Dr. Micheline WhiteĚý(Department of English Language and Literature ˛š˛ÔťĺĚýCollege of the Humanities) was invited to on Katherine Parr and Henry VIII.

What did Katherine Parr and Henry VIII write in their books? We stepped into the private libraries of one of history’s most infamous royal couples and discovered how ink, margins, and manuscript flourishes reveal more than meets the eye.

In this illuminating lecture, scholar Professor Micheline White dug into the marginalia left by King Henry VIII and his last wife, Katherine Parr, in their personal books. These deluxe volumes, often adorned with handwritten notes, decorative trefoils, and curious little pointing hands called manicules, told a compelling story of public image-making and personal survival in the Tudor court.

Were these annotations simply personal reflections, or were they calculated messages written for a watchful audience of courtiers? Professor White guided us through a close reading of these royal markings to reveal how Henry and Katherine used their books not just for learning or devotion, but as tools of self-fashion in crafting images of piety, wisdom, and authority. For Katherine in particular, this wasn’t merely academic: her very survival may have depended on how successfully she performed the role of the ideal Tudor queen.

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Congratulations to Kelly Babchishin (Department of Psychology), who received an (ERA) from the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities.  

, “Understanding and Addressing Technology-Facilitated Sexual Offences in Ontario,” will gather data from 800 university students and 800 adults convicted of sex offences to identify the factors linked to technology-facilitated sexual offences and the crossover from online sexual exploitation to in-person sexual offences. The findings will inform prevention programs and sexual education curricula for schools and universities to reduce the incidence of sexual offences and improve the management of sex offenders in Ontario to enhance public safety. These insights will also help alleviate pressure on Ontario’s criminal justice system by guiding more effective resource allocation. 

Four ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ researchers have been recognized by this year’s (ERAs). The Ontario government recently it is investing $75 million in 162 research and innovation projects across the province through the ERAs and the Ontario Research Fund. 

Each researcher will receive $140,000 from the Ontario government to support the direct and indirect costs of their projects, with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ contributing an additional $50,000 in matching support. 

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is a poet, novelist, storyteller and veteran whose novel Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures is available from Double Dagger Press.

Today, Matt writes and teaches in Paris: leadership at the École Militaire and creative writing at SciencesPo. His many published works interrogate themes of dehumanization, poetics, monsters, masculinity, cross-cultural exchange, and healing. He also co-hosts the by-donation Write Time workshop, and organizes fitness enthusiasts who use trees as barbells: the Log Club.

Follow his work and receive .

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ the Novel

Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures tracks Jones, a drone operator stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2010. As he monitors Sahar, a teenager and suspected terrorist, Jones commits the ultimate crime: he cares.

Jones’s supervisor is similarly stained, a fierce soldier who champions Afghan women. By day, Jones and the Major track Taliban down the cratered highways. By night, they wish their love had never hurt so many.

Beneath the base, Jones befriends Noah who, despite his cruel fangs and horrifying strength, is the only gentle creature in the entire desert. As Jones contends with a brutal predator stalking soldiers, Noah’s bids for freedom grow desperate, and the fighting season renews with a fresh crop of Taliban.

In Kandahar, there’s a monster in every window. And there’s also one in every mirror. As the war grinds him to ever-finer particles, Jones grapples with the toll—madness, craters, grief.

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Bachelor of Journalism and Humanities student Dominique GenĂŠ has won th.

GenĂŠ says the Humanities program armed her with skills that helped structure her journalistic work.

The fellowship program aims to amplify Black voices, improve coverage of Black issues in the news, and cultivate future Black media leaders. Each fellowship provides a unique opportunity for an early-career Black journalist—with one-to-five years’ experience—to be hosted for six months at CBC/Radio-Canada (English and French), The Globe and Mail, a CTV News newsroom or at the IJB at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

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A group of ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students took home top awards at CityStudio’s 2024 Event on April 12.

Held at the end of each academic year, HUBBUB is a networking event and exhibit showcasing a curated selection of student projects from each of the participating institutions.

At the event, students with top projects from each institution pitched their project or spoke about their CityStudio experience. Submitted projects are judged by a committee of one professor or faculty member from each institution and one City staff representative. The projects are scored for innovation, impact, scalability and problem-solving.

