CSUS 2024-2025 Award Recipient Announcement
The Centre for the Study of the United States is pleased to announce our two Bissell-Heyd fellows for 2024-25, Professors Melissa Gniadek and Amanda Sheely.
Professor Gniadek is a member of the Department of English whose primary appointment is at UTM (University of Toronto Mississauga). Her project, “Melville and Hawthorne ReWritten,” will bring an innovative performance project to the University of Toronto. This project explores the homoerotic relationship between writers Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Through multiple performances and community engagements, ReWritten will weave together dance, music, visual art, projection, and text, as it reimagines a queer love story that extends the LGBTQ2A+ archive.
Professor Sheely is a sociologist based at UTM. Her project, “Social Control, The State, and U.S Families,” will provide several forums to explore the overlapping histories of how various welfare systems in the U.S.A. — the welfare, child welfare, criminal justice and immigration — have exerted social control over economically disadvantaged families. This interdisciplinary project aims to bring together, and facilitate dialogue between, scholars with expertise in different policy areas. By creating a space where scholars can discuss how these different systems operate, as well as how they shape family outcomes, the project seeks to find areas of overlap and disjuncture between them.
This year the Faculty Research Award went to Professor Alejandra González Jiménez who holds appointments at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. Her project, “The Automotive City: Fragments of Free Trade,” examines Mexico’s car economy to critically interrogate the contradictions and dissonances constituting the North American geo-economic region. Asking how U.S.A. economic hegemony reinscribes itself by way of free trade, she focuses an ethnographic lens on Volkswagen Mexico, the German transnational car corporation located in Puebla, Mexico.
The Graduate Research Grant for this year went to Kayla Preston from the Department of Sociology, researching “An Analysis of Far-Right Youth Activists in Canada and the
United States” and Anna Renken from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, researching “Ecological Interventions: Design with Environmental Science and Technology in Late Twentieth-Century North America”.
The Centre for the Study of the United States is also pleased to announce four inaugural fellows in our new partnership with the Northrop Frye Centre. The first two graduate fellows are Lilika Kukiela from the Department of English and Chris Pihlak from the Department of History. The inaugural undergraduate fellows are Noah Sokoloff and Joy Xu.
For more details on CSUS awards and grants, please visit our websites dedicated to student and faculty awards.
