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 Bob Davidson, PhD
Mary Rowell Jackman Professor; Director, The Northrop Frye Centre
Bob Davidson, Mary Rowell Jackman Professor of Humanities at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College and faculty at the Culinaria Research Centre, specializes in the study of food, drink, and hospitality. He is the author of Jazz Age Barcelona (U of Toronto Press; shortlisted for the Canada Prize in the Humanities) and The Hotel: Occupied Space (U of Toronto Press). His latest project, The Scent of Spain: Fragrance, Odour and Culture, looks at key fragrances and smells that were part of Spain’s modern experience
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 Northrop Frye Centre, 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 both an olive and a twist.
Email: robert.davidson@utoronto.ca
Kelly Baron, PhD (Toronto)
Special Projects & Events Coordinator (Research) (on leave)
Kelly Baron has a PhD in contemporary Canadian Literature from the University of Toronto's Department of English. 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. She is the co-editor of The Crossroads of Music and Literature: New Essays on the Muse of Song (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Email: nfc@utoronto.ca
Kai Wang
Special Projects & Events Coordinator (Research)
Kai Wang worked in 2024 with the Office of the Principal and subsequently with Communications. She holds a BA from UBC and an MA from Yonsei University, with a specialization in sustainable development policy.
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.
Stephanie Borkowsky (Department of History)
Supervisor: Daniel Bender
Stephanie Borkowsky (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of History with a collaborative specialization in Food Studies. Her dissertation examines the lives of wet nurses in 19th century United States history, tracing how these women navigated the institutions, relationships, and social beliefs which shaped their experience of motherhood and (un)freedom. Stephanie is the former President of the Graduate Association for Food Studies and current Managing Editor at Gastronomica. She holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in Food Studies from New York University.
Qi Hong (East Asian Studies)
Supervisors: Yurou Zhong (East Asian Studies); Nathan Vedal (East Asian Studies)
Qi Hong (they/she) is a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture. Their dissertation explores the science, aesthetics, and politics of “linguistic sound” in China in the 19th and 20th centuries. Situated at the intersection of literary studies, book history, and the history of science and technology, this study aims to historicize linguistic concepts and experiments, as well as their reception within the broader intellectual community of late Qing and Republican China. Ultimately, Qi is interested in different ways to grapple with sound, sign, and sense amid radical shifts of knowledge and social paradigms.
As a translator and printmaker, Qi enjoys ruminating on and playing with the materiality of translingual communication. Her ongoing creative project combines printmaking and rapping to interrogate the politics of music and print culture under racial capitalism.
Bill Kroeger (Department of English)
Supervisor: Andrea Most
Bill Kroeger (he/him) is a PhD candidate of English (including a collaborative specialization with the School of the Environment). He studies calls to ecological conscience in different literary genres – from novels and poetry to films and protest documents. Engaging with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass as origin story, science writing, ecological theory, and personal memoir, he focuses on ethics of ecology and relation in contemporary novels such as The Overstory and Barkskins, the poetry of Whitman, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, and Jorie Graham, films (both documentary and narrative), and local environmental protest literature defending U of T’s own “Back Campus.” Bill’s work with Earthsongs, a community gardening and poetry project, seeks to mix material experiences of plants, soil, and food with poetic reimagination of earth-relations, stewardship, and, interspecies communities.
Robbie Steele (Department of English/Book History and Print Culture)
Supervisor: Daniel Wright
Robert (Robbie) Steele (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto. His SSHRC-funded dissertation analyzes how illustration-text dynamics in the Victorian illustrated novel function as a nexus for queer expression and interaction, especially in their complications of narrative time and the embodied experience of reading. He is also a Junior Fellow at Massey College and a former BHPC Printing Fellow in Massey College’s Robertson Davies Library, where he has recently curated an exhibition entitled Unbound: Queerness and the Book Arts, 1850–1987. He is excited to engage with the vibrant interdisciplinary community at the Northrop Frye Centre.
Connor Bennett (CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow)
Supervisor: Michael Cobb
Connor Bennett (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of English. His dissertation, which has been supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as well as an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, is titled “Quiet Discontent: Minimalism and Melancholia in American Fiction, 1945–2025.” In it, he shows how practitioners of literary minimalism—a style of short and simple sentences, structural fragmentation, and ellipsis—register and respond to the faltering of American idealism during the postwar era. He argues that American literary minimalists use style as a means through which to reimagine both that idealism and, in turn, “Americanness” itself. His article based on the dissertation’s opening chapter (“Raymond Carver’s Minimalist Mouth-Work”) was recently published in ELH: English Literary History. In 2023, he co-edited an essay collection called “Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics” for Post45 Contemporaries. Connor is also Co-Convener of the American Literature Research Collaborative, which promotes the study of American literature and literary cultures among undergraduates, graduates, and faculty from across the university.