Childhood and Youth Studies students in the Critical Approaches to Child Development course taught by Prof. Alexandra Arraiz Matute (Interdisciplinary Studies)  produced resources for Ottawa Public Health’s youth engagement strategy, and some of the groups submitted their work to a city-wide competition.

Students from the course won the top ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ award and also placed in the top 12 groups amongst submissions from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, University of Ottawa, and Algonquin College.

Project The SATURN Method: Self Advocacy for Children and Youth in the Healthcare Setting, led by ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ students Chloe Sykes, Will Bordeleau, Jemma Woschitz, and Natasha Kislev were among the winning groups.

Group member Chloe Sykes says the experience helped her realize her aspirations to positively impact the youth healthcare system.

Kate Belanger, a student in the group recognized as one of the top 12 city-wide, says the experience inspired her to continue her community efforts.

Mayor Sutcliffe congratulated all participants noting that CityStudio is a platform to share ideas, bring together different perceptions, and build meaningful relationships across organizations for mutual benefit. 

is a partnership between the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, City of Ottawa, Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology, and the University of Ottawa. It aims to explore municipal challenges from different perspectives by bringing together students, faculty and City staff.

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By Emily Putnam

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s own Sarah Phillips Casteel will be launching her new book, , published in Columbia University Press’ new , at the on Thursday April 11.

The first-of-its-kind book delves into a variety of often neglected literary and artistic creations that illuminate Black wartime experience in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.

This work underscores the importance of African diaspora experiences and artistic expression for Holocaust history, memory, and representation.

Casteel says that within Holocaust studies, there has been increasing attention to neglected or overlooked victim groups. 

“Because the numbers of Black victims were relatively small, they have tended to be overlooked or to be perceived as less significant. I don’t agree with that perspective, but I think it has played into the invisibility of Black experience during World War II.”

She says a number of other components contributed to the lack of acknowledgement thus far.

In an often-overlooked aspect of World War II history, Black people living in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were in some cases subjected to ostracization, forced sterilization, and incarceration in internment and concentration camps.

Casteel explains that it was artworks, in particular the ’s and Ghanaian Canadian writer ’s novel that initially got her interested in this neglected topic.

“I think there has been a systemic erasure of Black historical experience in wartime Europe as well as more broadly,” says Casteel. “I became really intrigued with what writers and artists have done to draw attention to a chapter of the war that scholars, museums, and other institutions had overlooked.”

Emphasizing Black agency, Casteel’s book explores both testimonial art by Black victims of the Nazi regime and creative works by Black writers and visual artists that imaginatively reconstruct the wartime era. 

In the absence of public recognition, African diaspora writers and artists have preserved the stories of overlooked Black victims of the Third Reich. Their works shed light on the relationship between creative expression and wartime survival and the role of art in shaping collective memory.

“It’s been an interesting research challenge, just trying to find traces of these Black wartime stories,” says Casteel. “Part of the challenge is that the Nazis didn’t have a designated category for Black prisoners. So that makes it harder to trace their presence in the camp system and in the archive.”

Among the artworks Casteel examines in the book are the internment art of Caribbean painter Josef Nassy, the survivor memoir of Black German journalist , the jazz fiction of African American novelist , Black Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan, and the photomontages of Scottish Ghanaian visual artist .

Casteel hopes that people will take away from the book a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of different histories of oppression and the diversity of experiences of Nazi persecution. 

She notes that utilizing visual sources enables new narratives to surface.

“Because this is a hyper-visible victim group, it’s sometimes easier to find traces of Black stories in the visual documents as opposed to the textual ones because the archive has not always recorded their presence well. Whereas when you have something like the Josef Nassy Collection, you can access a story that wasn’t recorded in written form.”

Casteel says that she is struck by how artists have often pointed to underrepresented narratives before scholars have.

She explains that a combination of storytelling mediums was essential to uncovering these histories.

“I came to the conclusion that when you’re faced with a history that’s been so invisible and so suppressed, you end up having to draw on all the resources of all the different media that you can in order to try to recover it. I think that’s why I ended up putting the book together in this way—why the book is so eclectic in terms of the range of artistic genres and mediums that it addresses.”

Casteel hopes that her work will reach beyond academia and help to bridge gaps in the historical awareness of who was affected by the Holocaust.

