The University of Toronto Excellence Awards (UTEA) provide undergraduate students with paid research fellowships with a faculty-led project for 14 full weeks during the summer term. Students gain direct research experience and learn investigative methodologies, providing them with the experience to consider career paths in research.
A SSHRC Undergraduate Student Research Award nurtures a student's interest in a research career and helps develop their potential. The research experience gained encourages the undertaking of graduate studies as it provides contextualized work experience that complements academic studies.
The variety of faculty projects and the diverse areas of study of these exceptional students bears testimony to the broad appeal of the humanities and the skills required to undertake research in its many facets.
University of Toronto Excellence Awards
Arina Asloian (Major in Political Science, Minors in Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations and European Affairs)
Research Title: "Yiddish Music and Holocaust Violence: History and Memory"
Supervisor Anna Shternshis
This project builds on an existing database of Soviet Yiddish Holocaust songs created in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation and collected between 1941 and 1947 (from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine).
These songs, recorded in the immediate aftermath of mass violence, represent one of the earliest cultural responses to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Crucially, the archival records preserve the names of performers and, in some cases, song creators. The proposed research seeks to trace the later trajectories of these individuals.
Petra Biddle-Gottesman (Major in Biochemistry, Minors in Immunology and Diaspora & Transnational Studies)
Research Title: "Histories of Orthodoxy"
Supervisor Naomi Seidman
Histories of Orthodoxy is a Partnership Grant with five partners currently, each of which has a dgital humanities project involving Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism in the twentieth century.
The Partnership Grant is being spent mostly on a technical team working on integrating these datasets to allow for research across projects. Petra will primarily work on the shared HOP website, particularly in its design component.
This will involve finding visual elements for the site, including photographs of girls and women from interwar Poland available in various digital and physical archives, and acquiring permissions for their use. Her participation follows a year working on a project on Bais Yaakov, an Orthodox girls’ school system that was founded in Poland in 1917 and continues today with hundreds of schools across the world.
Annika Kohli (Specialist in Health and Disease) and Biinizi Smith (Major in History, Minors in Indigenous Studies and Religion)
Research Title: "Crafting Memory: Mounds & Jingle Dresses in Treaty #3 Territory"
Supervisor Pamela Klassen
This project is based on ongoing community-engaged research for the Mounds & Memory project in cooperation with Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, named a “National Historic Site” in 1969, as well as a new project on the history of the “Shiibaashka’igan—the Jingle Dress” at Naotkamegwanning First Nation, which was named a National Historic Event in 2023. Both First Nations are located in Treaty #3 Territory (northwestern Ontario).
Annika will focus on the history of archaeology at Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung and Biinizi will focus on the history of Shiibaashka’igan in Naotkamegwanning and the wider Treaty #3 Territory.
Nathaly Sanchez (Majors in History of Religions and Diaspora & Transnational Studies)
Research Title: "Garage Archives"
Supervisor Kevin Lewis O'Neill.
Research on clerical sexual abuse suffers from a lack of primary sources. As a result, investigative journalism has largely shaped the field. This work has been indispensable in establishing a public record of abuse and institutional response, yet journalistic inquiry necessarily bends towards disclosure rather than sustained analysis. A new era of scholarly inquiry has become possible through the bankruptcy proceedings of forty-one Roman Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the United States and Canada. These proceedings have generated expansive collections of materials, including legal documents, survivor testimonies, internal Church communications, and extensive priest personnel files. Yet legal teams typically warehouse these materials once they reach a settlement, storing these materials in garages, basements, and self-storage units. I refer to these collections as “garage archives.” Produced through litigation rather than research, they now constitute the largest and most detailed body of primary source material on clerical sexual abuse in the world.
Nathaly will support the examination and systematization of materials in three garage archives, network currently uncoordinated garage archives, and establish best practices for accessing such future archives.
SSHRC Undergraduate Student Research Award
Arista Arhin (Specialist in Psychology, Major in Diaspora & Transnational Studies)
Research Title: "Servants of the Paraclete"
Supervisor Kevin Lewis O'Neill.
The Archdiocese of Santa Fe in New Mexico filed for bankruptcy in 2018. The reason is clerical sexual abuse. The archdiocese eventually settled with survivors in 2022 not only for millions of dollars but also for an unprecedented non-monetary agreement. The archdiocese must hand over its "abuse files" to the University of New Mexico. This archive includes a vast array of source materials, spanning legal documents, survivor testimonies, internal Church communications, and extensive priest personnel files. These materials signal the emergence of a new kind of archive that is vital to holding the Church fully accountable for its crimes—in every diocese whose future settlement includes a mandate to hand over its abuse files to a public research university. In response to the urgent research opportunities presented by these first-of-their-kind archives, and in anticipation of a growing number of future similar archives, this research will undertake a systematic assessment of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe's abuse files. Arista will support the examination and systematization of the archival materials, including a full assessment of the materials. This will help categorize the archive's vast holdings, ensuring that legal documents, survivor testimonies, and Church records are properly organized and accessible to researchers and the public.