. More specifically, she is compelled by the intersections of Eastern and Western cultures and its impact on the integration of the female body into the nation state as a tool for this exchange.

Visiting Fellows

The Northrop Frye Centre Visiting Fellows are scholars working on research projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Visiting Fellows have access to the University of Toronto library system and the E.J. Pratt Library’s special collections. Visiting Fellows participate in the intellectual community at Victoria College and communicate the results of their own research in a public lecture organized by the Centre.

Dr. Uxía Otero-González

Uxía Otero-González is a Postdoc Fellow at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2023–26), where she earned a PhD in History (2022) with a dissertation on normative femininity and its sartorial embodiment in Francoist Spain, 1939–75. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the TMU School of Fashion (January–December 2024) and a Visiting Fellow at the Northrop Frye Centre, part of the Victoria College at the University of Toronto (Fall 2024).

Uxía’s research project, CostuMe(s), addresses the ties between clothing, gender, and memory during Franco’s dictatorship. Uxía is deepening her knowledge of the (im)material cultures surrounding fashion. This knowledge helps her examine fashion’s role in Spain’s transition to a consumer society and how fashion shaped perceptions of Franco’s regime abroad. You can learn more about Uxía’s project by visiting @costu_me_s on Instagram and X.

Affiliated Research Projects

The Northrop Frye Centre Research Affiliate Program provides financial and administrative support for the research projects of Victoria College Fellows. This opportunity will be of special interest to Fellows who work with, or would like to work with, undergraduate Research Assistants. By affiliating your project with the Centre, you become eligible for the following benefits:

The NFC will cover the residual wages for Work Study Research Assistants (normally one per project)
You will gain priority access to booking the Northrop Frye Centre (VC102) for research-related activities. If needed, the NFC will also offer administrative support for affiliated research projects.

We invite Victoria College Fellows to apply for this unique opportunity by submitting 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. Applications will reopen for affiliated research projects in spring 2025.

The 2024-2025 Affiliated Research Projects are as follows:

Jennifer Mara DeSilva | Enslaved Florence

This new digital project grows out of research conducted at the Archivio di Stato in Florence, Italy, which preserves documents illuminating enslaved people from 1366 to 1650. This time period covers the fullest Italian and European conception of the Renaissance period, great cultural wealth and political change in Florence, as well as the shift of the slave trade’s point of embarkation from Eastern Europe and North Africa to West Africa. Juxtaposing varied documents in a digital project using ArcGIS data layers, creates a chronological and geographic atlas of Florence’s most oppressed residents. This open-access project will reveal data patterns that expand earlier studies confined to a single document type, elite households, or narrow time period. In addition to mapping specific enslaved people in households through this period, Enslaved Florence will determine: how many enslaved people lived on a single street, parish, or quarter in a given time period? How many enslaved people joined a single household over centuries? How did the gender and age trends of enslaved people change over time? How large was the population of free people born of at least one enslaved parent? How did the patterns of child abandonment, “renting out,” and manumission change over time? There is no comparable project for an early modern city that strives to identify and map all enslaved people and over three centuries.

Ann Komaromi | The Dissident Legacy

This project takes a critical look at Soviet dissidence after Stalin, which involved nonviolent resistance to repressive acts by the Soviet state and agitation for the rights of citizens and groups, including women, Jewish, and Ukrainian activists, among others. It seeks to acknowledge these different perspectives and to situate non-violent rights-based resistance in its social and political context as a Soviet phenomenon. Examining the intersection of Soviet dissidence with gender, ethnic identity, and community affiliation, this project will show dissidence to be grounded in a variety of locations and social networks that supported rights defense activities in the USSR. It will emphasize the human and networked character of dissidence, which took place in homes as well as on the public square. Overall, the project aims to contribute to decentering the field of Slavic studies, thickening the notion of rights, and preserving and communicating the legacy of Soviet dissidence.

At stake is a deeper understanding of how democratic and liberal principles may be pursued in the context of multiple modernities, as well as a nuanced approach to the history of real socialism. This project will be pursued through study of dissident memoirs and archives using interdisciplinary methods of literary and historical analysis. The research mobilizes recent advances in the study of Soviet subjectivity and writing of the self, in book history concerning uncensored Soviet texts (samizdat and tamizdat), and in archival theory, for a critical understanding of the way the dissident legacy has been constructed and received. Project outputs will include bi-lingual (French-English) communications, comprising a database of Soviet dissident memoirs, annotated interviews, curricular development, scholarly and public events, and publications featuring analysis of dissident memoirs and archives. The results of this study will be relevant for literary scholars, historians, and public audiences interested in Jewish, Russian, and Ukrainian relations, gender in Soviet history, human rights, and forms of non-violent activism.

