Nadia Almasalkhi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on political transnationalism in Middle Eastern diasporas and the phenomenon of political non-participation. Her dissertation seeks to understand why participation by out-of-country voters sharply increased in Lebanese elections between 2018 and 2022, and why this increase was uneven across destination countries where the diaspora live. Specifically, her project will compare the political engagement of Lebanese in Canada, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, examining how different...
Claire Chun is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis in gender, women and sexuality Studies. Her dissertation research examines the ways that Asian North American diasporic art and media critically engage issues of settler colonial and militarized imperial violence through aesthetic practices of more-than-human kinship and entanglements.
Claire's Hildebrand Fellowship will support her field research in Vancouver and Toronto where she will explore how Asian diasporic artists based in Canada complicate notions of Asianness by grappling with...
Allison is a Ph.D. student in city and regional planning. Her work takes a critical approach to housing policy and land use planning. She examines the barriers to creating truly affordable housing, and how municipalities can deliver on their housing goals.
Allison's Hildebrand Fellowship will enable her to study Housing Now, an affordable housing program in her home city of Toronto. Housing Now aims at developing affordable housing through public-private partnerships and surplus city-owned land. Allison's research is motivated by the limited assessments of Housing Now's progress,...
Jennifer is a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures (Linguistics Track), hosted in the French department. Her research examines the intersection of grammatical gender and social gender.
Jennifer’s Hildebrand fellowship will support her research on variation in non-binary French and the social challenges non-binary Francophones face in using this gender-affirming French variety in their everyday lives. She uses a mixed-methods approach to examine both what non-binary French forms are gaining popularity, and changing social attitudes toward these word forms. She is excited...
Lianne is a PhD student in History, with a designated emphasis on Jewish studies. Her current project looks at a history of the Canadian state through the lens of Jewish institutions. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Montreal's growing Jewish community organized its own educational and healthcare institutions under the confessional system then prevalent in Quebec. As the government expanded its role in public services over the 20th century, these institutions operated in dialogue with authorities increasingly involved in funding and regulating areas once exclusively overseen by...
Matthew Kovac is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. His research focuses on anticolonial struggles and transnational solidarity movements in the 20th century. His dissertation examines the role of solidarity committees in building alliances between Irish republicans and the Palestinian and South African national liberation movements during the 1960s-1980s. Matt’s Hildebrand Fellowship will support archival research in Vancouver and Montréal, where he will investigate the activities of local Irish solidarity committees, including their relationships with First Nations activists and...
AJ Kurdi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies, with a designated emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation research is a comparative study on different forms of ethnic minority queer organizing in Montreal, Budapest, and Paris, and how they shape the priorities and political orientations of mainstream LGBTQI movements, laws and public policies in North America and Europe.
AJ's Hildebrand Fellowship will support his fieldwork in Montreal during the monthlong Fierté Montréal celebration. He will examine the...
Britt Leake is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science. His research focuses on understanding the conditions under which democracy succeeds or fails in societies with extensive ethnolinguistic or religious diversity. His dissertation project uses John Rawls’s theory of public reason as a frame through which to examine historical cases from four countries (Canada, India, Lebanon, and Spain) in which different cultural groups tried to make compromises on the terms of a social contract that would be legitimate in the eyes of each group. Britt’s research on Canada will focus...
Lydia is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, public health, and immigration at the turn of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in the work of settlement houses and milk committees in urban spaces, and how immigrant women engaged with reform projects and could lay claim to social citizenship through their mothering and hygienic practices.
Lydia’s research on Canada will explore connections between clean milk initiatives and constructions of whiteness within the transnational history of the settlement movement...
Madeleine is a first-year Ph.D. student in the history of art specializing in twentieth century art of North America, with an emphasis on folk art and modernism of the United States. The Hildebrand Fellowship will facilitate Madeleine’s research on pioneering Canadian nationalist artist Joyce Wieland (1930-1998). Promoting unity between francophone and anglophone Canada while maintaining critical distance through absurdist humor, Wieland’s work interrogates US economic and ecological interference in Canada through a feminist and ecocritical lens, utilizing unconventional mediums like...
