Letter From Our Director, Alison Keith

September 6, 2023 by Sonja Johnston

As we return to campus for the upcoming academic year, we at the JHI are looking forward to the renewal of our traditional in-person programming, which this yearironically!will be centred on the theme of Absence. Our first public event is the launch of our 2023-24 JHI Art Exhibition, “Mnemonic silences, disappearing acts”. In association with the Art Museum at U of T, the JHI is pleased to present an exhibition, curated by Dallas Fellini, that interrogates the silences, erasures, and censorships that colour the queer and trans archive. In addition, our 2022-23 Year in Review will be available at the launch. Read all about the year that was, including the trio of art installations that we enjoyed last year in association with the Art Museum.

We look forward to welcoming faculty appointed to the U of T during the last three years of pandemic-related pandemonium in person at our second annual New Faculty Salon on Wednesday, September 27 from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm in JHB100. We are excited to introduce our new colleagues to the JHI and the research programming in humanities and qualitative social sciences that we support across the tri-campus, multidivisional U of T. Please tell your new colleagues about this eventwe would be delighted to meet them!

Next month we will host our second Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities on Wednesday, October 4 from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm. This annual lecture features a leading humanist at the University of Toronto and commemorates our lasting gratitude for the support of the Honourable Henry N.R. Jackman for research in the humanities. The Department for the Study of Religion’s Naomi Seidman, Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Arts, will speak on the topic of “Remembering the 93: Sexual Violence, Ultra-Orthodox Memory, and Performance,” in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library.

This fall we are running four competitions for 2024-25 JHI fellowships on the theme of “Undergrounds/Underworlds.” The competition for 12-month and 6-month JHI Faculty Research Fellowships closes on September 20. Our two postdoctoral fellowship competitionsin Digital Humanities and in New Media and Public Humanitieshave a deadline of November 30, as does the Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellowship. Please consider putting in an application!

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