New postdoc fellows working with Dr. Greer
Nipissing University welcomes two postdoctoral fellows to the Geography and History departments to work with Dr. Kirsten Greer, Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Global Environmental Histories and Geographies.
Dr. Katie Hemsworth joins Nipissing as Dr. Greer’s CRC Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Margôt Maddison-MacFadyen, who was Dr. Greer’s CRC Postdoctoral Fellow last year, returns for a two-year term as a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow.
Sonic historical geographies: Listening for soundprints and echoes of the past, involves engaging more deeply with sonic methods to interpret and learn from the past, while also considering the ethical and political challenges of such methods, like listening and recording, in different cultural contexts. In October 2017, she participated in the Challenging Canada 150 Symposium hosted by Dr. Greer at on the Anishinaabeg lands of the Nipissing people. Her talk, Soundings, urged fellow academics in the audience to open space for sound-based knowledges. On stage at the Capitol Centre, she asked participants to be more attentive to what she called the soundprints of settler colonialism by listening more deeply to cultural and environmental legacies of injustice. Recently, her research with Dr. Greer has included developing a sound archive for the Empire, Trees and Climate project, and examining the history of McGill University’s interdisciplinary research programs on the environment in Barbados. During her fellowship, she will continue to draw on her research into the connections between sonic methods and digital mapping to help develop the online portal for Nipissing’s Centre for Understanding Semi-Peripheries (CUSP).
Dr. Hemsworth has published in academic journals including Social & Cultural Geography, Historical Geography, Emotion, Space, and Society, and PUBLIC: A Journal for Imagining America (forthcoming). She recently returned to Canada after living in Atlanta, where she collaborated with an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Georgia State University as a content curator for ATL Maps, a community-driven digital mapping and storytelling platform.
Born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Dr. Hemsworth is especially excited to once again become part of a Northern Ontario university community.
Dr. Maddison-MacFadyen graduated from the Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Interdisciplinary PhD Program in 2017. Although she takes an historical-geographical approach to her current research, she is also grounded in the Literature and Education fields, and she is interested in the development of critical historical consciousness. Included in her work as Dr. Greer’s CRC Postdoctoral Fellow last year, Maddison-MacFadyen supported the Challenging Canada 150 Symposium, wrote content for Nipissing’s CUSP portal, and taught two history courses through Nipissing’s Blackboard Learn: HIST 3126 – Narratives of Colonial Slavery, and HIST 2026 – The British Slave Trade in the Atlantic. Maddison-MacFadyen also worked with Dr. Greer as co-editor of Past Place, the newsletter of the Historical Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. Through Dr. Greer’s Empire, Trees, Climate project, Maddison-MacFadyen met team member dendrochronologist Dr. Adam Csank who put an increment borer in her hands. As a result, she and Csank collaborated on two research projects involving heritage structures, one in Bermuda, the other in Prince Edward Island. Maddison-MacFadyen’s Banting Postdoctoral Research Project is titled, Mind the Onion Seed!: The Bermuda Onion, Slave Narratives, Plant Knowledge and Seventeenth- to Twentieth-Century Commerce in the Global North Atlantic. Using the famed Bermuda onion as a boundary object, she will investigate its cultivation in Bermuda and its transport from Bermuda to the West Indies and North American markets. Her study will highlight historic connections between these regions and will add to emerging studies of eco-cultural networks as a means of rethinking Empire.
Dr. Maddison-MacFadyen is published in both academic and cultural journals, including Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, the Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History, and the Newfoundland Quarterly. A paper she recently co-authored with Dr. Adam Csank about their Bermuda collaboration is to appear in Historical Geography’s 2019 issue.
British Columbian-born, Dr. Maddison-MacFadyen lived in the Turks and Caicos Islands for a number of years before making Prince Edward Island home. She is pleased to be an active member of Nipissing University’s academic community.