The JHI is pleased to announce the Chancellor Jackman 12-month Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities for 2026-27.
Twelve-month Faculty Research Fellows 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 2026-27, Doubles, Doppelgangers.
Doubles, mirror images, and infinite recursive nesting of identical structures are omnipresent in nature and in culture. Our stories rely on concepts such as the play within a play, game within a game, dream within a dream, mise en abyme, self-representation, halls of mirrors, replicas/worlds in miniature, imposters, cycles, microhistories and metanarratives. Within our reflections on mind, thought, and metaphysics, we explore reality as (nested) simulation, infinite or eternal spaces or beings, cosmologies where each thing reflects/contains each other thing, hauntings/ghostly echoes/premonitions, and reflections into infinity. Our reflections of nature, whether human, biological, or computational, rely crucially on notions of recursion, recurrence, fractals, and the distortions that accrue across them (mutation, tradition, drift). In disciplines across the humanities, we observe the use of fractals, spirals, images contained in themselves, doubles, reflections (of reflections of reflections), and rhizomes. What might an exploration of doubles and recursion reveal about the ways that we reflect our realities?
12-Month Faculty Research Fellows
- Kevin Coleman, Associate Professor, UTM Department of Historical Studies
- Kajri Jain, Professor, UTM Visual Studies and A&S Art History
- Larissa Lai, Professor and Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies, Canadian Studies Program, University College and A&S Department of English
- SA Smythe, Associate Professor, Faculty of Information
Kevin Coleman
Kevin Coleman, (PhD History 2012, Indiana University, Bloomington) is a historian of capitalism, photography, and political conflict in modern Latin America, and is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016) and co-editor of Capitalism and the Camera (2021) and Coups d’état in Cold War Latin America (2025). He wrote and directed Stolen Photo (Señal Colombia, 2024), a documentary exploring the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Colombia. His research has been supported by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and SSHRC.
Fellowship Research Project—Theopolitical Doppelgängers: Óscar Romero, Far-Right Christianity, and a Battle for the Soul of the Americas
Theopolitical Doppelgängers examines how competing Christian traditions create theological doubles, figures that claim the same religious authority yet justify opposing political actions, often propelling violent confrontation. The assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero and the subsequent contest over his legacy were manifestations of a transnational religious and political struggle waged by both far-right Christian forces and supporters of Romero. This doubling is pervasive in my textual and visual source material—including in commemorative posters and in photographs of Romero—revealing the hauntings of past religious conflicts that continue to shape the politics of the Americas today.
Kajri Jain
Kajri Jain (PhD Art History & Theory 1999, University of Sydney) works on the interface between art, religion, politics, caste, and vernacular business cultures in modern and contemporary India. Her books include Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Duke 2007), on popular prints, and Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke 2021), on monumental statues. She also writes on contemporary art and on the discipline of art history, most recently in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023) and How Secular Is Art? On The Politics of Art, History, and Religion in South Asia (Cambridge 2023).
Fellowship Research Project—Doubles That Make Nature Otherwise: Nature in the Time of the Gods
This book project investigates the proliferating inorganic doubles of organic nature in public space in contemporary India, their layered genealogies, and the resonances and interferences between their logics of signification. What cosmopolitics, aesthetics, representational regimes, and moral-ethical values are embodied in India’s plastic grass, robotic elephants, fibreglass deer, concrete parrots, and aluminium trees? How do these depart from, and provincialize, the secular post-Enlightenment conceptions of nature that inform global environmentalism and much environmental humanities scholarship? At stake here are the obstacles to, and opportunities for, salutary ecological practices as well as opposition to religious majoritarianism and the habitus of caste.
Larissa Lai
Larissa Lai (PhD English 2006, University of Calgary) is the author of nine books including The Lost Century, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl, and Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Recipient of the Jim Duggins Novelist's Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Astraea Award, and the Otherwise Honor Book, she has also been a finalist for the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism, the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Governor General's Award.
Fellowship Research Project—The False Creek Agent
The False Creek Agent is a murder mystery about a Chinese Canadian real estate agent called Raymond Mah, who is found interred in the one of the supporting pillars of a Vancouver livework condo building in the early 2000s. As a former musician and "one-hit wonder" he is a figure of recursive oppositions, between Hong Kong and Canada, between British colonialism and Chinese reclamation, between punk and pop, between an artistic life and a financially viable one. Will the rabbit-like detective, secret agent Valeria Wu, with help from her twins, be able to work out who killed him, and why?
SA Smythe
SA Smythe (PhD History of Consciousness 2017, University of California-Santa Cruz) is a critical theorist, multi-instrumentalist, and transmedia artist. They are Founding Director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis, a multidisciplinary co-working hub, archival nexus, and creative studio dedicated to Black Studies research and community-engaged Black & Indigenous research-creation and Afro-diasporic aesthetic practice. Author of Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean; the poetry collection [proclivity]; and editor of Transnational Black Studies (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press) and Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity. Smythe received the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies from the American Academy in Rome, 2023–24 MacDowell Fellowship in Multimedia Installation, a 2025 residency at Banff (Leighton Studios), and were a semi-finalist for the 2025–30 Creative Capital Award in Socially Engaged Multimedia Performance. Smythe’s public scholarship, research-creation, and political organising link Black poetics, Indigenous sovereignty, trans/nonbinary aesthetics, and migrant justice across multiple geographies.
Fellowship Research Project—Black Trans Life and the Anarchival Ghost Print
Tracing the “ghost print,” or residual duplicate impression, as a metaphor for black trans and migrant living across the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Black Atlantic, Smythe examines how the Western archive figures presence/absence as photo negatives that demand misrecognition, erasure, and paltry inclusion. In response, Smythe proposes a black nonbinary method that generates counter-doubles through productive negation and anarchival aesthetic interventions that refuse capture. Drawing on black critical theory, (an)archival thought, legal historiography, and trans aesthetics, this project develops Neither/Nor/Necessity, a collection of essays including libretto scores and original and ghost monoprints. Through this mixed-media, transgenre project, Smythe reimagines recursive structures of attachment, identity, and repair towards forms of liberation and life-making that are neither singular nor final.