The Jackman Humanities Institute is delighted to announce our 2025-26 Undergraduate Fellows, who'll be joining us during our Dystopia and Trust theme year.
Catherine Diyakonov, A&S Diaspora & Transnational Studies and Study of Religion (double major)
Project: The Globalization of Dystopia: How the Russo-Ukrainian War Reflects a Worldwide Decline in Trust in Institutions and Democracies
JHI Supervisor: Ann Komaromi, A&S Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures and Comparative Literature
Milton Harris Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Catherine Diyakonov is an incoming fourth-year student who intends to pursue graduate research. She is currently a Research Assistant at the School of the Environment with Professor Kariuki Kirigia and Professor Hamed Ibrahim where she researches policy that sits at the intersection of science and law. Catherine has served on the G7 and G20 Research Groups as a Compliance Director, Lead Analyst, and Compliance Analyst. She is the recipient of the Undergraduate Research Fund where she is conducting research on Canadian migration policies this summer.
This research project examines how the Russo-Ukrainian War reflects a broader global decline in trust in democratic institutions and international governance. The project investigates how misinformation, authoritarianism, and political polarization contribute to a dystopian erosion of trust through the exploration of similarities between this conflict and global issues like climate change, poverty, and corruption. By using the Russo-Ukrainian War as a case study to analyze institutional fragility and resilience, this research project will propose pathways for rebuilding trust and imagining a utopian future rooted in equity, transparency, and international collaboration.
Lia Iannarilli, A&S English and Political Science (double major)
Project: Pipe Dreams: Petro-Masculinity, Fossil Fiction, and Cultural Dystopias of Canadian Extractivism
JHI Supervisor: Luis van Isschot, A&S History
Dr. Jan Blumenstein Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Lia Iannarilli is interested in interdisciplinary research that combines her interests in political science, human geography, and literary analysis. She has worked as an English research assistant for the John Galt project and Jackman Scholars-in-Residence program, alongside conducting a politically-focused examination of media representation as a Laidlaw scholar. Her most recent project, through an ROP, investigates the afterlives and impacts of mine closure. She hopes to pursue an academic career exploring how representation, power, and identity converge across political and literary mediums
Canada’s ongoing fossil fuel dependence produces and supports petro-masculinity, which idealizes extractive frontiers as utopias of opportunity for men. Yet this fantasy rests on the legitimization of colonial exploitation, ecological degradation, and gendered violence for communities in extractive sacrifice zones. Focusing on oil-encounters in Canadian literature, like Kate Beaton’s graphic novel Ducks (2022), this project examines how petrofictions critique and construct petro-masculinity as a dystopian cultural formation. It seeks to understand how literature, reflecting shared imaginaries, reveals dystopia not as a future threat, but as a present condition beneath us, in the underbelly of Canada’s enduring petrocultural fantasy.
Kira Jensen, UTSC Philosophy and Political Science (double major); Statistics (minor)
Project: Rights of Nature, Wrongs of Power: The Dystopia of Eco-Constitutionalism
JHI Supervisor: Katharine Rankin, A&S Geography & Planning
Zoltan D. Simo Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Kira Jensen is an interdisciplinary undergraduate student with a foundation in political theory, environmental policy, and mixed‐methods analysis. She was named a 2024 Laidlaw Research & Leadership scholar and was the Primary Investigator for a thesis on the impact of climate change awareness on the career and life trajectories of young adults. Kira holds research assistantships on work spanning AI governance, extreme political discourse, and disability representation in curricula. She takes great pride in her leadership roles, serving as a Student Union Philosophy Director, founder of the "SPARK" Political Leadership Program, and President of the Association of Philosophy Students.
Eco-constitutionalism promises a reimagined relationship between law and the natural world—yet often reveals a deeper dystopia. Rights-of-nature frameworks, though framed as moral progress, can expose the erosion of trust in institutions that invoke justice while enabling harm. Through the cases of Ecuador and New Zealand, the research examines the values used to legitimize environmental protection and the worldviews that are excluded. At its core is a question central to environmental ethics: can law shaped by colonial, anthropocentric, and speciesist assumptions truly reflect ecological care—and what does its often symbolic realization reveal about the dystopian character of our legal and political moment?
