The JHI is pleased to announce the Chancellor Jackman 12-month Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities for 2025-26.
Twelve-month Faculty Research Fellows hold an office on the 10th floor of the Jackman Humanities Building and are central members of the Circle of Fellows. They are University of Toronto tenured faculty members by the time of their fellowship, chosen for their distinction in achievements relative to their career stage, the excellence of their proposed project, and its relation to the annual theme for 2025-26, Dystopia and Trust.
A new millennium, rapid advances in science and technology, and a new determination to fight social injustice could have encouraged dreams of utopia. Instead, as though from the predictable plot of some pulp sci-fi or true crime story, they seem to have delivered a nightmarish dystopia. Easy information has given way to facile misinformation, the promise of solidarity to faction and polarization, democracy to authoritarianism, supremacism, and the kleptocracy of the 1%. People all over the world have lost trust, not only in many major institutions of societies, but also in each other. Are these trends reversible? Can widespread political and social trust be achieved, within and across societies? If not, with what consequence? If so, how should the subjective, social scientific, and philosophical dimensions of our dystopia be analyzed and re-imagined? What possible utopia has our dystopia, if it is one, betrayed?
12-Month Faculty Research Fellows
- Katherine Blouin, Associate Professor, UTSC Department of Historical & Cultural Studies
- Ann Komaromi, Professor, A&S Department of Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures / Centre for Comparative Literature
- Katherine Rankin, Professor, A&S Department of Geography & Planning
- Luis Van Isshot, Associate Professor, A&S Department of History
Katherine Blouin
Katherine Blouin (Ph.D. 2007, Université Laval (Québec) and Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis) is a 12th generation French settler from Québec city. She is the lead editor of Everyday Orientalism. Her publications include Le conflit judéoalexandrin de 38-41: l'identité juive à l'épreuve (2005), Triangular Landscapes: Environment, Society, and the State in the Nile Delta under Roman Rule (2014), The Nile Delta: Histories from Antiquity to the Modern Period (editor, 2024) and The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory (coedited with Ben Akrigg, 2024). She is currently working on a book project entitled Inventing Alexandria.
Fellowship Research Project—Dystopian Ruins, Trusted Simulacra: Classics, Archaeology, and the Construction of Modern Alexandria and Toronto
Dystopian Ruins explores how Classics and archaeology were instrumental to the modern European colonisation of Alexandria and Toronto between 1805 and 1914. By examining the underbelly of the supposedly trustworthy stories of civilization and cosmopolitanism associated with and performed in these two cities, this project illuminates the role of Classics and archaeology in the establishment of canonical urban narratives, not only in the public imagination, but also on the Land itself. I suggest that these trusted stories have become symbols akin to Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra that, through their occlusive nature, play a foundational role in the creation of the dystopian Anthropocenic present that both cities are reckoning with.
Ann Komaromi
Ann Komaromi (Ph.D. 2001, University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches late Soviet culture, samizdat (underground publishing) and dissidence in the USSR. Komaromi’s articles and books theorize the formation of alternative publics and epistemologies in samizdat, while attending to specific texts and groups. She is interested in the return of modernism and avant-garde in nonconformist and oppositional literary and art movements in the late twentieth century and beyond. Current projects include studies of dissident memoirs and archives, a history of Jewish activism in Leningrad, and an inquiry into trash and used objects in post-War visual art and museum exhibits.
Fellowship Research Project—Soviet Dystopia and Alternate Networks of Trust
This project examines networks of trust within and beyond the USSR in response to disillusionment with Soviet utopia. It makes use of literary and historical methods to investigate dissident memoirs and testimony as structured narratives and material texts that pass through transnational circulation. A critical focus on gender and ethnic identity – with special attention to the testimony of women as well as that of activists of the Jewish national movement and Ukrainian dissidents – will produce new knowledge about unfamiliar figures and fresh insights into well-known dissidents and their values against the background of real socialism.
Katherine Rankin
Katherine Rankin (Ph.D. 1999, Cornell University) studies cities and urban planning from a background in Anthropology. She takes a commitment to participatory and community-based ethnographic approaches into the study of state and market formation—through research on infrastructure development, post-conflict and post-disaster governance, commercial gentrification and microfinance. She is author of Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalization and Social Change in Nepal (Pluto Press and University of Toronto Press 2004) and currently Principal Investigator of a research project titled Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts.
Fellowship Research Project—Corruption and the Situated Logics of Ethical Judgment: Road Building in Nepal as a Zone of Ontological Difference
Corruption furnishes the central problematic for this project. Rarely have we encountered a single issue that animates such a wide range of knowledge producers grappling with the dystopian outcomes of development. My principal objective as a JHI Faculty Fellow is to write the first draft of a sole-authored monograph titled Corruption and the situated logics of ethical judgment: Road building in Nepal as a zone of ontological difference. The book contends that approaching corruption as a matter of multiple, emergent ontological frames can inform radical epistemologies of planning that foreground situated logics of ethical judgment.
Luis Van Isshot
Luis Van Isshot (Ph.D. McGill University, 2010) is Associate Chair of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. His book The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010 was published in 2015 by the University of Wisconsin Press (Spanish trans. Editorial Universidad de Rosario 2020). For more than two decades he has conducted research, published, and taught on social movements, human rights, extractivism, and political violence in Latin America. In addition to his academic work, he has written legal opinions on human rights cases and worked for the Colombian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Fellowship Research Project—Corporate Lives and Landscapes: The Construction, Development, and Representation of Foreign-Owned Enclaves on South America’s Oil Frontier
In the early twentieth century, Standard Oil acquired vast properties across Latin America, encompassing millions of hectares of land. The company built ports, railways, roads, and towns, transforming lives and landscapes. For five decades, Standard Oil ran a private empire the likes of which had never been seen in the region. They also meticulously documented and photographed everything. This project looks at the construction and the representation of foreign-run industrial enclaves. Standard Oil’s scheme was utopian for foreign managers, engineers, geologists, and drill operators, who enjoyed great prosperity. But the advent of oil also produced a dystopian future of dispossession, conflict, contamination, and work without rights.