Dr. Paul Barrett
Paul is an Assistant Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. In addition to his research on Canada Reads, Paul studies the digital humanities and contemporary Canadian literature. He is currently completing a project that uses digital tools to analyze Austin Clarke’s extensive literary archive.
Paul has published extensively on digital humanities, including a recent article in Canadian Literature that places the field in its context with respect to Canadian literary study. Paul is the author of Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and the forthcoming ‘Memberin Austin Clarke (Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2020).
Dr. Sarah Roger
Sarah is the project manager for the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) project at the University of Guelph and an adjunct assistant professor in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster. Previously, she was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at McMaster, a visiting research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and a college lecturer and Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.
Sarah’s research traces how books travel through the literary marketplace. She has taught courses on Canadian literature and cultural concepts of reading, and she has published on the intersection of reading and personal and cultural identity. She is the author of Borges and Kafka: Sons and Writers (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Kiera Obbard
Kiera Obbard is a Ph.D. student in Literary Studies at the University of Guelph. Her current project, The Instagram Effect: Contemporary Canadian Poetry Online examines the complex social, cultural, technological and economic conditions that have enabled the success of social media poetry in Canadian publishing, how the technological affordances of social media platforms mediate reading and writing, and the relationship between social media poetry and data mining practices.
She is a fellow at The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab, an editorial board member of the Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies and WaterHill Publishing, and she works full-time at a technology company in Waterloo.