Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Research Award Opportunities
For 2024, there are over 40 advertised opportunities for eligible undergraduate students to work with researchers in the Faculty of Arts.
Note: The advertised opportunities are not an exhaustive or exclusive list. Professors do not need to be listed in order to be eligible to supervise students for the purposes of this award. You may interview any eligible professor who is considering supervising a research assistant. They must be full-time UM faculty, not adjunct professors or instructors.
Application deadline is February 13, 2024.
2024 Research Opportunities
Anthropology
Julia Gamble
Supervisor: Julia Gamble
Contact Information: Julia.Gamble@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Dr. Gamble is a bioarchaeologist who studies interactions between early life stress and later life health in past populations by looking at growth lines in teeth combined with further evidence from the skeleton. Broadly, she is interested in patterns of stress and in how to read these from the skeleton. She also uses 3D technology to document archaeological teeth and bone, and combines this with dental analysis on microscopic, molecular, and chemical levels. Her current work involves regional focuses on Austria, Denmark, and Belgium.
Haskel Greenfield
Supervisor: Haskel Greenfield
Contact Information: Haskel.Greenfield@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
- Development of Bronze Age urban societies in the Near East.
- ArcGIS analysis of archaeological excavation from Europe, Near East or Africa.
- Making an archaeological film on European, African, and/or Near Eastern archaeological excavations.
- Art, theatre and social protest in Greenwich Village – a biography of an artist.
- Origins of metallurgy – an archaeological approach.
- Zooarchaeology – animal bones in archaeology.
- Early domestic herd managements and provisioning of urban societies – zoology, proteomics and isotopes in archaeology.
- Virtual reconstruction and reality of early urban settlements.
Lara Rosenoff Gauvin
Supervisor: Lara Rosenoff Gauvin
Contact Information: Lara.RosenoffGauvin@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
My current work concerns nurturing a collaborative repatriation process in the Department of Anthropology. I am particularly interested in addressing settler colonial violence as manifest in academic institutions, and in fostering community-driven work that creates and allows for processes that centres Indigenous self-determination respect, responsibility and reciprocity. Participating in the Respectful Repatriation Ceremony at UM, the research involves potential archival, historical or artistic forms of engagement.
Classics
Michael Sampson
Supervisor: Michael Sampson
Contact Information: Mike.Sampson@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
I am a scholar of ancient Greek literature with two major active projects. The first is a study of literary culture in an Egyptian village, undertaken via an examination of its papyrus fragments, uncovered via archaeological excavation. The second is an ongoing, international collaboration to archive those papyrus texts digitally, in TEI/EpiDoc XML, at the papyri.info portal. I am especially eager to supervise a student with expertise in XML/XSLT, which will enable new approaches to the corpus to be explored.
Economics
Robert Chernomas
Supervisor: Robert Chernomas
Contact Information: Robert.Chernomas@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Economic determinants of health; Progressive macroeconomics; American history
Jesse Hajer
Supervisor: Jesse Hajer
Contact Information: Jesse.Hajer@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
The Political Economy of Public Policy in Manitoba; Income Distribution and Poverty; Labour and the State; Community Economic Development and the Social / Solidarity Economy
Ian Hudson
Supervisor: Ian Hudson
Contact Information: Ian.Hudson@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Determinants of Interprovincial Variation in Social Welfare Indicators: Research has shown that there is considerable variation in provincial social welfare policy and outcomes. Our research will incorporate Power Resources Theory to investigate the factors that account for these differences.
Jonathan Jenner
Supervisor: Jonathan Jenner
Contact Information: Jonathan.Donald.Jenner@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
- The political economy of colonial capitalism.
- African economic history.
- Extramaket labour coercion in capitalism.
Gregory Mason
Supervisor: Gregory Mason
Contact Information: Gregory.Mason@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Health economics and indigenous economics development; using AI in empirical research.
English, Theatre, Film & Media
Hee-Jung Serenity Joo
Supervisor: Hee-Jung Serenity Joo
Research Interests:
Science fiction by writers of colour; abolition; critical race theory; queer theory.
Erin Keating
Supervisor: Erin Keating
Contact Information: Erin.Keating@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
British Restoration theatre and fiction; early modern celebrity and fan cultures; book history; affect, queer and gender theory; contemporary fantasy (fiction, television and film).
Dana Medoro
Supervisor: Dana Medoro
Contact Information: Dana.Medoro@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Literature, feminism, gender, animals, history of medicine, nineteenth century U.S.