Casteel was also interviewed in where she discusses the book in-depth.

Those looking to celebrate the release of Sarah Phillips Casteel’s new book can on April 11 at 5:30 p.m. Casteel will be in conversation with Aboubakar Sanogo, and Ming Tiampo will moderate the conversation.

Organized by the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada, the event will be presented in English with simultaneous French translation. Following the talk, Casteel will be available to sign copies of the book.

Sarah Phillips Casteel is a professor of English at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture and the Institute of African Studies. She is a member of the’s Academic Council. Her previous books include  (Columbia University Press, 2016) and the coedited volume  (University of Virginia Press, 2019).

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By Emily Putnam

Artist-in-Residence has closed their residency at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ with two student-led performances.

Shortt is a storyteller and performing artist working across Turtle Island and internationally. They are a vocalist, saxophonist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, video artist, curator, administrator, and producer.

Shortt has been on campus since January 2024. While here, they’ve taught a course called Music Producing 101 (MUSI 4200) and ran the Performer-Composer Lab ensemble. They also gave a masterclass, presented a concert at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Dominion-Chalmers Centre, and took part in music auditions and juries.

They say ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s music program hosts a uniquely diverse range of musicians in study.

“The program here is really great because I’m meeting students from a plethora of genres. I have metal guitar players, I have singer-songwriters, I have classical musicians and jazz musicians, people who are self-taught, and people who have had lessons their whole life. I think it creates a really interesting dynamic that’s fun to work with.”

Shortt says the students they’ve worked with have been open and eager to the new challenges they’ve been assigned.

“Students here are super keen. They have been absolutely amazing to work with. I don’t think I’ve met that many people who are just happy to try things out.”

Shortt focussed on teaching students how to prepare artist bios, build their resume, and send email pitches in hopes of helping artists become more well-rounded experts of their craft.

The ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ Music that occurred on April 1 took place at local venue .

The showcase featured the music of ABBA, Gotye, Andrea Bocelli, and several original compositions from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ music students.

The ensemble also collaborated with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s radio station where students Robyn Lichaa, Sarah Peters and Anastasia Wasylinko  and performed pieces that will be featured at the showcase.

Shortt says connections and community can be one of the keys to success.

“I think it’s the advice everyone gives, and not everyone takes — which is: ask the local artists you’re interested in for coffee, because you learn so much from these conversations. I’ve done that so many times. I still do it.”

Shortt also advises aspiring artists to refrain from being discouraged when things don’t go according to plan.

They say Ottawa’s community has welcomed them with open arms.

“I really like that Ottawa seems to have specific communities. And while maybe if you look statistically, there’s less, it’s almost like there’s more, because you’re really focusing on specific places.”

Shortt says they particularly connected with ’s work, one of Ottawa’s leading independent and underground music and arts presenters.

“I found people really want to connect with you. Even if they don’t have the time, even if time’s not available, they’re like: I’ll find time.”

Another focus of Shortt’s teaching was improvisation and interpreting music beyond traditional notation.

“I did all this training for so long, and then someone introduced me to improvisation. It really opened my eyes and reshaped how I looked at my previous training and classical music.”

“There’s now these different ideas and ways of approaching improvisation, but they all coalesce, and they all come together. I just think it’s good to make sure you’re working all the different parts of your brain. I think they all work together in the end, and I’m just hoping that I can help make people into full and complete musicians, so that they’re not just only looking at music one way.”

Shortt’s most recent artistic expression-of-choice is creating that encompass all components of their creativity.

“I really like video art because it kind of became a substitute for theatre, which I had really fallen in love with.”

The second student-led performance will be taking place on Friday, April 5 at the Kailash Mital Theatre at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University.

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By Emily Putnam

Those from the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ community tuning-in to the this weekend may get to see a familiar face on screen.

, who is now a Juno nominated composer, started her journey at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ in 2002 to study jazz guitar.

Brandon says she feels overwhelmed and excited for her first-time nomination.

“It’s wonderful to have this acknowledgement from my peers and to be in the company of the other nominees I admire so much, such as Dinuk Wijeratne, Emilie Lebel and Nicole Lizée.”

Brandon is nominated for Classical Composition of the Year for , a piece recorded with and cellist , who she says she wrote the piece for.

