with Dany Guay-Bélanger, Patricia Branco Cornish, Kelann Currie-Williams, Kelly Norah Drukker, Lauren Laframboise, Cassandra Marsillo, and Eleni Polychronakos
English
In Fall 2023, we launched our Scholars-in-Residence program, seeking to bring together oral history practitioners, artists, and creative storytellers. Our call resonated beyond expectations. We were delighted to welcome to COHDS seven brilliant scholars and oral historians who have contributed, in manifold ways, to the intellectually vibrant life of our community this past year.
Join us for a roundtable conversation that features the work of our 2023-24 Scholars-in-Residence in an informal and convivial atmosphere.
Dany Guay-Bélanger is a FRQ and SSHRC funded PhD candidate in Game Studies at the Université de Montréal and holds a master’s degree in Public History from Carleton University. He created a podcast that explores the development and application of Deadplay, a methodology favouring a holistic approach for the preservation and study of videogames as cultural heritage artefacts. His research aims to perfect and concretize the methodology developed during his master’s in order to allow players and researchers, present and future, to access videogames from every eras of this medium’s history. Dany has also interned and was the Garth Wilson Fellow at the Canada Science and Technology Museum and is currently the Francophone Representative of the Canadian Game Studies Association.
Patricia Branco Cornish is a PhD candidate in the Communications Department at Concordia University. She draws on a feminist decolonial perspective to reveal women artists’ contributions to Brazil’s 1960s-1970s avant-garde art movement, which coincides with Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). Patricia combines oral stories and visual art as a research method in which artists use their artworks as memory triggers to discuss the past. The art object’s materiality helps to create narratives embedded with personal, public, and artistic-political aspects of the artist’s life. Patricia holds an MA in Art History from University of São Paulo (MAC-USP) and is the co-author of an article on art collections placed under the custody of public art museums in cases of money laundering investigations.
Kelann Currie-Williams (they/she) is a writer, visual artist, and oral historian based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal.Kelann is a PhD student at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, working at the intersections of Visual Culture, History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies. Their research focuses on the image-making and photographic preservation histories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Canada from the late 19th to late 20th centuries, and the scenes of migration, homemaking, community-building, and political mobilization that those photographs depict. Kelann is a long-time student affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Her critical work has appeared in academic journals such as Urban History Review, the Canadian Journal of History, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Philosophy of Photography.
Kelly Norah Drukker is a writer and doctoral candidate in Concordia University’s Humanities PhD program. As a research-creation scholar working at the intersection of creative writing, oral history, family history, and memory studies, she has presented her projects at Concordia University, Rutgers University, the University of Ulster, the University of Jyväskylä, and Sydney Catholic University. Kelly’s first collection of poems, Small Fires, was awarded the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Concordia University First Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Grand prix du livre de Montréal (2016). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals in Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. Petits feux, the French-language translation of Small Fires by Lori Saint-Martin and Paul Gagné, was published by Le lézard amoureux in 2018. As a doctoral student, Kelly has been the recipient of a Faculty of Arts and Science Graduate Fellowship, a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, a United Irish Societies of Montreal Scholarship, a School of Canadian Irish Studies Bursary, and a Fr. Thomas Daniel McEntee Graduate Scholarship. She continues to live, work, study, and write in Montreal.
Lauren Laframboise is a Vanier Scholar and PhD student at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in the Department of History at Concordia University. Her research explores the impacts of deindustrialization in the apparel industry in Montréal and New York City. In 2021, Lauren completed her MA in History at Concordia, and from 2020-2022 she was the Associate Director of Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time (DéPOT). She has worked on a variety of public history projects exploring labour and immigration history, including museum exhibitions, online oral history platforms, walking tours, and documentary films and radio, including the Voices of the Immigrant Workers’ Centre oral history project. She is also the External Affairs Officer for the Concordia Research and Education Workers’ Union (CREW–CSN) and convenes their Feminist Workplace Committee.
Cassandra Marsillo is a public historian, artist, and educator, based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), telling and listening to stories about immigration, identity, collective memory, food, and folklore, particularly in relation to the Italian-Canadian experience and traditions from her family’s region, Molise. Her latest project is an oral history cookbook on the stories and recipes of Montreal’s molisani, Dalla valigia alla tavola: A journey through Molisan culinary heritage, which she completed in collaboration with the Federazione delle associazioni molisane del Quebec, photographer and artist Vee Di Gregorio, chef Joseph D’Alleva, and pastry chef Erica Marsillo. Currently, she is working on a zine/exhibit about the history and family stories of the iconic “Italian birthday case” in North America.
Eleni Polychronakos is a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is also a writer and teacher. She holds a Masters in Literature (McGill, 2000) and one in Journalism (UBC, 2007). Her short fiction appears in The Puritan, The New Quarterly, The Bath Short Story Award Anthology 2019 and other literary publications. One of her stories was long-listed for the 2020 CBC Short Story Competition. From 2011 to 2015, she was a member of the collective that edits and publishes Room magazine, a longstanding Canadian journal of feminist literature. Eleni is currently writing her dissertation “Girl’s Name: Seeking Narratives of Feminist Genealogy in Twentieth-Century Greece.” This SSHRC-funded research creation project uses oral history and literary criticism as both theory and methodology to collect, create, and analyze stories by and about women who came of age during Greece’s turbulent twentieth century.
REGISTRATION
Please note that all our events are free and open to all, but you need to register! Register here. For any questions contact, cohds.chorn@concordia.ca
In person (max 25 people), LB 1019 (Sunroom)
COHDS/ALLAB is located on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal.
