Presenter Bios
Freya Abbas (she/her)
Freya Abbas is a masters student in English at the University of Toronto. She is pursuing a collaborative program in South Asian studies. Her undergraduate degree was in English and linguistics. She is interested in the history of colonialism and exploration in the early modern period and how contact with the Indigenous languages of the Americas altered European thought. In addition to this, she is interested in postcolonial theory, ecocriticism and diasporic variations of English.
Deborah Barnett
Deborah Barnett is an independent typographic designer and letterpress printer in Toronto, the publisher and creative Director of Someone Editions. One of the founding members of Dreadnaught Press in the 1970s, Deborah has worked with literary works by Margaret Atwood, A.F. Moritz, and Nicole Brossard among many. She designs letterpress chapbook productions as explorations in material research, creating experiential learning environments, and providing authentic training in the book arts.
Miriam Borden (she/her)
Miriam Borden is a PhD candidate in Yiddish at Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, researching post-Holocaust Yiddish culture in America. BHPC and other book-centred projects include two library exhibitions of Yiddish books (Robarts, 2017 and 2018) a podcast about rescuing a forgotten midcentury Yiddish library, and an award-winning collection of Yiddish primers, basal readers, and other pedagogical material for children.
Isobel Carnegie (she/her)
Isobel Carnegie is a Masters of Information candidate and Digital Initiatives Graduate Student Library Assistant at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses are archives accessibility and outreach, and how archives are a site of self-discovery and storytelling. She holds a Master of English from Toronto Metropolitan University and an Honours BA from U of T in English and Sexual Diversity Studies.
Simon Franzen (he/him)
I have been a PhD Student at The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) in Tromsø since May 2023. Before starting my PhD project, I completed studies in Geography, History and Cartography. In my PhD project, I am researching the construction of spatial images of Northern Fennoscandia in the 16th and the 17th centuries. One focus of my project is the relationship and intertwining between early modern maps as primarily visual sources and textual evidence of spatial knowledge such as topographical descriptions.
Ferron Guerreiro (she/her)
Ferron Guerreiro is a first-year PhD student in English at the University of Toronto, with a focus on early modern literature. Her research interests include women’s drama and theatricality, early modern manuscript culture, and queer/feminist theory.
Xiao He (she/her)
Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Beijing Normal University, China (2010-2014). Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from Dalhousie University (2019-2021). Currently pursuing a second Master’s degree in the Department of East Asian Studies, focusing on Literati, texts, and literatures in the (late) Ming Dynasty.
Nayani Jensen (she/her)
Nayani Jensen is a PhD student at the IHPST (Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology) at the University of Toronto, where she researches the rise of climate science in the nineteenth century. She has a background in Mechanical Engineering, where she worked on climate research projects (BEng, Dalhousie University) and later received a Rhodes Scholarship and studied English Literature and the History of Science (BA, MSc, University of Oxford).
Josiah Lamb (she/her)
I’m in my first year for my PhD in English and I am part of the BHPC program. I study the early modern period and my research focuses on the relationship between early modern women and cryptography.
Fridtjof Leemhuis (he/him)
Fridtjof Leemhuis is a PhD fellow in the field of Antiquity and Early Christian Studies at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, in Oslo, Norway.
James Nowak
James Nowak is a poet, essayist, and book artist from Wellington County. He runs a small letterpress studio along the Eramosa River. His writing has appeared in Dark Mountain, and a selection of his poems won the 2022 Eden Mills Writers’ Festival poetry contest. His chapbook of erasure poems, Draw Me The Sky, is forthcoming from Vocamus Press, and a live performance of the poems will take place in February at U of T’s Festival of Original Theatre (FOOT) conference. @wordsandtheirmanyrobes
Carmen Oanea
My name is Carmen Oanea, and I am a second year PhD student at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. My field of inquiry is book history, with a focus on incunabula. Among others, I am interested in reading practices and collection building in early modern Europe. At the moment, I am undertaking a research year at Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, Germany, in the department of Book Studies. I have a BA in English Literature, with a focus on Old English poetry, an MA in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. I am also cataloguing the incunabula collection of the Romanian Academy Library of Cluj on Material Evidence in Incunabula. Since 2022, I am a member of the Centre for the History of the Books and Texts (CODEX), directed by Prof. Dr. Habil. Adrian Papahagi.
Risa de Rege (she/her)
Risa de Rege works in collections management at the music library at the University of Toronto, and recently finished her MI in the Faculty of Information’s book history and print culture program. Her main research interests in bibliography are material culture, codicology, and digital humanities. Past projects have included an exploration of self-taught book mending, an interactive digital edition of a medieval song manuscript, and a letterpress print lyric sheet for an American folk tune.
Simon Patrick Rogers (he/him)
Simon Patrick Rogers is the special collections archivist at the John M. Kelly Library. He has extensive experience processing, arranging, and appraising archival materials and as an archival consultant. He has also been active as a faculty instructor, teaching material bibliography for the Book and Media Studies program at the University of St. Michael’s College and is an alumnus of the Book History and Print Culture programme (BHPC) at Massey College. He is a co-founder of the community outreach project, Toronto Information Network for Independent Music Co-operative (TINI) and has published numerous articles on diverse topics including archives, municipal history and architecture, music, literature and the field of monetary appraisal.
Daniel Stermac-Stein
Daniel Stermac-Stein is a farmer, hide-tanner, leather-worker, and parchment-maker. He lives on a small farm in the rural Ottawa Valley, where he operates a small-scale natural tannery and sewing studio. Daniel teaches workshops in hide tanning and clothing making throughout Ontario. In 2023, he taught Jewish parchment making as the inaugural public event on his new farm. theherdshrone.ca
Rodrigo Lichtle Ventosa (he/him)
Rodrigo Lichtle Ventosa is a Ph.D. student in Spanish (Hispanic Literatures and Cultures) with a Specialization in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto. His research centers around experimentality in Latin America during the 21st and second half of the 20th Centuries.
P. J. Zaborowski (he/they)
P. J. Zaborowski studies medieval British literature and the History of the Book at the University of Iowa. His research explores how narrative theory and book studies can be combined to reveal how medieval readers engaged with texts. P.J.’s dissertation project focuses on the oft-overlooked figure of the messenger in fourteenth century literature from the British Archipelago and the myriad ways in which messengers shape and structure texts in this period. When not writing his dissertation, PJ can often be found puzzling over what Digital Humanities is and how to fit it into his research, or shouting at his students in Old English whenever they complain about having to read the “Old English” of Shakespeare and Jane Austen.
BHPC Student Colloquium 2024 