“Simulacra is essentially a sonification of my own experiences with identity”, says Brandon. “Like many others, I’ve often felt intense pressure to alter aspects of my fundamental self in order to better ‘fit in’.”

“I express this in the piece by making the timbre of the cello a metaphor for this kind of self-inhibition and self-suppression – it travels from the narrowest of timbral ranges to the fullest, undergoing continuous transformation, eventually ending in an uneasy balance.”

Brandon’s compositions have been described as “…gut wrenching and horrific” (Critipeg), and “otherworldly, a clashing of bleakness with beauty” (Minor Seventh).

“I get great satisfaction from creating music that has a certain physicality, although sometimes that quality is not necessarily beautiful in the traditional sense. But to me, this manipulation of timbre is what carries the most communicative aspects of music.”

The piece, conducted by , was first performed at the in 2023 and was supported by , and .

“The title of the cello concerto, Simulacra, refers to Baudrillard’s famous book on semiotics, and the concept of ‘a copy that does not have an original’. This is a nod to the idea that sometimes we create our identities out of nothing, creating a kind of hyperreal self that replaces us in the real world.” says Brandon.

She says her education at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ helped to instill important values that she carries with her today.

“I worked with Wayne Eagles, Garry Elliott, Tim Bedner and , all of whom had a profound impact on me musically and as a person. I was lucky to have had the chance to work further with Roddy beyond my degree – we toured a little together on the East Coast and he is featured on my first album, ‘‘ which was released in 2016. He’s a brilliant guitarist and composer.”

“I also took classical guitar lessons from Garry even after I graduated. His approach to teaching gave me a foundation of discipline which I relied on later in life as I moved into composition. He taught me that nothing good comes without effort and practice, which is a philosophy I use to this day twenty years later.”

Brandon says ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´â€™s music program was always encouraging of her innovative and unique sonic interpretations.

“One thing I appreciated about ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ as a whole was its openness to musical ideas and influences from beyond the traditional conservatory system. I never felt that my musical ideas, however outlandish, were considered unwelcome. This musical openness definitely laid the foundation for my later approach to composition and performance in more experimental and free improvisational styles.”

She says her compositions help bring her internal emotions outward.

“For me, composing is as simple as wanting to take everything that I hear inside, and bringing it outside. Simulacra, and all my pieces are these kinds of personal communications to ‘the outside world’.”

“I’m grateful that other people have found these expressions to be something worthwhile, and I cherish all the collaborations with performers that have come from that.”

This year’s winners will be revealed in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the  Presented by Music Canada on Saturday, March 23 and The on Sunday, March 24, live on CBC.

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Lightning Interviews with Our Community

Name: Paul Keen
Academic Title: Associate Dean, Professor
Email: paul_keen@carleton.ca
FASS Affiliation(s): Department of English Language and Literature, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture

How would you explain your research to someone with no experience in your field?

My research focuses on a set of connected debates that people in Britain were having about the meaning of literature in the Romantic period. Most of these debates sprang from much wider issues such as the political struggle for democracy that spilled over into Britain in the years after the French Revolution, and questions about what it meant to be a professional author in the midst of Britain’s accelerating shift into a modern commercial nation driven by fashion, credit, and conspicuous consumption as a status marker in an unstable world. These changes were compounded by related pressures unleashed by highly political debates about modern science, the politics of empire, women’s rights, and education. All of these issues foregrounded questions about literature that are strikingly current in our own day: How should we even define the word “literature”? What use was it? What social role or public value should it have? Who should be reading and writing what, and how much should this be regulated?

My most recent project is related to this. It explores the arguments that advocates were making for the public value of the humanities in the early nineteenth century, which is the time when modern humanities programs (including the first courses in English literature) were being set up in Britain’s new universities. These advocates’ arguments are especially interesting because, like our own age’s obsession with STEM, this was a utilitarian age, so the claims they developed on behalf of the liberal arts still ring true today!

What first sparked your interest in your discipline and research?