Kanika Lawton (CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow)
Supervisor: Meghan Sutherland
Kanika Lawton (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute, where they are also part of the collaborative specialization at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. They hold an MA from the Cinema Studies Institute and a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia. Their intellectual interests coalesce around a broader investment in theorizing and historicizing socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic shifts in a post-9/11 United States through close attention to what they term “surveillant media," as well as an ethical commitment to those most disproportionately impacted by the snowballing effects of U.S. security and surveillance apparatuses. Subsequently, their SSHRC-funded dissertation puts forth a two-pronged claim: neutrality is an affect that expresses itself through violence, and such violence has been dismissed across both surveillance studies and cinema studies with regards to the aesthetic quality of surveillant media. Deeply indebted to Black studies, whiteness studies, affect theory, queer theory, and trans studies, their dissertation intends to make acutely visible the entrenched violences of U.S. surveillance practices without reproducing the violent visibility that structures them. Alongside being a CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow, Kanika is the President of the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union and a Lead of the Queer and Trans Negativity Working Group at the Jackman Humanities Institute. Their work has been published in Spectator and Media Fields.
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.
Lia Iannarilli
Lia Iannarilli (she/her) is an incoming fourth year student majoring in Political Science and English. She is interested in interdisciplinary research, and her project adopts a critical geographic analysis of Italian shorelines as a convergence of national identity, leisure culture, and politics. Under the supervision of Professor Ahmed Allahwala, her research explores Italian shorelines as sites of contested territoriality, where border policy, beach politics, and tourist economies intersect and are mobilized by far-right political discourse. By investigating Italian shorelines as negotiations of territorial and cultural control, she aims to recontextualize seemingly banal spaces of leisure within an urgent right-wing political climate.
Natalie Lau
Natalie Lau (she/her) is a third-year student studying Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, History, and Political Science. Her research is about how growing authoritarianism on the one hand and tightening borders on the other create a growing class of political migrants stuck in limbo, focusing on two seemingly disparate cases: Hongkongers in Canada and Myanmar refugees in Thailand. Through collecting the oral histories of various stakeholders and actors, including exiled politicians, grassroots leaders, and laypeople of various backgrounds, her body of research seeks to preserve a historical and cultural memory of defiance.
Valerie Ng
Valerie Ng (she/they) is an undergraduate student in Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Toronto. Her research project, The Body as a Cage: The Spatiotemporality of Being and The Argonauts, undertaken under the supervision of Professor Maria Cichosz, investigates the body as a site of confinement, dislocation, and resistance across literature, film, and critical theory.
Through an autoethnographic methodology, the project integrates personal narrative with theoretical analysis to examine how cultural texts represent bodily estrangement, spatial-temporal fragmentation, and the affective dimensions of being situated in— and sometimes alienated from— one’s physical form. She is influenced by Maggie Nelson's seminal work The Argonauts, as well as post-structuralist thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Hélène Cixous. Culminating in a book-length manuscript, the project interrogates how dominant narratives shape the way bodies are read, regulated, and remembered.
Olivia Pontecorvo
Olivia Pontecorvo (she/her) is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Italian Studies with a double minor in Mediaeval Studies and Renaissance Studies. Supervised by Dr. Giulia Gaimari, her research project entitled Ritual Friendships: Liturgy, Emotion and Community Making in Dante and Riflesso: Undergraduate Journal of Italian Studies studies the intersection of affect theory and the history of emotions in medieval literature. It explores the affective liturgical environment of the Middle Ages in Dante Alighieri’s works to understand how he depicted emotional bonding, friendship and community making. Olivia is also the Vice President of Academics for the Italian Student Association and co-founder of Riflesso: Undergraduate Journal of Italian Studies.
Bavan Pushpalingam (CSUS/NFC Undergraduate Fellow)
Bavan Pushpalingam (he/him/his) is an Eelam Tamil-Canadian scholar-activist and emerging researcher at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he studies Public Policy with minors in Food Studies and Urban Public Policy and Governance. His research focuses on food security, food sovereignty and fair trade policies, with a particular emphasis on tea farmers in Sri Lanka and India, women-led agricultural movements in northern Ghana and racialized youth in Scarborough.
