Projects & Initiatives

Our commitment to socially engaged, leading edge research and direct engagement with our community is reflected not only through our curriculum but also in the creative and innovative projects undertaken by faculty and often providing research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students.

The History Engine

“Digital Innovations for Interactive Teaching and Research Across the Disciplines: The History Engine 2.0”, has been selected for a Provost’s ITIF grant, total of grant and matching $32,168.22, over 2 years, 2011-2013.

Partnering directly with the History Engine’s original designers at the Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, our goal is to transform the current History Engine from a US-based project into a truly international collaboration that supports interdisciplinary teaching and research.

The outcome will be a web-based interactive tool that significantly enhances undergraduate experiential education by providing a suite of digital resources that fosters applied research and writing skills and exposes students to the methods and practice of digital scholarship.

For more information contact Dr. Christine Berkowitz

Roots & Routes

"Roots & Routes: Scholarly Networks and Knowledge Production in the Premodern Mediterranean and in the Digital Age" is a three-year Summer Institute (2011-2013) hosted by the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Initiated and directed by Natalie Rothman and funded through a $150,000 summer institute grant from UofT's Connaught Fund, the institute brings together two dozen faculty, doctoral students, and undergraduates from across the university and beyond for 10 days of workshops and seminars.

Participants present their individual research materials, learn about existing and emerging digital research tools, and collaborate in developing group projects in an effort to articulate a more coherent and explicitly transdisciplinary analytical framework for future scholarship using digital methodologies.

The Institute's annual themes are: Spatialities and Borderlands (2011), Translation, Mediation, and Circulation (2012), and sociability and materiality (2013).

Visit The Institue website for more details.

Interactions - HCS Seminar Series

This year's Historical and Cultural Studies seminar series, "Interactions", will engage with both interactions between peoples and cultures and the interactions between disciplines and methods. The seminar meet three to four times a term, providing a venue for faculty and interested graduate students to meet and discuss exciting new research.

View more information on Interactions - historical & Cultural Studies Seminar

Mazgaba Se’elet

Michael Gervers is the founder, and director, of the Central and Inner Asia Seminar (CIAS) and, together with Ewa Balicka-Witakowska of Uppsala University, has established Mazgaba Se’elet, an online database of over 65,000 photographs, largely his own, of Ethiopian art and culture (UserID and Password: student).

He is presently working with Paulina Rousseau in a UTSC Library project which will make the entire manuscript collection of the 15th-century Ethiopian monastery at Gunda Gunde (Tigray Province) available on line.

The Italian Question

Franca Iacovetta is principal co-investigator with Gabriele Scardellato, Mariano Elia Program in Italian Canadian Studies, York University, of a $645,000 grant from the Canadian Historical Recognition Program (2010-12) for The Faces and Memories of Internment, a public history project meant to better educate Canadian students and the wider public about the events and debates related to the internment of Italian Canadians in the Second World War.

The project`s three elements include a documentary, an interactive website, and the development of curricular materials for classroom teaching.

To download the documentary, The Italian Question: The Internment of Itallian Canadians during World War Two, produced by Aysha Productions, 2012, directed by Sunny Yi, go to: http://italianquestion.com/main.html

Tung Lin Kok Yuen

The donation of $4 million from Tung Lin Kok Yuen 東 蓮 覺 苑 (Hong Kong) is a significant contribution to Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The benefits of this generous gift are profound and far reaching.

It supports regular opportunities for scholars from around the world to teach on the Scarborough campus through a Visiting Professor and Lecturer Program, it provides ongoing funding for conferences and public lectures by noted Canadian and international scholars, and it offers student scholarships in Buddhist studies.

Initiatives supported by Tung Lin Kok Yuen 東 蓮 覺 苑 emphasize multiple perspectives in the study of Buddhist thought and culture, including linkages among history, literature, philosophy, religion, and the visual and performing arts.

View more information on Tung Lin Kok Yuen

Berkshire Conference

Berkshire Conference on Women's History, Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche

Toronto: May 22-25, 2014, Proposals due January 15, 2013.