Judith Owens
Supervisor: Judith Owens
Contact Information: Judith.Owens@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
My current research focuses on the healing arts in early-modern (Renaissance) literature and culture in England. In the first phase of this research, I will be collecting information on medicaments and treatments as well as on the affective labour of tending to the sick. Some of this information is in printed texts, but a lot of it is available only in manuscript. At some point, I will travel to libraries in the US and the UK that have extensive collections related to medicine in the 16th and 17th centuries. As a first step, next spring and summer, I will be compiling a bibliography of printed and manuscript sources as well as transcribing manuscript sources that I already have. A student research assistant would help with this work. I will also be revising for eventual publication an article on an aspect of the healing arts in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. A student research assistant would help with collecting secondary sources.
Vanessa Warne
Supervisor: Vanessa Warne
Contact Information: Vanessa.Warne@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Vanessa Warne’s current research interests include the literary depiction of traditional crafts (i.e. weaving, lacemaking, and woodcarving) and the cultural history of disability, with a focus on the history of blindness. This summer she will be researching Victorian-era visual and literary depictions of blind people’s experiences of crafting, including knitting and wired beadwork. She welcomes the opportunity to work with an Undergraduate Researcher on the neglected history of blind people’s experiences as creators of material culture.
German and Slavic Studies
Stephan Jaeger
Supervisor: Stephan Jaeger
Contact Information: Stephan.Jaeger@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Dr. Jaeger’s research analyzes the representation of war and genocide, particularly the two world wars and the Holocaust in German, European and North-American public memory in museums, literature, film and historiography. His current research is particularly interested in the narration/storytelling and representation of the Holocaust, refugees, war, genocide and other atrocities, in perspectives of perpetration, collaboration, implication and victimhood in physical and virtual exhibitions, and how these museum exhibitions create experiences and empathy for potential and real visitors. He is also working on a book collection entitled Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories: Narrating the Past for Present and Future. Student research could relate among others to current online exhibition strategies and/or the analysis of online reactions/reviews to specific museums, monuments and exhibitions, as well as support in analyzing physical exhibition spaces and observing visitors' behaviour in museum space. Areas of research: German and European Studies, War and Holocaust Studies, Representation of Atrocities in transhistorical contexts, Museum and Memory Studies.
History
Greg Bak
Supervisor: Greg Bak
Contact Information: Greg.Bak@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
1. Archives, Decolonization and Reconciliation: Canadian archives have been a primary structure in support of settler colonialism, providing the legal and cultural foundations for what the TRC called cultural genocide. The TRC’s Calls to Action included calls specifically directed at archives. This project examines what the Canadian archival community is doing to advance decolonization and reconciliation, by responding to the TRC’s Calls or otherwise.
2. Digital History and Digital Archives in Manitoba: This project seeks to identify and examine archival records that document digital histories in Manitoba.
Jarvis Brownlie
Supervisor: Jarvis Brownlie
Contact Information: Jarvis.Brownlie@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Hydro-impacted Indigenous peoples in Manitoba; Community-based research; Indigenous oral history; Settler colonialism in Canada; Crown-Indigenous relations.
Sean Carleton
Supervisor: Sean Carleton
Contact Information: Sean.Carleton@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Settler colonialism; Indigenous resistance; Indian Residential Schools.
Tina Chen
Supervisor: Tina Chen
Contact Information: Tina.Chen@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Histories of race, anti-racism and anti-oppression; visual cultures and creative engagement in anti-colonial solidarity movements; modern Chinese history; equity, diversity, and inclusion in sport; socialist and feminist theories and practice.
Roisin Cossar
Supervisor: Roisin Cossar
Contact Information: Roisin.Cossar@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
History of the environment in the Middle Ages; histories of women in the Christian Church; digital history and mapping the Middle Ages.
David Parent
Supervisor: David Parent
Contact Information: David.Parent@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Metis history, society, politics, and governance; Critical Indigenous studies
Adele Perry
Supervisor: Adele Perry
Contact Information: Adele.Perry@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
History, Gender, Colonialism, Water, the Body, Infrastructure, western Canada, feminist research methods, Indigenous research methods
Greg Smith
Supervisor: Greg Smith
Contact Information: Greg.Smith@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Legal history; criminal justice history; history of evidence in criminal law.
Erik Thomson
Supervisor: Erik Thomson
Contact Information: Erik.Thomson@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
During the First World War, the Hudson's Bay Company signed a contract with the French government to be a global purchasing agent and shipping firm. The Company's archives, located now in the Provincial Archives of Manitoba, contain over 73 meters of correspondence about this activity, as well as substantial other relevant collections. Given the scope of the collection, students have latitude to choose different subjects of interest to them, while helping me pursue my broader research project. This includes the history of many commodities—wheat, sugar, picric acid, telephone cables and aircraft—operations of a global shipping firm in the age of steam, labour relations, finance, accounting and insurance issues, merchant banking networks, as well as political and diplomatic affairs that come to engage France, the UK, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Romania, Canada and the US.
