Faculty of Humanities and Social Science
Researchers in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science are well positioned for interdisciplinary and collaborative research.
Dr. John-Paul Chalykoff
Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages
John-Paul Chalykoff (Michipicoten First Nation) is an Associate Professor of Anishinaabe Studies at Algoma University / Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig. His research focuses on Ojibwe language revitalization, which integrates language, music, education, and puppetry. Through the writing of new and original Ojibwe children’s songs, he integrates language learning, music, and education. The puppetry introduces a visual medium for these songs, as well as a performance aspect. He also works in other language revitalization projects, such as local language documentation in the Algoma region, and Indigenous auto-ethnography based research.
Dr. Suleyman Demi
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work
Suleyman M. Demi is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, Algoma University, Timmins Campus. Suleyman is an educator, researcher and environmental activist who has dedicated his work to addressing issues affecting society's marginalized population. Before his appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Suleyman was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a Senior Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Africa Studies of the New College of the University of Toronto, where he contributed to the departments' work. His research interest is multidisciplinary, stemming from Social and environmental justice, Indigenous health and sustainable food systems, food sovereignty, health equity and social determinants of health. His current research critically explores the health equity challenges of Black healthcare providers and users in the Greater Toronto Area.
Dr. Andree-Ann Deschenes
Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and Music
Through her extensive discography and performance schedule across North America, Dr. Andree-Ann Deschenes is recognized as one of the foremost advocates of the Latin American piano repertoire. For her efforts, The Whole Note celebrates her as a “very gifted pianist” with “a tremendous amount of energy, humour and astonishing talent”.
Further recognition has come for her most recent album, The Ovalle Project (2018), a comprehensive two-disc record that revives the work of late Brazilian composer Jayme Ovalle—as of now the only commercially available recording of his piano works. In reviewing the album, Classical Post called Deschenes “the perfect person to take on [Ovalle’s music] and bring life back into his works,” while Mainly Piano remarked that “the variety in the moods, intensity and tonal colors is vast [in The Ovalle Project], and Ms. Deschenes has taken the time and attention as well as research to get inside of the music.”
Most recently, Dr. Deschenes has commissioned seven Brazilian and Jazz pianists to write concert pieces for a new album project to be recorded in June 2023.
Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge)
Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages
Mkomose (Dr. Andrew Judge) is Assistant Professor of Anishinaabe Studies at Algoma University. He has Lectured at Sir Wilfrid Laurier University, The University of Waterloo, and Coordinated Indigenous studies at Conestoga College where he established a network of Indigenous leaders to restore land. Mkomose specializes in Anishinaabe cultural knowledge, ethno-medicine, and land-based learning.
Mkomose has learned from, worked and consulted with, and served Indigenous Elders and community leaders for over a decade. He has founded several community-led Indigenous knowledge based programs at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels and works tirelessly to promote Indigenous land-based sustainability practices.
Robin Isard
eServices Librarian, Arthur Wishart Library
Robin started his library career working at the Washington DC public library as Head of Intranet Development. Following that, he lived for many years overseas, primarily in West Africa building IT infrastructure in The Republic of the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau and Guinea Conakry. He also worked in Ethiopia and Uganda on telehealth projects for The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada.
Currently, Robin is the systems librarian at Algoma University where he works primarily with open source technologies to investigate the development of distributed knowledge systems and the application of library and archival standards of metadata to scholarly research materials. The latter is exemplified by his work on the SSHRC funded George Whalley project with Dr. Michael DiSanto. Before working on the George Whalley project, Robin was a contributor and project manager for Project Conifer, one of the largest implementations of open source software in the academic world. Robin is currently developing a JAM stack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup) app to allow small archives to catalogue their collections using linked data. He’s a contributor to Opensource.com.
Email: robin.isard@algomau.ca
Dr. Nathan Murray
Assistant Professor in the Department of English and History
Nathan Murray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and History. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto, and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He has published articles on British and Canadian Literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Dr. Murray has recently circulated his research on writing pedagogy at international conferences dedicated to composition and communication, including the Conference for College Composition and Communication. Drawing on his experience teaching Algoma's students, he has shared research on effective methods for supporting international student writing. He is currently at work on a book-length study of J.R.R. Tolkien, Agatha Christie and other popular mid-century British novelists who resisted the attention of critics who wanted to analyze hidden meanings in their work. The book examines the ways in which these authors attempted to direct the reader’s attention exclusively to the ‘surface’ of the work.
Dr. Dionisio Nyaga
Assistant Professor in the department of Social Work
Dr. Dionisio Nyaga has a Ph.D from Social Justice Education/SESE/University of Toronto. He is an Assistant Professor at Algoma University-School of Social Work-Timmins campus. His research practice and teaching interests are in the areas of ethical and moral philosophy in research, critical reflexive methodologies, Afro-pessimism, gender studies, anti-oppressive practice and teaching, psychic methodologies of care,textual analysis , African studies ,Black and Blackness, Black masculinities, spiritualities, transnational and transcultural studies. He has co-edited a book on ethical responsibilities and duties of researcher dubbed Critical research methodologies: Ethics and responsibilities.