Melani Veveçka (CSUS/NFC Undergraduate Fellow)
Melani Veveçka (she/her) is entering her fourth year at the University of Toronto, where she majors in Political Science and Evolutionary Anthropology. While she initially approached politics as a personal interest, by the latter half of her second year she had formally redirected her academic path toward political science, with a particular emphasis on American constitutional law and the evolving role of the Supreme Court. Her current research, conducted under the supervision of Dr. Delaney Glass in the Department of Anthropology, explores how interpretations of constitutional law have shaped bodily autonomy in the United States, with specific case studies on military conscription during the Vietnam War, LGBTQ+ rights, and reproductive freedoms. Outside of her academic work, Melani enjoys visiting art galleries, discovering new restaurants, and spending time with her kitten Georgie — named after George Orwell.
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.
The Northrop Frye Centre is welcoming the following Visiting Fellow in the 2025-2026 year:
Dr. Lailatul Fitriyah (dia, she, her) is an Indonesian, Muslima feminist scholar who focuses on comparative Muslim and Christian feminist theologies, decoloniality, gender, and religions, marginalized forms of Islam and Christianity in Southeast Asia, and feminist interreligious dialogue. She is currently an Associate Professor of Interreligious Education at the Claremont School of Theology in Los Angeles where she teaches courses in the fields of Feminist Interreligious Dialogue, Decolonial Theories and Religions, Critical Islamic Studies, Racism and Islamophobia, and Ethnography and Theologies. She currently works on a manuscript on the constructions of Muslim and Christian anti-patriarchal theologies from the lives of Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers who work and live in Singapore. Her publications can be read in journals such as The Muslim World, Religions, and Interreligious Relations.
The Northrop Frye Centre is welcoming the following Doctoral Visiting Fellows in 2025-2026:
Renee Congdon is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese department at Princeton University and a Graduate Fellow of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, where she focuses on Spanish culture, literature, and film from the late 19th century to the present day. Her research interests include popular culture, gendered and domestic labor, food studies, and rural studies, with a particular emphasis on addressing how literary and cultural objects can illuminate legacies of popular resistance on the peripheries of the Spanish state. Her recent publications include a piece on sensory detail as narrative technique in Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Albatros Ediciones, 2022) and a chapter on Ainhoa Rodríguez’s 2021 film Destello bravío and its radical engagement with extinctionist discourses about “empty” Spain (Vernon Press, 2025). Her doctoral thesis brings together her interests in popular culture and gendered and domestic labor, analyzing the fraught sociocultural legacies of the proletariat washerwoman in the Spanish popular imaginary from the late 19th century to the present day.
Sonia Scarlat is a PhD candidate at the University of Salamanca in Spain. Her dissertation, titled “Metaliterary Autofiction: A Comparative Study of the Works of Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, Philip Roth, and Paul Auster”, examines metaliterary autofiction as a particular manifestation of autofiction. Her dissertation reviews the ways in which writers of autofiction have tended towards metaliterary modes throughout the history of the sub-genre, a trend which has grown in recent decades in both Hispanic and Anglophone contexts. Through her research, she seeks to establish a typology of metaliterary autofiction and compare its evolution in the works of Marías, Vila-Matas, Roth, and Auster. Sonia is a graduate of the University of Toronto with a degree in Linguistics and Spanish and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Salamanca in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. As a Northrop Frye Centre Doctoral Visiting Fellow, her research project, “Transatlantic Intersections: The Autofictional and the Metaliterary in Ben Lerner and Javier Marías” explores the influence of Marías’ metaliterary and autofictional writing in the novels of Ben Lerner.
Affiliated Research Projects
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The NFC will cover the residual wages for Work Study Research Assistants (normally one per project)
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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.
Claire Battershill | The Prompt Book: A History of Creative Instructions
Centuries before Yoko Ono asked an orchestra to count all the stars, ancient poets suggested cutting up lines of Virgil to make new texts and asked would-be writers to imagine their lives as sea monsters or military captains. This research project asks how creative prompts have evolved historically in form, function, and style, and what their material history can reveal about changing conceptions of creativity, authorship, and artistic instruction. How do prompts reflect broader cultural or educational ideologies about writing, art, or creativity? What material evidence can we find of those impacts?
