Internal research competitions

Dr. Bednarski is co-authoring a book with Dr. Christian Lloyd at Queen’s University on the history of Herstmonceux Castle in England, to be published with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Dr. Stumpf is publishing a book with Peter Lang Publishers based on his theology dissertation.

Read Tristanne Connolly's edit of Darwin's The Loves of the Plants

Dr. Wriglesworth is currently editing a book of selected letters between Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison that will be published with University of Michigan Press. 

This seed funding will allow me to prepare an external research grant application that begins a multi-year transnational project on the history of salt in England. I am in the early stages of assembling a preliminary research partnership to examine the physical and archival evidence and to produce an interdisciplinary environmental history of the most important mineral refined and consumed by human beings across time. To date, no such history exists.

Canadian academia is facing unprecedented challenges, from eroded provincial funding to public doxing of scholars to the rising power of corporate consultants. The situation has been described as ‘existential’ (Brean, 2025), yet faculty have largely refrained from attempting to deepen public understanding of this crisis. There is a vast body of scholarly research on these challenges that has not been mobilized for a broader audience. And, when these issues are raised, public understanding is hindered by the opacity of academia's basic principles.

This project seeks to build faculty capacity to share knowledge about academia. It will develop a model for synthesizing and translating scholarly research about universities into public-facing educational materials. The project involves organizing three participatory workshops, each on a major issue facing the sector, and a suite of public-facing resources on each issue. Together, the workshops will build a resource hub, along with interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral connections between faculty, other university stakeholders, and civil society actors. Aggregating faculty knowledge about these issues will allow faculty to develop collective research agendas and new research partnerships. The collective knowledge mobilization model developed will be the subject of two journal articles, two conference presentations, and two non-academic articles. This FRG will hopefully complement a SSHRC Connection Grant but can also stand alone.

Blake Sees Jesus is the first collection of essays on Jesus in Blake’s visual art. Edited by Tristanne Connolly and Helen P. Bruder, it is expected to be published by Bloomsbury in 2027. It brings together two of the most essential things about William Blake: he was a visionary artist and he revered divinity in human form. For Blake, Christianity and Art were synonymous. Jesus is a pervasive figure throughout Blake’s visual art, from early to late, and spanning all of the forms and media he worked in. We have invited twelve Blake scholars, in addition to ourselves, to write chapters centred on one main image or group of images. Arranged chronologically, they extend through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The contents explore the significance of seeing, both in the practice of art and the experience of faith, and particularly in the distinctive and intensive demands Blake’s art makes on its viewers to arouse visionary imagination. The title also insists, as Blake often did, on a human Jesus over an abstracted, orthodox Christ. Blake Sees Jesus takes a deep and detailed look at what makes Blake one of the greatest artists to critique and champion Christianity.

Drawing has long been used to enhance a number of developmental skills in young children. It has also been re-introduced with seniors and again individuals in retirement homes and long-term care. With both developmental periods, there is evidence that it enhances mental health and well-being. Between childhood and the declining years, drawing is not encouraged unless in school art classes or an individual pursues fine arts. We hypothesize that drawing through the lifespan could be implemented in all contexts as an easy and low-cost prevention strategy for mental health and well-being challenges. Using a convergent mixed methods randomized control design, this study will test our hypothesis that drawing is beneficial for enhancing mental health and well-being. In addition, we will explore:

1. Perceptions of what happens emotionally, physically, and socially in the act of drawing.
2. The meaning that is generated through the process of drawing.
3. The relationship between the act of drawing and well-being.
4. The questions and stories that emerge during the act of drawing.

In 2016, I published a metasynthesis of qualitative studies on non-couple sexual relationship (NCSR) experiences, commonly known under the colloquial umbrella terms of “casual” sex and “hooking up”; the first on the topic (Rodrigue & Fernet, 2016). Qualitative metasynthesis is a systematic review method that involves integrating the findings of numerous qualitative studies on a given topic to construct a bigger-picture or critical understanding of it. Since the publication of this metasynthesis, qualitative studies on NCSR experiences have widely expanded not only in number, but also in the breadth of topics and populations they cover. To explore how qualitative scholarship on the topic has evolved in the last decade, I am conducting a second metasynthesis of studies published between July 2015 and July 2025. This project will allow for a decadal update on the new knowledge that has been constructed on NCSR experiences and to identify promising directions for future qualitative research.

I have conducted preliminary analyses on a sample of 20 studies collected in March 2023 and presented the findings at a scientific conference in 2024. I plan on completing the analysis with the full sample of 37 studies and publishing the findings in a scientific article in 2027.

