The JHI is pleased to announce the Chancellor Jackman 6-month Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities for 2026-27.
Tenured faculty at the University of Toronto, each six-month Faculty Research Fellow receives a half-year leave from the normal teaching and administrative duties to undertake research (including travel) on the project proposed in their application. They are chosen for demonstrated excellence of their record of scholarship and the merit of the research proposal. Six-month fellows are invited to participate in the intellectual life of the JHI in the year following their fellowship, often by contributing a short talk to the JHI’s YouTube channel.
6-Month Faculty Research Fellows
- Susana Bejar, Associate Professor, A&S Department of Linguistics
- Michael Chazan, Professor, A&S Departments of Earth Science and Anthropology
- Valentina Napolitano, Professor, A&S Department of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar
- Alejandro Paz, Associate Professor, UTSC Department of Anthropology
- Martin Revermann, Professor, UTM Department of Historical Studies
- Atsuko Sakaki, Professor, A&S Department of East Asian Studies and the Centre for Comparative Literature
Susana Bejar
Susana Bejar (PhD Linguistics 2003, University of Toronto) is a linguist who works on theoretical syntax and its interfaces, including agreement and case phenomena, syntactic dependencies, locality effects, and the nature of grammatical features. Her research integrates comparative morphosyntax, fieldwork, and formal modeling. She has published articles in journals like Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, Language, Syntax, Journal of Linguistics and Inuit Studies, and she co-edited the volume Phi-Theory: Phi-Features across Interfaces and Modules (Oxford University Press). Her ongoing projects include SSHRC-funded research on case/agreement mismatches and, in partnership with Labrador Inuit language specialists, Inuttitut grammar and language documentation.
Fellowship Research Project—Objects and Agreement in Labrador Inuttitut
Labrador Inuttitut encodes rich grammatical information through bound morphology on verbs, tracking event participants using multiple morphological inventories. This project investigates how this system interacts with the syntax of objects, exploring questions about transitivity, animacy, and verb class. It frames Inuttitut agreement as fundamentally object-oriented, challenging earlier analyses that treat the subject as central. The research combines corpus analysis with elicitation of novel data using methods that control communicative contexts for speakers. The project builds on ongoing collaborations with Labrador Inuttitut specialists in Nain, Nunatsiavut, pairing linguistic research with community-driven documentation and revitalization projects.
Michael Chazan
Michael Chazan (PhD Anthropology 1992, Yale University) served for ten years as founding Director of the Archaeology Centre. Chazan is the co-director of the Wonderwerk Research Project where his team has documented evidence for human use of fire one million years ago. Beyond his scientific publications, he is the author of World Prehistory and Archaeology: Pathways Through Time, now entering its 6th edition; The Reality of Artifacts: An Archaeological Perspective; and the translation from French of Eric Boëda’s book Techno-logic & Technology: A Paleo-history of Knapped Lithic Objects.
Fellowship Research Project—Fire: A Deep History
This book traces two million years of the human engagement with fire showing how fire has become deeply woven into our lives while dispelling the myth that we are fated to replicate the past as we face the pressing challenges of the future. This is a book written for a broad public audience and is meant to provide a new perspective on issues that are central to developing a response to the environmental and technological challenges we face today.
Valentina Napolitano
Valentina Napolitano’s (PhD Social Anthropology 1995, SOAS-University of London) interdisciplinary scholarship traverses multiple thresholds across the Americas, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. She is the author of several monographs and edited collections on Catholicism, borderlands, traces, affects, and longue durée of histories, including the recent co-authored What is Political Theology? (Columbia University Press, 2025). Her current research focuses on mysticism, degrowth, and political theology.
Fellowship Research Project—Can AI Bear Sin?
This project examines artificial intelligence (AI) as a site where enduring Catholic theological themes—sin, doubling, and incarnation—are reanimated. Drawing on Catholic and political theological archives and anthropology of personhood, it explores AI as an “incarnated double” that reflects and challenges human agency and responsibility. The project develops politico-theological insights addressing AI’s affective, incarnate, and recursive nature, centered on Pope Francis’s question: “Can AI bear sin?” It critically explores how AI doubling reshapes Catholic personhood, the body, and sovereignty. This research will complete the final chapter of a monograph on Christian mysticism, anthropology, and contemporary political life.
