Classical Studies
Professor / contact | Altay Coskun |
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Position available | ongoing |
Project | Database project Amici Populi Romani: collection of biographical data of kings and dynasts of the Mediterranean world who were friends of the Romans. |
RA tasks | Depending on the skills and experience of the student, s/he could help me with the design and development of the website, with the production of digital genealogical tables, and/or with the editing of articles, many of which are written by non-native speakers. |
Professor / contact | Altay Coskun |
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Position available | ongoing |
Project | Ancient Black Sea Studies |
RA tasks | The student would first be introduced into Ancient Black Sea Studies, with a particular focus on the Bosporan Kingdom on the North Coast of the Black Sea. Depending on the skills and languages the student commands, s/he could be involved in editing conference papers, website design, production of small texts (blurbs, summaries), digitizing texts, and the organization of the team meetings. |
Professor / contact | Altay Coskun |
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Position available | ongoing |
Project |
Biblical Texts as Historical Sources for Hellenistic Judaea I have recently moved my research interest to Hellenistic and Roman Judaea. In particular, I have found new clues to understand the process how the prophetic Book of Daniel or the dynastic history of 1 Maccabees have been composed or revised and reedited. This opens many new perspectives on how to use these Biblical texts as historical sources. I am currently writing a series of journal articles and book chapters on these topics. |
RA tasks | The student would help edit my texts, discuss related questions with me and potentially also develop a research agenda of their own in the field, if the cooperation is for a longer period. I typically organize one international workshop per year at UW and would like to include the student in its preparation. |
Professor / contact | Altay Coskun |
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Position available | ongoing |
Project |
Kolchian Studies My research on the ancient Black Sea region includes the legendary kingdom of Kolchis (Colchis), also called the land of the Argonauts and believed to have been the home of the sorceress Medeia. I have recently produced a series of articles on the historical geography: based on intensive literary studies (geographic literature, tragedy and epic poetry) as well as surveying recent scholarship on archaeology and using Google Earth, I have suggested new locations among others for Dioskurias, the largest Greek city on the eastern Black Sea coast. My ongoing work traces the various cities that were identified as Aia, the home city of Medeia, in the early period of Greek colonialism. I further study how the myth of Athamas, Ino, Phrixos, and Helle developed over time. |
RA tasks | The student would help edit these and other papers on the ancient Black Sea for publishing, assist my research with literary surveys, and potentially also develop a research agenda of their own in the field, if the cooperation is for a longer period. |
Communication Arts
Professor / contact | Shana MacDonald |
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Position available | ongoing fall 2021 - spring 2024 |
Project |
Dr. MacDonald’s project Feminist Digital Media (2016-2020): Building Affective and Activist Worlds examines digital media practices including memes, hashtags, and TikTok videos since 2016 which have contributed to a range of feminist activist movements from intersectional, Indigenous, trans, and queer feminist perspectives. The project both documents and archives these practices and shares them with public audiences through the Instagram account @aesthetic.resistance . |
RA tasks |
Collecting, organizing, managing digital materials including memes, hashtags, TikTok videos. Creating summaries of media events, literature review of digital media articles, creating and managing content for our Instagram account. |
English Language & Literature
Professor / contact | Marcel O'Gorman |
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Position available | fall 2018 (preferred), ongoing |
Project | Digital Abstinence? Yes, the title of my SSHRC-funded research project is "Digital Abstinence: The Art, Philosophy, and Politics of Unplugging." The project runs out of the Critical Media Lab at the Creative Hub in Downtown Kitchener. There are many components to the project, from a psychology study of phone bans in high school, to interviewing Old Order Mennonites, to various digital art projects created in the Critical Media Lab. |
RA tasks | The RA would help teach workshops in the Critical Media Lab and other locations, prepare materials for the workshops, and possibly contribute to data collection. The candidate will have access to a maker space and would be part of a lively research creation community. |
Professor / contact | Randy Allen Harris |
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Position available | ongoing |
Project |
This is an international, interdisciplinary project that combines rhetoric, style, cognition, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. It is based on a large database of rhetorical figures that models human knowledge. We are growing the database with a citizen-science game. The end goal is to support Machine Learning corpus work for such purposes as argument mining, text summarization, and authorship attribution). |
RA tasks | The RA will work both independently and in collaboration with other researchers. Research activities will include some combination of data analysis, data collection, database management, game design, literature search, wiki-entry and reference-guide content provision, and bibliographical research, depending on the talents and interests of the RA. |
Professor / contact | |
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Position available | ongoing |
Project |
The Demos Lab (Democratization through Education in Medicine, technolOgy and Science Lab), examines communication in STEM subjects. The project for this position is focused on examining how climate change is discussed and debated among Millennial and Gen Z adults and other generational cohorts in Canada. |
RA tasks | The RA will work with my existing research team to conduct bibliographic research, code data, and other tasks as appropriate to the RA and current research program of the team. The RA will be provided with training in research methods for interpretive and qualitative research as well as training for any tools we're using in the project. |
Psychology
Professor / contact |
Hilary Bergsieker |
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Position available | ongoing; typically two-term commitment for new lab members |
Project | The Diversity and Intergroup Relations Lab uses experimental social psychology research methods to investigate interactions between diverse groups of people, studying factors that make them fail or flourish. We use lab-based experiments and field studies to test how, when, and why people establish, maintain, and repair trust in others from different backgrounds. Within the Engendering Success in STEM research consortium, our work advances gender equity in STEM fields by promoting adolescent girls’ identity fit in STEM and full-time professionals’ allyship to women in STEM. |
RA tasks | Students working in my lab gain broad exposure to social-psychological theory and research methodology, with advanced students engaging in data analysis as well. I personally train lab members in literature review, experimental procedure, survey design, stimuli development, participant management, data preparation, and data analysis, as well as developing their skill in using software such as Qualtrics, Ztree, MediaLab/DirectRT, Microsoft Excel, and SPSS. |