Lita Wanjiru Ngure, A&S Environmental Studies and Peace, Conflict & Justice Studies (double major); Environmental Geography (minor)
Project: Who Do You Trust in the Ruins of Extraction? Post-Apartheid Dystopia and the Struggle for Urban Belonging
JHI Supervisor: Katharine Rankin, A&S Geography & Planning
Jukka-Pekka Saraste Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Lita is a climate justice organiser pursuing a double major in Environmental Studies and Peace, Conflict & Justice, with a minor in Environmental Geography. She was raised in Nairobi, Kenya. Having been a JHI Scholar-in-Residence and an UofT Excellence award recipient, she has developed a passion for researching the environmental history, grassroots organising and geographies of care in Eastern and Southern Africa. A violinist for over 15 years, Lita is also interested in exploring how music can be a tool for community building and social justice.
This project explores how South African music captures the dystopian realities and resistance rooted in post-mining landscapes. Drawing on geography and musicology, I aim to make the connection between cultural production and urban marginalisation to examine how artists such as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Letta Mbulu turn fragmented landscapes into sonic archives of spatial injustice. Using policy and archival sources, my research traces how post-apartheid development narratives collide with lived realities in settlements like Suweto, Tudor Shaft and other townships where music is used to reclaim fractured urban space.
Elizabet Nisenbaum, A&S English and Book & Media Studies (double major)
Project: Does AI Dream of Synthetic Touch? Human and Non-Human Relationships in Dystopian Literature and Cinema
JHI Supervisor: Ann Komaromi, A&S Slavic & East European Languages & Cultures and Comparative Literature
Dr. Michael Lutsky Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Elizabet is a passionate and dedicated scholar, with aspirations of continuing her academic career in interdisciplinary literary and media studies. Her research interests lie in exploring the relationship between the body and the spaces it inhabits along with the way the human and the monstrous are intertwined. Elizabet is also involved in student life and community, having previously held positions as Associate Editor for the IDIOM English Undergraduate Journal and a staff writer for the UC Gargoyle, and currently acting on the English Student Union, the Toronto Poetry Society, and the Editor-in-Chief of The Foolscap Journal.
In a posthumanist dystopia, the human body turns into something almost unrecognizable, while the monstrous body becomes uncannily recognizable. The navigation of interpersonal relationships in such a society is thus complicated both by blurring boundaries between the accepted and the abjected – the Other – and by the imbalanced power dynamics between the human and non-human. Through studying these relations within dystopian media, this project aims to find what it means to recognize and reject humanity, to have and hold a human body, and to perform intimacy when it is nearly impossible to distinguish between what is human and what is not. Ultimately, this research explores the future of the human body, the monster, and connection.
Petrina van Nieuwstadt, A&S Philosophy (Specialist)
Project: Algorithmic Conditioning, Cinematic Form, and the Data Subject
JHI Supervisor: Katherine Blouin, UTSC Historical & Cultural Studies
James Fleck Undergraduate Award in the Humanities
Petrina is a Philosophy Specialist at the University of Toronto, where she also works as a teaching assistant. She’s interested in philosophy of religion, particularly multi-faith dialogue and global engagement. As a recent Laidlaw Scholar, she researched conceptions of miracles and their role in fostering interreligious understanding. She’s also interested in critical media theory, particularly how algorithmic content shapes ideology and political agency. Outside of school, she’s on the executive team of the G7 Research Group and will spend the summer volunteering with Odd Arts, a UK-based theatre organization running creative programmes in prisons and other justice settings.
This project examines how algorithms transform cinema from a space of reflection into a system of behavioral conditioning. As short-form algorithmic platforms fragment films into engagement-optimized clips, viewers are shaped into predictable, emotionally legible subjects whose responses align with commercial imperatives. Here, technological advances that could have fostered utopian imagination instead undermine democratic potential. Algorithmic media doesn't merely reflect our social dystopia—it actively produces it by eliminating ambiguity and replacing shared meaning-making with isolated feedback loops. Drawing on the works of Comolli, Adorno, and Chun, this research explores how the collapse of cinematic meaning into algorithmic response compromises our capacity to envision alternatives to current social arrangements.