Skip to main content Skip to local navigation

New SSHRC Research Awards for Professors Jody Berland and Bernard Lightman

New SSHRC Research Awards for Professors Jody Berland and Bernard Lightman

Congratulations to Professor Jody Berland on the success of her recent SSHRC Insight Grant. “Digital Animalities: Media Representations of Non-Human Life” ($300,250)

The research project "Digital Animalities"  explores how ubiquitous media are changing the meanings and possibilities of human-animal relations. Animals powerfully symbolize what humans value, accept, exclude, or fear in themselves and in the world. New visual and digital technologies vastly multiply the production, circulation and acquisition of animal images. The current proliferation and re-con-figuration of the animal occurs in the context of a global visual culture that relies on images of animals to signify, promote, destabilize and secure its political, cultural, and natural landscapes.  A culture in which animals and environments are as precarious as their meanings inspires a range of expressive strategies through which images negotiate risk. The symbolic proliferation of animals reconciles contradictory needs and desires in a mediated environment offering uncertainty together with powerful incitements to connect, participate, and enjoy.

As principal investigator, I am working with a team of 10 international scholars to enhance collaboration in research and research dissemination. The project includes a multimedia art exhibition, a blog, an online archive, and scholarly publication.

Learn more about Professor Berland’s research and teaching.

Congratulations to Professor Bernard Lightman on the success of his SSHRC Insight Grant, “The Collected Letters of John Tyndall: 1820-1893” ($358,892)

SSHRC Insight Grant:  $358,892
A five year grant for the project "The Collected Letters of John Tyndall (1820-1893), influential Victorian scientist: editing and publishing volumes 5 to 14."  The letters will illuminate the life of an eminent Victorian physicist at the center of many of the key developments in nineteenth-century science, including the professionalization and popularization of science, the debates over Darwin's *Origin of Species*, and the construction of the cultural authority of science.

Learn more about Professor Lightman’s research and teaching.

Other Humanities faculty research.