Three and a half years into our five-year SSHRC Insight Grant project (funded in April 2022), the end is coming into view. We initially envisioned a small number of papers but as the research progressed we found that several additional papers had to be written to fully express our results. This FRG application seeks funding to support unanticipated costs related to the project, including funds for additional student wages and funds to cover open access fees required to meet best practice of making SSHRC-funded research results broadly available.

This project focuses on capturing the history of the students, faculty, and alumni of St. Jerome’s College during the First World War. Using war records, newspapers, student newspapers, and other primary documents, the researcher intends to create a repository that showcases the rich history of members of our community who served in the First World War.

I am seeking seed funding to help prepare a SSHRC Connection grant aimed at hosting a three-day workshop and open-access tool: the Conference and Ontology on Restoration Ecology (CORE). The workshop will establish the ontology to deal with the influx of big data across a number of identified academic disciplines.

Canada, like other nations, is taking significant steps to address the global biodiversity crisis. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework commits to placing thirty per cent of federal lands under active restoration by 2030. Despite these important measures, evidence of ecosystem restoration remains locked away in peer-reviewed scholarly publications, or, worse, hidden in the filing cabinets of consultants and not-for-profit agencies. The research exists, but  it is difficult to access. This poses an acute challenge for restoration and conservation within the social sciences, fields of research that involve interfacing with policymakers and community members about natural environments. With more than 75% of land areas classified as severely degraded by the UN, this work has never been more urgent.

CORE brings together an interdisciplinary group of environmental historians, historical ecologists, restoration ecologists, and conservation practitioners and researchers to shape a cohesive knowledge base that will underpin open data in the field and bridge restoration and conservation social science and ecological science. This Connection project bring forth a truly trans-disciplinary effort that will result in an output capable of connecting currently siloed deposits of ecological knowledge.

University students in Canada are experiencing a mental health crisis, with increased reports of psychological distress, mental illness, and poor well-being (Linden et al., 2021; Moghimi et al., 2023). One approach to addressing mental health challenges is through the implementation of peer support programs. Prior studies have demonstrated that participation in peer support programs is associated with increased mental health and well-being (Drysdale et al., 2022; Richard et al., 2022). However, there are limitations of structured peer support programs, especially when being targeted at student populations. University students often experience competing demands with respect to their time, meaning that they struggle to commit to consistently attending programs over a prolonged period of time (Sprung & Rogers, 2021). As a result, their ability to experience the full benefits of these evidence-based programs is not guaranteed (Byrom, 2018).

Given the limitations of structured peer-support programs, the current mixed methods study is designed to investigate the efficacy of an unstructured drop-in peer support program for university students’ mental health and well-being.

This project is the first phase of a new direction in my research. My lived experience providing labour-intensive eldercare has prompted an interest in caregiving, particularly the care involved for people living with dementia. As I have taken initial steps toward developing a research agenda in this area, I have determined two key areas of focus:

1. Care narratives. I have begun researching narratives of eldercare, primarily memoir and autofiction. I have prior research experience in the field of autobiography, and I have published work on medieval life writing, so this direction has felt like a natural outgrowth of my work on language, rhetoric, and narrative.
2. Care futures. Dementia is a much-feared diagnosis, and the number of people living with dementia is increasing as the global population ages. Many experts predict a care deficit in years to come, and even now, infrastructures of care are often inadequate or inaccessible (the COVID-19 pandemic both exposed and exacerbated these gaps). I’ve been given an opportunity to collaborate with interdisciplinary researchers on the future of dementia care, and my role as a humanities scholar and a caregiver equips me with a unique perspective and capacity to contribute.

Using an existing data set, I will produce a manuscript to submit for publication in a scholarly journal describing a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of the Perceptions of Sex Offenders (PSO) scale (Harper & Hogue, 2016). This instrument is thought to have three subscales:

• [1] Sentencing & Management - how society should deal with those who offend sexually;
• [2] Stereotype Endorsement - beliefs about the kind of person who offends sexually; and
• [3] Risk perception - ideas about danger (or lack thereof) posed by sex offenders).

CFA will indicate whether the aforementioned data set fits this three-factor model. Further scale validation information will be provided by calculating correlations between PSO total score and the 3 PSO subscales with restorative justice principles and other relevant constructs, as well as presenting internal consistency and descriptive statistics. Validation of standardized instruments is crucial for development of a solid body of research. Given that the PSO is gaining popularity in the scholarly investigation of attitudes toward people who offend sexually, psychometric analysis is warranted.