Angela Esterhammer | The Works of John Galt: Innovations in Short Fiction, 1820 – 1840
This project represents a phase in the production of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt, the first annotated scholarly edition of fictional and non-fictional writings by the Scottish-born Galt (1779-1839), who is also a key figure in Canadian history and culture due to his role in the settlement of early-nineteenth-century Ontario. His works encompass many genres: popular novels, historical fiction, gothic stories, political satire, biography, travel writing, poetry, and drama, as well as journalism on topics ranging from art criticism to political economy to slavery to North American settlement. The proliferation of Galt’s writing during the 1820s and 1830s contrasts spectacularly with his near-disappearance from literary history between the mid-nineteenth and the late twentieth century, and most of his works have never been republished until now.
Julia Forgie | Expanding Horizons: The Impact of International Experiential Learning on Undergraduate Students’ Professional and Civic Development
This mixed methods research project explores the impact of international experiential learning opportunities—such as the EDS360Y0 Education Internship—on undergraduate students’ professional knowledge development, civic engagement, and global understanding. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, the study investigates how immersive, cross-cultural field experiences shape students’ evolving conceptions of teaching and learning, their sense of civic responsibility, and their ability to engage with global issues in educational contexts.
Pamela Klassen | Mounds and Memory Around the Great Lakes
The Mounds Research Collective brings together scholars, Indigenous history experts and curators from Canada and the United States to catalogue, re-examine, and remediate nineteenth-century mound-builder theories and their ongoing effects. Found across Turtle Island (North America), ancient mounds and earthworks are remarkable landforms created by the labour and artistic vision of human beings who lived millennia ago. Working in collaboration with Indigenous and settler public history organizations in the Great Lakes region, the project catalogues settler narratives of the mound builders and examines how such narratives continue to have an effect on the mounds themselves, as places that have been excavated, bulldozed, turned into golf courses, or made into "National Historic Sites." The project also documents and analyzes how Indigenous peoples have written and performed counter-narratives that center mounds as material witnesses of their ongoing relationship with the land, which they continue to visit and steward as places of ceremony.
Joanna Papayiannis | Curses in Clay, Letters in Lead: Ritual Cursing and Political Ostracism in Ancient Anthens
This project explores the intersections in ancient Greece between lead tablets used for cursing and clay ostraka (broken pieces of pottery) used for political ostracism. Though cursing was marked as a transgressive practice, ostracism was an official political mechanism used for exiling a threatening citizen through a secret vote. Despite these conceptual differences, the curse tablets and ostraka seem to overlap in many interesting ways: curse tablets were frequently deployed in competitive contexts, such as in the Athenian law courts, and ostraka were sometimes used to target personal rivals. Material, textual, and ritual parallels between cursing and ostracism suggest that curses were an illicit, yet often deployed, supplement to state-sanctioned political procedures, such as ostracism. The project seeks to draw attention to the relationship between cursing rituals and political procedures in ancient Athens and to challenge the disciplinary boundaries typically enforced between political systems and ritual practices.
Shaun Ross | Charting Virgil’s Renaissance Reception
This project will continue work on an interactive digital edition of the Aeneid that charts the poem’s reception in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. It will schematize 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. This project expands on research carried out with undergraduate RAs during four iterations of the Scholars-in-Residence program, as well as with NFC sponsored work-study teams from 2022-2025.
Adam Sol | The Mixed Literature of Creativity
Everyone loves creativity and wants a piece of it. In fact, the word is so ubiquitous that it’s difficult to zero in on what people mean when they use the term. For some it seems to mostly refer to innovation and newness or “disruption,” whereas others focus more specifically on artistic making. Published material on creativity tends to fall into one of three categories: "How-to” books from artists, writers, teachers; surveys of creative fields and their impact in economic terms; and psychology-based research into how creativity functions in the brain. This project seeks to understand how creativity functions across disciplines, and how to translate ideas about creativity across different cultures and different languages.
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
2024-2025
Yizhou Zhang (Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies)
Bard Swallow (Medieval Studies)
Sajdeep Soomal (Department of History)
Marta Rocatin Centelles (Spanish & Portuguese)
Chris Aino Pihlak (CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow)
Lilika Ioki Kukiela (CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow)
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
Ariel Wang
Rick Wei
Milena Pappalardo
Kyra Menezes
Eunice Der
Noah Sokoloff
Joy Xu
2023-24
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
2024-25
Dr. Uxía Otero-González (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Dr. Yaser Farashahinejad (Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies)
Dr. Paul Barrett (University of Guelph)
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)