Over the past ten years, the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) in the Faculty of Arts & Science has hosted 35 postdoctoral fellows — 19 women and 17 men – with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, whose mission is to foster and support the arts and humanities as vital engines of democracy.
The breadth of work produced by these outstanding scholars has spanned the diverse range of the humanities, with projects including everything from contemporary Middle Eastern literature to human-animal relations under settler colonialism to the politics of sex and gender in early 20th century Germany.
As the program wraps up, fellows from the final cohort look back on their time at the JHI and the impact the U of T community has had on their work and lives.
“I’ve had the opportunity to share my work with and to learn from incredibly bright and generous scholars across a range of disciplines,” says Danielle Taschereau Mamers, a Mellon postdoctoral fellow from 2017 to 2019 whose research combines media studies, political theory and critical Indigenous studies.
"What Mellon has made possible is truly an incredible gift."
During her fellowship, Taschereau Mamers worked on a project examining human-bison relations and the re-introduction of bison herds to their Indigenous territories as a response to settler colonization. She also published two articles, revised her dissertation into a forthcoming book, and taught at UTM’s Department of Political Science and Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology.
“In theory, writing can be done anywhere,” says Taschereau Mamers. “But, in practice, the beautiful space at the JHI was an encouraging place to really build a writing practice — both alone in my office or in meeting spaces with writing groups that met throughout the year.”
Former Mellon postdoctoral fellow Amir Khadem not only made strides in his academic and journalistic work at the JHI, but he also reached a vast community of people with his highly popular Persian-language podcast, “Reading Ferdowsi” — a cultural phenomenon that racked up more than two million downloads in one year.
Khadem is a scholar of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, with particular focus on the histories of violence and their communal remembrance, remediation and reconciliation. At the JHI, he also produced an English-language podcast about the contemporary Muslim experience called “A Curious Muslim” and taught in UTSC’s Department of English and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in A&S.
The JHI and the Mellon Foundation were instrumental in giving me the freedom to expand my professional network, gain new experiences and grow my scholarly knowledge, which is all one can ask of a postdoctoral fellowship.
“The JHI and the Mellon Foundation were instrumental in giving me the freedom to expand my professional network, gain new experiences and grow my scholarly knowledge, which is all one can ask of a postdoctoral fellowship,” says Khadem, who is currently making the transition to a career outside of higher education as a writer and translator. A recent JHI workshop on “Writing Creative Non-Fiction for Academics” was particularly conducive to his forthcoming work.
The final cohort of Mellon postdocs was rounded out by Mark Anthony Geraghty, whose research on violence, transitional justice and post-conflict nation building in Rwanda is based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in the small yet densely-populated African republic. At the JHI, Geraghty worked on his book manuscript as well as three articles for leading anthropology journals. He will next take up a permanent lectureship at the Department of Anthropology at University College London.
In addition to the outgoing Mellon postdoctoral fellows, former fellows include Laurie Marhoefer, now associate professor of history at the University of Washington, whose research delves into the politics of sex and gender in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany; Erin Soros, short story writer and historian of literature and psychoanalysis who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University; and Oisín Keohane, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Dundee whose work in philosophy of language and political philosophy was encompassed in his JHI project on “cosmo-nationalism” – a strain of nationalism that uses cosmopolitan ideas to advance the aims of one nation.
“From mundane factors like the importance of having a pleasant room to eat together so as to better ‘digest’ ideas to more ethereal factors like having art on the wall to get the creative juices flowing, I really do believe that a space which is inspiring stimulates great ideas,” says Keohane of his time at the JHI.
The benefits are a two-way street, with the JHI gaining from the expertise and creative thinking of the scholars it has hosted over the years.
“As the JHI winds up ten years of Mellon postdoctoral fellowships,” says JHI Director Alison Keith, “we are grateful for the immense contributions that our many cohorts of postdocs have brought to the intellectual and pedagogical life of the University of Toronto.”