meet the team
Principal Investigator
Zoë Druick
Zoë Druick is a Professor in the School of Communication at SFU. Her research considers histories, theories and trajectories of documentary and reality-based media with an emphasis on their intersection with biopolitical projects. Her single-authored books include Projecting Canada and A Married Couple, and her co-edited books include Programming Reality, The Grierson Effect, & Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema and New Screen Histories in Canada. As Principal Investigator on this project, Dr. Druick's work involves research into how cybernetic logics permeated Canadian educational television initiatves in the 1960s as well as countercultural media art networks.
Zoë DRUICK'S LOCAL NETWORK:
Research Assistant
Alonso Melgar
Alonso is an MA student in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on how museums utilize media to conceptualize national culture and how their economic and political motives influence this. Other areas of interest include critical race studies, gender studies, and labor within the music industry.
Co-Investigator
Andrew Burke
Andrew Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg. His book, Hinterland Remixed: Media, Memory, and the Canadian 1970s, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2019. His work on the Distributed Networks project involves examining how uses of educational television in Canada signal towards processes of postwar modernization. Focusing specifically on the subgenre of the university promotional film in Canada, his contributions work to reveal the role of such films in creating and consolidating the idea and image of the modern institution.
Co-Investigator
Michael Darroch
Michael Darroch is Associate Dean, Academic and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University. His SSHRC-funded research projects on histories of arts and media education played a critical role in re-issuing the landmark interdisciplinary media studies journal Explorations (1953-59) co-edited by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Dr. Darroch's recent research engages with histories of Toronto School communication and media studies, urban media cultures, and borderlands visual cultures.
Michael Darroch's Local Network
Research Assistant
Jack O'Dwyer
Jack O’Dwyer is a fourth-year PhD student in Cinema & Media studies at York University,
Toronto. He received a BA and an MA in Film Studies from University College Cork,
Ireland. He has recently presented his research at Lancaster University, Dalhousie University,
and the University of Chicago. He has published in the journals EuropeNow and Mediapolis,
while an Oxford Bibliographies page is forthcoming. His research interests include cinematic duration, digital
cinema, diary films, cognitive film theory, trash cinema, experimental film, cinema and memory,
and cinephilia. His current primary object of study is one-shot filmmaking.
Co-Investigator
Ira Wagman
Ira Wagman is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Carleton University. He is primarily interested in the history of television and its intersection with communication policy, media history, and the history of communication studies. Dr. Wagman's work on the Distributed Networks project includes examining the connection of educational media to religion, especially in relation to postwar social changes in Quebec and the changing positions of the Catholic Church on questions of media and communication.
Collaborator
Mark Hayward
Mark Hayward is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at York University. He focuses on on diasporic broadcast media, economic discourses in pop-culture and philosophical approaches to technologies. He is the author of Identity and Industry: Making Media Multicultural in Canada (McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 2019).
Collaborator
Jennifer VanderBurgh
Jennifer VanderBurgh is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, where she teaches courses on film, television, media and cultural memory, and is undergraduate coordinator of the Atlantic Canada Studies and Film Studies programs. Her work on the Distributed Networks project is to excavate the early history of the use of television in Nova Scotia classrooms - the first use of educational television in Canada.
Collaborator
Liam Young
Liam Young is an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. His areas of research include media theory, infrastructure studies, philosophies of technology and information, and critical internet studies. Dr. Young is the author of List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). His work on the Distributed Networks project involves researching Canada's Telidon project, a teletext service built upon existing TV networks, protocols, and devices during the later postwar period.