Our Team
Affiliated Faculty
Michael O’Driscoll brings needed expertise in archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies and strong leadership and organizational skills from extensive administrative experience as a journal editor, national association executive member, project leader, and major conference organizer. He is the Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study.
Geoffrey Rockwell His expertise in the development of research tools for the humanities, the design of interactive multimedia, the archiving of digital research data, and the development of data standards for the humanities will support work on prototypes of web interactives and the multiple areas involving data methods for documentation, standards, protocols in our digital archive projects.
Sean Luyk is a Digital Curation Librarian who works to digitize, preserve, and provide access to UAlberta audio and contributes to research on the use of audio recordings in virtual research environments, including ethical curation.
Research Associates
Chelsea Miya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She also produces episodes for the The SpokenWeb Podcast and you can hear her work in the episodes “Sounds of Data,” “Academics on Air,” and “Drum Codes.”
Ariel Kroon (she/her) is an independent settler scholar. She has given talks and workshops on topics including but not limited to rights management for archival audio, climate anxiety, genre fiction, and Canadian literature, and co-hosts and produces the podcast Solarpunk Presents. Her academic work has appeared in SFRA Review, The Goose, Canadian Literature and the SpokenWeb Podcast episode “Academics on Air.” Connect with her at arielkroon.ca.
Research Assistants
Maia Trotter (she/her) lives, studies and works on Treaty 6 territory. Maia is a second-year Master of Library and Information Studies student at the University of Alberta. She received her Bachelor of English Honours from Simon Fraser University. Her current research interests are focused on community and feminist-driven metadata practices in digital initiatives, and the emotive evocations of sounds of public spaces like libraries.
Xuege Wu is an MA student in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She conducts research in the field of early modern theatre and women’s writing. Previously, Xuege participated in two nationally funded projects focusing on British theatre. She also presented her work, which examines the influence of antiquity in Early Modern English women’s translations, at the Sixteenth Century Society’s Annual Conference. As a Graduate Research Assistant, Xuege is tasked with creating metadata and indexes for the Aviary repository.
Sarah Freeman is an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta. She is studying English with a minor in Computing Science. Some of her interests include humanities computing, time-based media, and literary sound studies. She is excited to be joining the SpokenWeb team as a Research Assistant.
Michael MacKenzie is a PhD Student in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, studying the circulation of desires for neotenous embodiment and physical growth resistance in youth across literature, film, video games, and medical discourses. His interests are in psychoanalysis, Do-It-Yourself trans* and queer studies, and speculative fiction.
Natasha D’Amours is an MLIS student at the University of Alberta. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Victoria, with a minor in Digital and Interactive Media in the Arts. Her past experience has ranged from virtual reality film production to printing and bookbinding, and she is currently working at Bruce Peel Special Collections.
Catalina Torres-Benjumea MA in Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, as a Research Assistant at SpokenWeb, is actively exploring minimal computing as a decolonizing tool. Her career spans roles as an independent editor, writer, and Senior Editor/Publisher.