Researcher Profiles
Researchers
Lauren Beck. Ph.D.
The director of the CEMVC, Lauren also holds the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and the rank of Professor of Visual and Material Culture Studies at Mount Allison University, Canada. She researches early modern visual culture and word and image studies, particularly in the Atlantic world, and pursues questions arising from race, gender, and place of origin in the settler-colonial milieu. Her recent books include Illustrating el Cid, 1498-Today(2019), Firsting in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2019), Canada’s Place Names and How to Change Them (2022), Mitji: Let’s Eat! Mi’kmaq Recipes from Sikniktuk (2024, with M. Augustine), and Abiayalan Pluriverses: Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies (2024, with G. Chacón and J. Sánchez). Her research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, and the Canada Research Chair programme.
Michael Cormier, Ph.D.
Dr. Michael Cormier has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Mount Allison University since July 2018. His primary research interests lie in the areas of computer vision and machine learning. Dr. Cormier is particularly interested in types of images that have been under-explored in computer vision research, including illustrations, artwork, and web pages. Ongoing applied research projects include the identification of media and methods in printed illustrations, especially from the early modern period, automated generation of metadata for scanned books, and interpreting the structure of web pages using visual evidence (in order to support assistive interfaces such as screen readers). On the theoretical side, he is currently working on methods for incorporating probabilistic reasoning into convolutional neural network models. After completing a BSc at St. Francis Xavier University in 2011, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Waterloo, completing an MMath in 2013 and a PhD in 2018.
Ana M. Fernández, Ph.D.
Ana M. Fernández holds a PhD in Spanish (University of Ottawa, 2022) and is a post-doctoral research fellow at the CEMVC, and co-founder, with Lauren Beck, of the International Research Community in Inclusion, Interculturality and Pedagogical Perspectives (IRCIIPP). Recipient of La Bourse de la Doyenne (2023-2025) and Bourse spéciale de la Doyenne (2023-2024), Ana is pursuing a PhD in Education at the Université de Montréal (UdeM). Her research focuses on autopoiesis, the enactive approach, and translanguaging. She has completed a Certificat de formation en pédagogie universitaire pour les professeurs (Université d’Ottawa) and a Stage intensif de perfectionnement pour les professeurs de français LE (Université du Québec à Montréal). She has published several articles and volumes in international peer-reviewed journals, among them “Paradoxes of Global and Local Development in the Film Verónico Cruz. La deuda interna: A Hybrid Discussion Group in Spanish for Specific Purposes,” Hispania, 14.3, pp. 415-431 (Fernández, 2021). Re-interpreting Southern Cone Memories, JILAR, 28.1 (Fernández & Sosnowski, 2022), Manifesting Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 47.3 (Fernández & Rojas Sotelo, 2022), Latin American Women Nurturing Memories, A Contracorriente, 21.2 (Fernández, da Silva & Torres, 2024). Based on her academic experience —as a research assistant, lecturer/chargée de cours, part-time professor—, she supports dialogic and inclusive education to achieve equity for the wellbeing of societies. You can contact Ana at afernandez@mta.ca.
Grace Gomashie, Ph.D.
Grace is a post-doctoral research fellow at the CEMVC, responsible for research in equity and diversity and researcher training. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 2020, and her research focuses on the language vitality of Indigenous languages in multilingual contexts. Her peer-reviewed publications include “Bilingual youth’s language choices and attitudes towards Nahuatl in Santiago Tlaxco, Mexico” (Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2020), “Kanien’keha/Mohawk Indigenous Language Revitalization Efforts in Canada” (McGill Journal of Education, 2019) and “Language Vitality of Spanish in Equatorial Guinea: Language Use and Attitudes” (Humanities, 2019).
Ailén Cruz, Ph.D.
Ailén is a post-doctoral researcher at the CEMVC who received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2020. She previously worked as an Assistant Professor at the Australian National University, where she taught literature and translation. Her main research stream focuses on the evolution of the bestiary genre from its medieval origins to contemporary Hispanic literature (book forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s University Press). Her peer-reviewed publications include “Nicolás Guillén’s El gran zoo and his Biopolitical Legacy in Three Contemporary Bestiaries” (Hispania, 2022) and “Roque Larraquy’s Informe sobre ectoplasma animal in English Translation” (The AALITRA Review, 2023). She is also interested in questions of the uncanny in Latin American literature, and has published on this matter in Romance Notes. For the latest on her research, you can visit her ORCid.
Samantha Ruckenstein, Ph.D.
Samantha Ruckenstein is the Digital Humanities Scholar at the CEMVC. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from McGill University, having completed her Master's in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures with a specialization in Medieval studies at the University of Toronto, in addition to her Undergraduate degree in Hispanic Studies at Queen's University. She is currently working as a lecturer on Visual Culture at Mount Allison University and Assistant Professor of Spanish at St. Thomas University’s Elsipogtog First Nation Campus. Samantha loves working with the CEMVC and increasing the presence of visual culture in academia. Her research interests include: Medieval and Contemporary Iberian Literature, Transatlantic Spanish Studies, Feminist theory, Disability studies, Minority studies, Jewish studies, and Spanish law. For more information visit samanthapenina.com.