Jocelyn Thorpe
Supervisor: Jocelyn Thorpe
Contact Information: Jocelyn.Thorpe@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Environmental justice; rivers in Winnipeg; decolonizing research
Indigenous Studies
Merissa Daborn
Supervisor: Merissa Daborn
Contact Information: Merissa.Daborn@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Food security; Indigenous STS (science, technology, and society); critical whiteness studies; surveillance and policing.
Peter Kulchyski
Supervisor: Peter Kulchyski
Contact Information: Peter.Kulchyski@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Hydro affected Indigenous communities; critical theory; Indigenous rights.
David Parent
Supervisor: David Parent
Contact Information: David.Parent@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Metis history, society, politics, and governance; Critical Indigenous studies
Sean Carleton
Supervisor: Sean Carleton
Contact Information: Sean.Carleton@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Settler colonialism; Indigenous resistance; Indian Residential Schools.
Labour Studies
Jesse Hajer
Supervisor: Jesse Hajer
Contact Information: Jesse.Hajer@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
The Political Economy of Public Policy in Manitoba; Income Distribution and Poverty; Labour and the State; Community Economic Development and the Social / Solidarity Economy
Julia Smith
Supervisor: Julia Smith
Contact Information: Julia.Smith@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
I'm researching feminist labour activism in Canada between 1940 and 1990. This project involves locating and examining archival documents related to labour and feminist movements in Manitoba during this period.
Linguistics
Nicole Rosen
Supervisor: Nicole Rosen
Contact Information: Nicole.Rosen@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Sociolinguistics, language variation and change, language revitalization, language documentation, Canadian English and French, Heritage languages, language interactions.
Political Studies
Andrea Charron
Supervisor: Andrea Charron
Contact Information: Andrea.Charron@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
NORAD, Arctic security, Canadian sanctions.
Sarah Hannan
Supervisor: Sarah Hannan
Contact Information: Sarah.Hannan@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Contemporary political theory; Well-being; Autonomy; Children's rights; Morality of procreation; Familial justice; Educational equality
Tami Amanda Jacoby
Supervisor: Tami Amanda Jacoby
Contact Information: Tami.Jacoby@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Middle East Politics; War; Terrorism; Gender and Feminism; Identity Politics.
Kiera Ladner
Supervisor: Kiera Ladner
Contact Information: Kiera.Ladner@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
As a Canada Research Chair I am involved in a number of large research projects all of which involve Indigenous peoples. The first project involves the ongoing constitutional debates in Australia and New Zealand. The second involves the development of an archive of legal cases and community initiatives related to the UNDRIP. The third involves a project on digital (data) sovereignties focussing on MMIWG. The fourth and final project explores the idea of an Indigenous Voice in settler-states (possibly through guaranteed parliamentary representation or a 3rd chamber) and will examine models from around the globe looking at institutional design, constitutional/societal fit and its perceived functionality. Please note that there will always be other projects that come up - given that I work on real world politics with communities and other researchers! For instance, over the last three years I have been involved in a HUGE COVID study in Canada, USA and Mexico, responded to the MMIGW Inquiry, explored the ‘death of reconciliation’, organized a workshop on regendering governance at the UN, worked on treaties and supervised a Post-Doc & undergraduate students on research exploring Indigineity in contexts such as the Middle East.
Steven Lecce
Supervisor: Steven Lecce
Contact Information: Steven.Lecce@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Political theory
Susan Prentice
Supervisor: Susan Prentice
Contact Information: Susan.Prentice@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Social & family policy, childcare (daycare), women’s work, gender discrimination, work/family balance, care.
Psychology
Danielle Gaucher
Supervisor: Danielle Gaucher
Contact Information: Danielle.Gaucher@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Social justice; EDI; Social Change.
Steven Greening
Supervisor: Leslie Roos
Contact Information: Steven.Greening@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Neuroscience of human emotion; cognitive neuroscience; emotion regulation; mental imagery
Debbie Kelly
Supervisor: Debbie Kelly
Contact Information: debbie.kelly@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Spatial cognition, avian food-storing, field studies of spatial cognition.
Sunmee Kim
Supervisor: Sunmee Kim
Contact Information: Sunmee.Kim@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Longitudinal Design, Prediction Modeling, Longitudinal Data Analysis Methods, Cognitive Aging and Related Psychosocial and physiological Factors.
Alicia Nijdam-Jones
Supervisor: Alicia Nijdam-Jones
Contact Information: Alicia.Nijdam-Jones@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Dr. Nijdam-Jones specializes in forensic psychology, in the area of violence risk assessment, malingering assessment, stalking, cultural safety in forensic mental health services, and the use of forensic assessment measures with culturally and linguistically diverse groups.