Alejandro Paz
Alejandro Paz (PhD Anthropology and Linguistics 2010, University of Chicago) has written about the politics of migration, language and citizenship in Israel/Palestine, as well as settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. His book Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship (Indiana UP) was published in 2018. His current research is about Israeli English online journalism, and its impact on North Atlantic public opinion. He helped to found the Hearing Palestine Initiative at the University of Toronto, and serves on its Steering Committee. He was also a founding steering committee member of the Jewish Faculty Network.
Fellowship Research Project—Mediating Imperial Publics: Translating Israeli Journalism in the Digital Age
This proposal is to complete a book, Mediating Imperial Publics: Translating Israeli Journalism in the Digital Age, that considers the regime of news media and (settler-) colonialism in Palestine/Israel and across the North Atlantic. It considers how the practices of polyglot Israeli journalists and their audiences create complex geographies that cannot be captured by nationalist lenses, nor by concepts like diaspora, transnationalism or globalization. Instead, this project develops the concept of imperial publics, which arise from the cultivation of subjects that assess the use of force on colonized others. Based in both archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this project innovates by examining the communications regime of contemporary colonial projects.
Martin Revermann
Martin Revermann (PhD Classics 1997, University of Oxford) is a classical philologist and cultural historian, with particular interests in theatre (especially ancient Greek and 20th-century European theatre), translation, Bertolt Brecht, ancient Greek religion, lyric poetry (both ancient and modern), the history of science as well as modes of comparatism. His research therefore integrates Classics, Theatre Studies, Comparative Literature, German Studies and History. Revermann’s publications include the monograph Comic Business. Theatricality, Dramatic Technique and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (Oxford 2006), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (Cambridge 2014), A Cultural History of Theatre (Vol. 1: Antiquity) (London 2017) and Brecht and Tragedy: Radicalism, Traditionalism, Eristics (Cambridge 2022) while he is the editor of Translating Latin and Greek: A Critical Guide (to be published by Cambridge University Press). In 2022 he was awarded the Humboldt Prize for his work.
Fellowship Research Project—The Theatre of Science: Exploring the Interfaces between Science, Theatre and Performance Art
The recent pandemic has made it abundantly clear that scientific insights must be communicated clearly and effectively so that the public understands and ‘buys in’ by changing its behavioural practices collectively. Persuasive social theatre and suggestive performance techniques are crucial parts of scientific communication strategies—the sciences need the theatre! In this project, the manifold interfaces between sciences and theatre-and-performance art will be examined: their histories, their conceptual and theoretical underpinnings as well as their futures (esp. in what I call ‘academic theatre,’ i.e. uses of plays/play-scripts and theatre and performance in academic contexts). Key areas of contact include environmental sciences, physics, medicine, AI and robotics as well as chemistry/alchemy. One lead interest is the question of where and how scientific knowledge begins and ends. Who needs to know what, in what way(s), at what level(s)? And how can theatre and performance best contribute to such re-conceptualized ‘scientific knowledge’?.
Atsuko Sakaki
Atsuko Sakaki (PhD Asian Studies 1992, University of British Columbia) teaches classical Japanese literature, narratology, urban space, photography, and image-text-sound relations. She has published four refereed books, most recently Train Travel as Embodied Space-Time in Narrative Theory (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), two edited journal special issues, such as “Things, Space, and Sensation in, around, and through Modern Japanese Literature in Print” (Literature, 2023), and articles, including “M for Mobilities, M for Memory” (Mobility Humanities, 2022). She serves on the board of several journals, and regularly reviews manuscripts for academic publishers. We are pleased to welcome Professor Sakaki back for her second faculty fellowship; she held the 12-month fellowship in 2010-11.
Fellowship Research Project—On Ineptitude: Senses and Affordances in Normative Space
This project explores the meta-critical exploitation of two mediums of print culture—prose narratives and photography—which becomes potent to represent how various degrees of ineptitude affect our experience of space and inform our understanding of the intertwining of the senses. The physical activities we engage in, though usually classified by one particular sense (vision, aurality, tactility), are in fact managed through the operation of multiple senses, and create haptic effects. These narrative and photographic representations radically question the modern, optically centred paradigm and the anatomical comprehension of the human body, at the precise time when their authority in the modern system of representation is being contested.