Justin Yoston
Justin Yoston began his involvement with the CEMVC as a metadata research assistant in 2018, and he currently serves as research supervisor for the Centre, guiding on data management and systems integration. In this capacity, he oversees a team of researchers in compiling and documenting image sets for the repository. In addition to his role at the CEMVC, he also contributes to business strategy and web design at Metafy (Dr. Beck’s start-up company) and maintains employment as an analyst in the private sector.
Justin completed his Bachelor of Arts degree at Mount Allison University (Hons. Philosophy, Min. Psychology), during which time he served as a teaching assistant. He spends his spare time writing poetry & fiction, playing musical instruments, working on home automation, and hanging out with his chihuahua, Brutus.
Research Analysts
Désirée Worrall-Bélanger
Désirée Worrall-Bélanger (She/Her) graduated from Mount Allison University in 2024, having completed a Bachelor of Arts with an Honours in English, a Minor in VMCS, and a certificate in visual literacy and culture. She is currently working full-time as an Editorial, Marketing, and Community associate at Fable — a social media app for book-and-tv-show lovers. Désirée’s interests in the world of visual and material culture solidified when she began posting on social media (specifically BookTok) for her business back in 2021. Within the first two weeks of opening her Etsy shop, her social media account (@rainydayslibrary) went viral, which allowed for numerous opportunities to parnter with brands such as Notion, Macmillan, Scholastic, Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury, and more. It is also how she connected with Fable as they found her account, offering her a paid internship, which led to a guaranteed full-time position after graduation. Désirée has been working with Dr. Beck and the CEMVC since her first year at MtA (2020) until the end of her third year where she had to take a break to focus on her internship; she’s thrilled to be joining the team once more in 2024 as a now-graduate. In her free time, you will most likely find her curled up in her reading corner, catching up on her current read.
Kate McSweeney
Kate McSweeney obtained her Master of Letters from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland in 2024 after graduating from Mount Allison as one of the first two honours students in VMCS in 2023. While at Mount Allison, she started working for CEMVC in 2021 on the Aesop's Fables project through a placement in her first ever VMCS course. This was one of the pivotal moments that cemented her love of VMCS and convinced her to switch her major from biology to VMCS. Since then, she has worked with Dr. Lauren Beck and Dr. Christina Ionescu on various research projects relating to place names, book illustrations, gender representation in film, and most recently medieval and early modern symbolism used by far-right groups in North America. She hopes to continue researching in the field of visual culture and complete her MLIS degree to work in arts-based data and metadata management. Currently she is a graduate intern at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles in the collections information and access department where she helps to keep the back end of the museums collections pages and databases running smoothly.
Nicole Laura Surette-Bourque
Nicole is a current undergraduate student at Mount Allison University with an Honours in Classics, a triple minor in Ancient Greek, Latin, and VMCS, as well as a certificate in Visual and Material Literacy, with plans to graduate in May 2025, and to continue into a graduate studies program in the fall. Her research interests include a focus on the Classical and Archaic period, the use of material culture as research evidence, for example, through its relation to the population. She is also interested in the connections the Greeks made with other Mediterranean populations, such as the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and the indigenous populations of places they colonized. As well, she would love to explore Ancient Greek racism and othering of the non-Greek populations. She has been with the CEMVC team since the fall of 2024, and she is very excited to be a part of the team as a data analysis and continue to grow her research skills!
Former Graduate Researchers
Martha Lorena Rojas Castañeda
Bachelor in Liberal Arts with a focus on Cultural Anthropology. Her interests in art and culture led her to work in various cultural and artistic projects in her home city Quito. Lorena recently finished her master's degree in Hispanic Studies at Western University with a thesis about the Chilean singer Violeta Parra. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant at Western teaching a beginners Spanish course. She also works as research assistant for professor Lauren Beck with a project about equality, diversity and inclusion in western visual culture over the last five hundred years. She will continue studying her Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies at Western with an investigation about female voices in Latin American cinema. Lorena is interested in cultural, gender and intermedial studies.
Ashley Morford
Ashley Caranto Morford is a Pinay-British scholar-activist and SSHRC-funded PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto. Her work is accountable to and in relationship with Indigenous studies, Pilipinx/a/o studies, anti-colonial methods and praxis, and digital humanities. Along with her work at the Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture, Ashley is the research lead for the SSHRC-funded #DecolonizingDigital Twitter project, which runs out of Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos’ Indigenous Life Promotion and Social Action Network labs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. She is co-editing a forthcoming anthology (through Wilfrid Laurier University Press) on Twitter as an Indigenous territory with Dr. Jeffrey Ansloos and Dr. David Gaertner. Ashley is also a co-founder of Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed, a digital humanities partnership committed to anti-colonial digital research and pedagogy, with Arun Jacob and Dr. Kush Patel. To learn more about Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed, click here.