Presentation: Effects of Covid 19 Among Black African Homeless
Email: dionisio.nyaga@algomau.ca
Andrea Pinheiro
Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts and Music Department
Dr. Pinheiro’s work is distilled from the experience of place and is intertwined with consideration of the long and complex histories of land, objects, and materials. Referencing historical events, significant sites, often those impacted by the nuclear industry, or other artworks, the images, and materials in her work become vessels that record her interactions; gestures that oscillate between creative and destructive processes of transformation. She collects and works with clay from the river near her home in Searchmont, Ontario. Dr. Pinheiro makes burnished pinch pots and wheel thrown pots that I pit-fire and then give away. She borrows the clay from the land, gives it away freely, to others or to the earth. She is currently developing temporary sculptures that become soil amendments after they are buried in the earth. As her practice becomes increasingly oriented around her relationship with land, she is integrating these new elements into her ongoing work with photography, films, installations, painting, and sculpture. As she documents her processes she often works over those images with paint, clay, and found materials before scanning and enlarging the images for final output as prints or time-based work.
Pinheiro has completed several residencies, including at the Banff Centre for the Arts and a curatorial residency at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver. Pinheiro has received multiple research grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Presentation - Ecological and Land-based Research in Studio Art Courses
Email: andrea.pinheiro@algomau.ca
Website: www.andreapinheiro.ca/ and www.coopercolegallery.com/artist/andrea-pinheiro/
Dr. Rose Torres
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work
Dr. Rose Ann Torres is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the School of Social
Work at Algoma University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education from OISE/University of Toronto. Prior to joining Algoma University, she was an Assistant Professor at University of New Brunswick. She has been a Lecturer in the MSW program at Wilfrid Laurier University and in the BSW program at Toronto Metropolitan University. She was also a Lecturer in the Master’s and Ph.D. programs in the Social Justice Education Department, OISE/University of Toronto. She is the principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Development Grants research project entitled “Examining Access to Mental Health Care Service: The Impact of COVID-19 on Filipino Health Care Workers in Northern Ontario” and co-principal investigator of the SSHRC Institutional Grants project titled “Effects of COVID-19 on Teaching and Learning: Stories of Indigenous and Black and Asian Faculty Members and Students at Algoma University.” Dr. Torres has published her work in co-edited books, peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, keynote speaking, conference presentations, webinars, workshops, and media commentaries. She currently serves as an Advisory Board Member for Sault College and First Nations Technical Institute. She has been instrumental in establishing pathways and partnerships with local and international universities and colleges in the School of Social Work at Algoma University. Dr. Torres’s work as an educator includes community engagement and organizing, as well as consultancy services in interdisciplinary research that crosses geographic borders with Asia, Canada, Africa, and other countries. Dr. Torres’s commitment to the community seeks to bring about transformative change and critical development in terms of health and social well-being, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability. At Algoma University, she teaches critical policy in the north, social work research, social work philosophy and ethics, critical social work practice: Anishinaabe, structural and feminist perspectives.
Dr. Jodi Webber
Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work
Northern Ontario is aging faster than anywhere in the province. The demographic imperative brings with it unique challenges for families and health systems alike. I have spent my career as a social worker with older adults across the healthcare continuum and my research program has grown out of those experiences and the needs of the communities we serve.
I am an early career qualitative researcher. My PhD is from Queen’s University in Aging & Health. It is important to me to be a part of a wider team that showcases the strengths of our community partners and the talents of our Algoma University students. I am particularly interested in the experiences of unpaid family and friend caregivers to older adults in rural and remote communities, health human resources and infrastructure planning and the moral distress experiences of community based health and social care workers. I am also passionate about innovation in teaching and learning and have been collaborating with the Algoma Teaching and Learning Centre team to design active and interactive pedagogy aligned with our Special Mission and current academic challenges.
Dr. Tony Robinson-Smith
Assistant Professor in the Department of English and History
Tony Robinson-Smith teaches academic and creative writing to students at Algoma University. The appointment is the latest in a professional career of teaching English language and literature at university spanning twenty years. He spent two years teaching eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature at the Royal University of Bhutan in the Himalayas, three years teaching English for Academic Purposes to international learners at Nottingham Trent University in England, and fourteen years teaching writing (academic, technical, and creative) at the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University here in Canada. Tony also spent six years teaching general and business English to adult learners in Japan.
Tony’s research relates to non-fiction travel writing. He is the author of two travel memoirs, Back in 6 Years (Goose Lane Editions, 2008) about his journey in the 1990s around the earth without using aircraft, and The Dragon Run (University of Alberta Press, 2017) about his 578km ultramarathon across Bhutan. The latter gained an honorable mention at the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award: Adventure & Recreation (Adult Non-Fiction) in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2018. He is currently writing a third travel memoir about the voyage by dug-out canoe he and his wife undertook on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea in 2018. It will be published by University of Alberta Press in 2024. Tony has written travel sketches for The Globe and Mail and is a regular contributor of articles to the American online travel magazine Perceptive Travel. Tony has also published short fiction in The Fiddlehead and The Nashwaak Review.