Kristin Reynolds
Supervisor: Kristin Reynolds
Contact Information: Kristin.Reynolds@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
The overarching aim of Health Information Exchange Laboratory work is to understand the unique health-related needs of population groups, ascertain gaps in information and services, and work with groups to create information, resources, and services that will meet their targeted needs. We draw on a range of research methodologies in our work, including qualitative, quantitative, epidemiological, mixed-methods, website evaluation, intervention science, and integration of physiological measurements.
Leslie Roos
Supervisor: Leslie Roos
Contact Information: Leslie.Roos@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
I lead clinical research in 3 broad areas: (1) Intervention science: the role of family mental health for child development; (2) Equity-focused care: the promotion of initiatives driven by the leadership of trainees advancing community wellness through self-determination, with current projects relevant to Indigenous & Newcomer family mental health; (3) Technology-enhanced interventions: advancements in eHealth and wearable tech for family mental health.
Melanie Soderstrom
Supervisor: Melanie Soderstrom
Contact Information: M_Soderstrom@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
My research examines infant language development, including the cognitive and perceptual capabilities that support this process and the nature of infants' everyday language environment. I employ both experimental laboratory behavioural testing of infants (infant speech perception) and linguistic analysis of audiorecordings via transcription/annotation, acoustic measurement, and adult perceptual ratings. I play a leadership role in ManyBabies, a largescale collaborative network of infant researchers that promotes and supports collaborative open science practices.
Religion
Justin Lewis
Supervisor: Justin Jaron Lewis
Contact Information: JustinJaron.Lewis@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Anarchist thought, Judaism and Hinduism, Sexuality and religion, Stories of holy people, Winnipeg Jewish history.
Kenneth MacKendrick
Supervisor: Kenneth MacKendrick
Contact Information: Kenneth.MacKendrick@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Religion, imagination, myth, ritual, evil, death, cognitive science of religion, religion and popular culture, history of the study of religion
Heidi Marx
Supervisor: Heidi Marx
Contact Information: Heidi.Marx-Wolf@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Ancient Medicine; Ancient Science and Cosmolog; Ancient Botany and Ecology.
Sociology and Criminology
Sonia Bookman
Supervisor: Sonia Bookman
Contact Information: Sonia.Bookman@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Cosmopolitanism, consumption, brands and branding, urban culture, media and Canadian film.
Mara Fridell
Supervisor: Mara Fridell
Contact Information: Mara.Fridell@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Enlightenment, Counterenlightenment & Antienlightenment politics; comparative university neoliberalization; comparative history of science, positivism-mechanism, and authoritarianism; complex ecology
Mark Hudson
Supervisor: Mark Hudson
Contact Information: Mark.Hudson@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Unions and social equality; political economy of the environment; climate politics; energy politics; sociology of wildland fire.
Susan Prentice
Supervisor: Susan Prentice
Contact Information: Susan.Prentice@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Social & family policy, childcare (daycare), women’s work, gender discrimination, work/family balance, care.
Lori Wilkinson
Supervisor: Lori Wilkinson
Contact Information: Lori.Wilkinson@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Dr. Wilkinson’s research agenda is focused on the successful integration of refugees in Canada. At this time, she is completing the following projects: integration experiences of Afghan refugees to Canada, a project outlining the economic integration of refugees for the UNHCR, mapping the characteristics of immigrants and refugees to Canada, and several other projects. Her research is always evolving and we expect a number of new projects to be underway by Spring of 2024.
Andrew Woolford
Supervisor: Andrew Woolford
Contact Information: Andrew.Woolford@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
1. "Transformative Visions of Restorative Justice." The practice of restorative justice is largely tied to the formal criminal justice system and the state. Recent anti-racist and anti-colonial activism presents an opportunity to think restorative justice anew. This is especially so in Manitoba, which has a Restorative Justice Act, but spends only 13% of its corrections budget on community corrections and a much smaller portion of RJ-related activity. The project partners with the Restorative Justice Association of Manitoba (RJAM) to explore gaps in RJ delivery and potentials for increased successful transformative, community-based practice. RA tasks include literature review, interview preparation and analysis of RJ programs.
2. “Symbiogenetic Destruction: Genocide, Human Groups, and the Natural World” is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded project. By “symbiogenetic destruction” we refer to how a group’s relationships to the natural world are damaged through genocidal processes. This project explores how human groups form their identities in relationship with the natural world and how these identities suffer when these relationships are affected by genocide. Case studies include Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia and Canada. RA tasks include literature review, Survivor testimony analysis, bibliography construction and internet-based research.
Women's and Gender Studies
Adele Perry
Supervisor: Adele Perry
Contact Information: Adele.Perry@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
History, Gender, Colonialism, Water, the Body, Infrastructure, western Canada, feminist research methods, Indigenous research methods
Jocelyn Thorpe
Supervisor: Jocelyn Thorpe
Contact Information: Jocelyn.Thorpe@umanitoba.ca
Research Interests:
Environmental justice; rivers in Winnipeg; decolonizing research