Asil Naqvi
I am currently a PhD student at the NICHE (Knowledge Intensive Computing for Healthcare Enterprises) Research Group at Dalhousie University. Previously, I was a teaching assistant for 2 years at the Dalhousie University for CSCI 2141. My master’s thesis, defended in April 2020 was on the prediction outcome of the kidney transplant patients using machine learning methods. The study was carried out using a high dimensional dataset of kidney transplants at Dalhousie University. My research interests lie at the crossroads of data mining, machine learning based decision support systems for clinical and healthcare settings.
Former Undergraduate Researchers
Shelby Carson
Shelby is a 2021 graduating student from Mount Allison University with a major in history and a minor in German and classical studies. Her historical areas of interest vary from the Hellenistic period to the Medieval era. Outside of German language courses, she has also enjoyed taking German literature courses. She has been a metadata assistant for the CEMVC since her second year at Mount Allison, primarily with the responsibilities of obtaining data for the collections. In particular, she has helped obtain metadata for the Ovid, Early Modern Women, and Latin American Chronicles collections. She will be working for the CEMVC over the summer to ensure quality and consistency throughout the collections. Shelby will then be attending the University of Toronto's Masters of Information program with a concentration in Archives in the fall.
Elizabeth March
Elizabeth completed her Bachelor of Arts at Mount Allison University with Honours in History and a minor in Classical Studies in May 2021. She wrote her Honours thesis on how the Renaissance author, Francesco Petrarca, combined classical and Christian influences in his writings about his muse, Laura. She began working with the CEMVC in the fall of 2019, researching illustrated editions of fictional texts, including Gulliver’s Travels, the works of the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen’s novels. Elizabeth will continue her studies in September 2021 at Carleton University, where she will undertake an MA in History. In September 2022 she will attend the University of Buckingham in England, where she will complete an MA in Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors. Elizabeth’s research interests include: the social history of Early Modern England and depictions of history on film.
Jonah Walker-Sherman
Jonah is entering his fourth year of his Bachelor of Arts degree in the Fall and hoping to complete his double major in Philosophy and Psychology by the end of the Winter 2022 term. His philosophical areas of interest range from ancient philosophy to the philosophy of science, and certain areas of logic, while his psychological interests center around biopsychology, language, and palliative care. He began working with CEMVC in the Fall of 2020, finding and meta tagging illustrations from texts of Cervantes' 'Vida y hechos del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha' and hasn't stopped since. In addition to his work with the CEMVC he is also working as a research assistant for Professor Jane Dryden and Assistant Professor Andrew Inkpen in a project relating to the recent explosion of biological research pertaining to the human microbiome. In the upcoming Fall 2021 term, he will be working as a teacher's assistant for an introductory course on Plato's Republic.
Emily Shaw
Emily Shaw (She/Her) is a graduate of Mount Allison University, having completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2021 with a minor in Visual Communication and Culture, and a certificate in visual literacy and culture. She is an interdisciplinary artist and humourist, exploring the female gothic, queer failure, and food anthropology through sculpture, textiles, performance, photography, and audio/video work. Shaw joined the CEMVC in May, working to assist Dr. Beck in her research in representation of women & water in heraldry of the Americas. Shaw will be spending the next year working on her practice and brushing up on her cultural studies. She’s aiming for a master’s in Fine Arts or in Cultural Studies in the next couple years.
Former CEMVC Interns
Alicia Allen
Alicia Allen is a third-year student at Mount Allison University with plans on receiving an Honours in Visual and Material Cultural Studies with a Minor in English Literature. When a social media and metadata research internship became available at the CEMVC, Alicia applied immediately, excited for such an opportunity. Her passion for graphic design is evident and she is excited to enhance her skills and create a professional portfolio for the future. Alicia thrives in settings where she can be connected to her peers. For example, she spends her free time as Co-President of the MTA Creative Writing Society and Co-President of the MTA VMCS Society. She likes to draw, read, and write, with dreams of becoming an author and an academic. After her undergraduate degree at Mount Allison, Alicia plans on attending grad school, pursuing a career in intercultural communications.
Charmi Pastagiya
Charmi Pastagiya, currently in her third year at Mount Allison University, aims to complete her bachelor’s degree in psychology. Upon discovering an internship opportunity in social media and metadata research at CEMVC, she promptly applied, eager for the chance it presented. In today's context, social media serves as a prominent platform for socializing, and Charmi passionate about social psychology, is intrigued by how this internship can offer insights to improve human engagement in passive interactions. Aside from her academic pursuits, Charmi enjoys cooking, reading, and swimming; she wishes to become a researcher so after her undergraduate studies at Mount Allison, she envisions gaining further knowledge with master's and PhD degrees.