For the first time in its history, the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History will be held outside the United States, in Toronto, on May, 2014.

A triennial conference hosted by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (an organization established in 1930), the Big Berks highlights wide-ranging historical scholarship on women, gender and sexuality as well as films, workshops, activist, cultural, and community event as well as an international book exhibit. As the first Canadian Berkshire conference president, Franca Iacovetta and the University of Toronto will host the conference in collaboration with co-sponsoring units and universities in Toronto and across Canada. Read more

For more information about the themes and CFP, go to Berks website: http://berksconference.org

ePorte

Natalie Rothman is the principal investigator in ePorte, an online research portal which aims to promote collaborative scholarship on the Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, bringing together researchers and students across institutions, disciplines, and linguistic specializations.

The project, hosted by the University of Toronto Scarborough, currently involves three doctoral students in the History Department (Sarah Loose, Stephanie Cavanaugh, and Mehmet Kuru), a recent alumna (Dr. Alexandra Guerson), and several IT specialists and undergraduate students at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

The project leverages existing and purpose-built Open Source software to offer a rich set of collaborative research tools.

Visit ePorte for more details.

Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre

Franca Iacovetta was a co-founder of the Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton, served many years on its board, and mounted one of its largest and most popular exhibit on Italian workers in Canada, La Vita Nova. Following a hiatus, she was recently elected to the Board.

For more details about WAHC, go to: http://www.wahc-museum.ca/

D.E.E.D.S Project

D.E.E.D.S Project (Documents of Early England Data Set)

Michael Gervers, as a Killam Fellow in 1975, founded the D.E.E.D.S Project (Documents of Early England Data Set), which has been devoted largely to the study of the medieval English property exchange documents, or charters.

His online, searchable database of 11,000 English property-transfer documents from the late eleventh century to 1307 has been developed in conjunction with algorithms prepared by Andrey Feuerverger and Gelila Tilahun of the University’s Department of Statistics to apply accurate chronological determinants to the 95% of legal documents from the period which were issued without dates.

This and related research (assisted by his PhD students, Robin Sutherland-Harris and Eileen Kim), including participation in a recent Digging into Data (DiD) Project entitled ChartEx, is currently supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC).

He is presently expanding the DEEDS database to include digitized Latin charters from the 11th through early 14th century, from any source.

History and Film

History and Film: An article Franca Iacovetta co-authored, with Karen Dubinsky, Queen’s University, on a 1911murder committed by an abused wife in the Italian immigrant community of Sault Ste Marie – "Murder, Womanly Virtue and Motherhood: The Case of Angelina Napolitano, 1911-22," Canadian Historical Review 72:4 (Dec 1991) 505-31 – provided the basis for a play - Frank Canino’s The Angelina Project, published by Guernica Editions in June of 2000, which has been produced at University of Hartford, Oklahoma City University, University of Alaska/Anchorage, Chance Theatre, California, Oklahoma City University and high schools - and a feature-length film used in women’s history classrooms across Canada.

For more details on, and to order, the film, Looking for Angelina, produced by Platinum Films, screenplay by Alessandra Piccione & Frank Canino, directed by Sergio Navarretta, go to: http://www.platinumfilms.net/index.html

Mediating 'Culture'

Thanks to an Early Researcher Award ($150,000) from Ontario's Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, Natalie Rothman will be launching in fall 2012 a three-year project, "Mediating 'Culture' and Cultures of Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean."

The project explores the role of diplomatic interpreters as cultural intermediaries between the Ottoman Empire and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Using new digital technologies for visualizing, analyzing, and presenting research data, the project will illuminate how concepts like “Europe” and “Western Civilization” emerged in the context of political rivalry and commercial collaboration between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbours, particularly Venice.

It will also shed light on the lives and writings of diplomatic interpreters who have rarely been studied, but who vitally helped to shape enduring ideas about the Ottomans in Europe.