The Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS) has announced the recipients of four inaugural postdoctoral fellowships. Fellows receive a funded, one-year postdoctoral research position to conduct their proposed research project under the guidance of a faculty supervisor. Fellows will receive $50,000 over the next academic year.
JJ McMurtry
“I’m thrilled to congratulate our inaugural postdoctoral fellows for their successful applications,” said J.J. McMurtry, dean of LA&PS. “These fellowships give researchers the opportunity to further pursue their academic interests with experts in the field and enhances the outstanding research being done in LA&PS.”
The fellowship program was a faculty-wide competition and linked ongoing work at LA&PS to address anti-Black racism. The projects cover a wide spectrum of disciplines.
Teddy Atim is a visiting fellow at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University. She will work with supervisor Annie Bunting, an associate professor in the Law & Society program. Bunting is also the project director for the Conjugal Slavery in War (CSiW) Partnership, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Grant. Atim’s project is titled, “The legacies for wartime sexual violence in northern Uganda: Social reintegration of women survivors and children born of war in northern Uganda.” Her project will examine the contextual factors that shape and influence war-time sexual violence, and women’s agency to overcome their wartime experiences.
Lance Balthazar is an adjunct professor in the Department of Philosophy at Austin Community College. He will work with supervisors Jacob Beck and Kevin Lande in the Department of Philosophy, on a project titled, “How Things Look and Why They Look That Way: Investigations in Vision at the Empirical-Philosophical Intersection.” Balthazar’s research falls under two themes: investigating the ways things look and investigating the psychophysics and visual processing which produce the looks of things.
Blair Fix is a political economist based in Toronto. His research focuses on how energy use and income inequality relate to social hierarchy. He will work with supervisor Jonathan Nitzan in the Department of Politics on a project called, “Does Hierarchy Drive Income Inequality?” His work will examine how hierarchy relates to the growth of inequality. By studying how growing income inequality relates to the hierarchical structure within firms, Fix looks to illuminate new ways to combat inequality.
Lauren Nareau is a doctoral student and current fellow and researcher at Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA). Working under the supervision of Natasha Myers in the anthropology department, her project is titled, “Cultivating Energy, Sowing Empire: making biofuels out of colonial legacies.” Using an abolitionist framework and anticolonial methods that are reshaping anthropological theory and practice, her research seeks to create a community-led, collaborative project that opens constructive dialogue about prison labour and the plant Marabú to understand how Afro-Cuban communities are staging new relationships with plants for a new future.
“Postdoctoral training is a crucial stage in researchers’ development and many full-time faculty have benefited from having fellowships during this stage,” said Ravi de Costa, associate dean, Research and Graduate Studies, LA&PS. “However, York has not regularly been able to offer an internal fellowships program so it is fantastic that we were able to launch LA&PS postdoctoral fellowships this past year.”