I got hooked by a fourth-year undergraduate course on the 1790s poets (mainly and ) which highlighted the powerful influence of the French Revolution on their writing. Like most of the brightest thinkers of their generation, they were obsessed with it. William Wordsworth wrote a lot of radical poetry in his early days, and went to live in France during the Revolution (as did many other writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Helen Maria Williams). Coleridge dropped out of university and became a radical writer and public speaker. I was intrigued by the energizing mix of poetry and radical politics, idealism and activism that energized their generation. They believed that the arts could be a powerful force for reshaping society in better ways. In some ways, it was a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, especially because of the galvanizing effect of reformers’ opposition to Britain’s war with the new government in France, which they denounced as an unjust reactionary war, much the way that protestors rejected the Vietnam war in the 60s. It’s not hard to find parallels with our own day as well.

What’s one fact about your research area that most people are surprised to learn?

The fact that most people are surprised by is the same one that surprised me most as I got into my research: that people thought of literature, not as the fairly narrow aesthetic category that we do today, but really as the late eighteenth-century version of social media. William Godwin, who was one of the leading writers of the day defined literature as “the diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion, whether written or oral.” That’s completely different than how we think of it today but it was actually pretty standard at the time. It didn’t mean that poetry and other types of creative writing were less valued; it makes the arts more interesting because it reminds us that they were part of a much larger set of social and political forms of debate that comprised what they thought of as the public sphere. Again, I was struck by just how strongly all of this resonated with our own debates about social media today!

What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?

It’s probably the same misconception that we all have about history generally, and it’s one that we never fully manage to work our way out of. We tend to think of these earlier ages as somehow “traditional” or old-fashioned, as though they were all 200 years old and wearing hopelessly out-of-date clothing, just because a couple of centuries passed since then. We sometimes approach writers from these earlier ages like they were born and raised inside the Norton anthology, and were writing their poetry and novels for our university English classes. It’s rare to remember that, in every age, people were living in the present tense. Like us, they were living in the most modern age that had ever existed and (again like us) one that was dealing with unprecedented changes like revolution, imperialism, urbanization, and the effects of capitalism. A lot of the writers that we study today were both brilliant and confused, arrogant and idealistic, political and professionally ambitious. They were trying to think their way through extraordinary questions and contradictions, and to use their writing as a way to intervene in all of these things, but without the benefit of hindsight or any kind of instruction manual. That sense of their modernity, which can be hard to fully embrace, makes historical study far more compelling.

Do you have a favourite class to teach?

I love teaching courses in Romantic literature, for all of the reasons that I’ve been discussing above.

Do you have any current or upcoming academic projects that you’re excited about?

My most recent book,, explores the ways that critics writing in the early nineteenth century developed arguments in favour of the humanities in the face of utilitarian pressures that dismissed the arts as self-indulgent pursuits incapable of addressing real-world problems. Its focus reflects the ways that similar pressures today have foregrounded all over again the question of how to make the case for the value of the humanities. Evidence of these problems surrounds us, but the core of my argument is that these pressures also constitute an important opportunity: a chance to re-imagine our answers to questions about the nature and role of the humanities, their potential benefits to contemporary life, and how we might channel these benefits back into the larger society. The good news is that in many ways, this self-reflexive challenge is precisely what the humanities have always done best: highlight the nature and the force of the narratives that have helped to define how we understand our society – its various pasts and its possible futures – and to suggest the larger contexts within which these issues must ultimately be situated. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way: knowing more about past debates will provide a crucial basis for moving forward as universities, and the humanities in particular, position themselves to respond to new challenges during an age of radical change.

My current project, The Joke of Literature: A History of the Essay in English, tracks the history of that most elusive of genres, “the essay,” over the three centuries since its meteoric rise in popularity after the appearance of The Spectator in 1711. G. K. Chesterton’s description of the essay as “the joke” of literature typified the genre’s uncertain history, always on the margins of those more ambitious forms of writing that could be embraced as “literary.” But this apparent limitation may help to explain both the essay’s enduring popularity across different historical periods and the renewed critical interest in the genre’s unruly status as “an experiment” or “a try-on,” as Montaigne called it, whose provisional nature unsettled the possibility of categorical certainties. Flaunting essays’ association with fragmentary and discontinuous writing that traded in the quotidian and the ephemeral, essay writers reveled in its democratic ethos, contrasting the immediacy of their everyday focus with the obscurity of more ponderous works that remained largely irrelevant to most readers.

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