Three U of T researchers are among the inaugural cohort of a prestigious new College created by the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) to recognize the emerging generation of Canadian intellectual leadership.
Amira Mittermaier, Milica Radisic, and Natalie E. Rothman will be inducted into the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists at the RSC Annual General Meeting in November.
Mittermaier, an associate professor in the University’s departments for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations has garnered four prestigious book prizes for her first monograph, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Her fieldwork, which illuminates how Islam is lived, embodied, and contested on the ground by going beyond the visible realm and paying attention to dreams, visions, the afterlife, and economies with God, was cited as ground-breaking by the RSC.
Radisic’s work in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute for Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering has gained her recognition as a leader in the field of cardiovascular tissue engineering. She was cited by the RSC for her innovative techniques for designing and developing new heart tissue derived from stem cells.
Rothman examines the connected histories of Venice and the Ottoman Empire in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She challenges claims about timeless civilizational divides between “East” and “West”, tracing how notions of religious, linguistic, and cultural difference were articulated through trade and diplomacy. The RSC calls her digital initiative on early modern cultural interactions, “path-breaking,” and she has won three major international prizes for her book, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul.
“We are thrilled to see three of our rising stars among the first to be granted this substantial honour from the Royal Society of Canada,” says Professor Peter Lewis, U of T’s interim vice president, research and innovation. “They certainly represent the excellence of the research community here at the University.”
The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists was created to gather scholars, artists and scientists at a highly productive stage of their careers into a single collegium where new advances in understanding will emerge from the interaction of diverse intellectual, cultural and social perspectives.
The College’s mandate is to address issues of particular concern to new scholars, artists and scientists, for the advancement of understanding and the benefit of society, taking advantage of the interdisciplinary approaches fostered by the establishment of the College.
Members must be within 15 years of the conferral of their PhD or equivalent qualification and are selected based on excellence and reflection of the disciplinary, geographic, linguistic and ethno-racial diversity of the campuses and communities of new scholars, artists and scientists in Canada.