Shaun Ross | Charting Virgil’s Renaissance Reception

Virgil’s Aeneid, though written in antiquity, was the single most influential poem in Medieval and Renaissance literary history. Poets such as Dante, Ariosto, Ercilla, Camões, Spenser, and Milton all used Virgil’s poem as a model, to imitate and to challenge, as they wrote their own vernacular epics. This project, building on work carried out by undergraduate researchers over the last four years, will create a digital edition of the Aeneid that charts how Dante and subsequent Renaissance-era poets responded to and reinterpreted Virgil’s Latin poem.

Catherine Sutton | Materiality, Memory, and the Military: Symposium and Exhibition

The exhibit restages a modernist play written and performed by the Varsity Veterans Association at Hart House Theatre in the 1920 inaugural season. The symposium will be held at Victoria College on November 16th, 2024, followed by the opening of an exhibit at the E.J. Pratt Library. No photos exist of the performance, but the never-before displayed script, stage directions and posters found in UTARMS will be included in the exhibit. The exhibit will display WWI diaries, photographs, ephemera, and objects held by the VIC Special Collections. A loan of artifacts like those used in the original play will be borrowed from the Royal Canadian Military Museum.

Past NFC Fellows

Since 2015, the Northrop Frye Centre has become a cross-generational community of scholars working in different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Past Doctoral Fellows

2023-2024
Aliju Kim (East Asian Studies)
J Hughes (Department of English)
Kate Russell (Cinema Studies Institute)
Rhiannon Vogl (Department of Art History)

2022-23
Eriks Bredovskis (History)
Hong Liu (Comparative Literature)
Colleen McDonell (English)
Morgan Moore (Medieval Studies)

2021-22
Dur-e-Aden (Political Science)
Marina Dumont-Gauthier (Art History)
Nattapol Ruangsri (Italian Studies)
Filippo Sposini (IHPST)

2020-21
Catia Dignard (Spanish and Portuguese)
Patrick Marshall (Cinema Studies)
Tavleen Purewall (English)
Robert Twiss (Comparative Literature)

2019-20
Emily Doucet (Art History)
Billy Johnson (English)
Matthew Thompson (Cinema)
Roxanne Korpan (Religion and Book History and Print Culture)

2018-19
Nicholas Feinig (Anthropology)
Chiara Graf (Classics)
Carrie Reese (Cinema)
Christina Turner (English)

2017-18
Aleksa Alaica (Anthropology)
Beyhan Farhadi (Geography)
Marisa Karyl Franz (Religion)
William Fysh (History)

2016-17
Amy Fox (Anthropology)
Erica Petkov (Political Science)
Johanna Pokorny (Anthropology)
Julia Rombough (History)

2015-16
Katie Fry (Comparative Literature)
Alexandra Logue (History)
Emma Planinc (Political Science)

2014-15
Joanne Leow (English)
Colin Rose (History)
Morgan Vanek (English)

Past Undergraduate Fellows

2023-24

Manuela Mora Castillo

Samantha Corrente

Sara Hashemi

Joël Ndongmi

Seavey van Walsum

2022-23

Daria Diakova

Tara Downie

Khulan Enkhbold

Sam Rosati Martin

Madeleine Schmuckler

2021-22

Holly Johnstone

Rion Levy

Anthony McCanny

Ishika Rishi

Elizabeth Wong

2020-21
Cheryl Cheung
Ori Gilboa
Lana Glozic
Kate Schneider

2019-20
Grace King
Kevin Yin
Leah Stephens
Maral Attar-Zadeh
Victoria McIntyre
Yilin Zhu

2018-19
Alexa Breininger
Aidan Flynn
Laura Harris
Veronika Korchagina
Alexandra Southgate

2017-18
Samantha Mazzilli
Sarah Ratzlaff
Benjamin Hillier-Weltman
Margaryta Golovchenko
Thomas Fraser

2016-17
Nika Gofshtein
Willem Alexander Crispin-Frei
Sofia Kavlin

2015-16
David Wang
Geoff Baillie
Amy Kalbun
Griffin Kelly
Vipasha Shaikh

Past Visiting Fellows

2023-24
Prof. William Conklin (University of Windsor)
Dr. Michel Mallet (Université de Moncton)

2020-21
Dr. Anastasiya Lyubas (Binghamton University)

2019-20
Prof. Claire Battershill (Simon Fraser University)
Dr. Marta Manzanares Mileo (University of Barcelona)

2018-19
Prof. Nandi Bhatia (University of Western Ontario)
Prof. Daniel Gallimore (Kwansei Gakuin University)

2017-18
Prof. Kevin James (University of Guelph)

2016-17
Prof. Edward Jones-Imhotep (York University)

2015-16
Prof. Thomas Willard (University of Arizona)

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