Research scholarship award winner of a
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
Canada Graduate Research Scholarship (Master’s)
In Spring 2025, I was the sole recipient at University of King’s College (Halifax, Nova Scotia) of a SSHRC CGRS-M scholarship worth $27,000 (December 2024 Competition), one of 1,323 graduate students to be awarded at universities across Canada. The funding goes toward the research I conduct as I write my MFA work-in-progress on preservation (of our planet and ourselves).
Part of my research concerns the role of photography in preservation and death, grief, memory, and memorialization. I am examining our planet’s preservatory prowess. Picturing Earth as a ‘Deep Time photo album’ that holds memories and offers the past up to us, sometimes because we are intent to seek it and other times, as a result of anthropogenic climate change.
Read more about my win in the Fall 2025 University of King’s College newsletter.
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My body was braille / for the creeping influences: / dawn suns groped over my head / and cooled at my feet / through my fabrics and skins / the seeps of winter / digested me, | Seamus Heaney, excerpt from The Bog Queen
In June 2024, I began a two-year, low-residency pursuit of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. I am writing a Science and Nature book on bogs, Iron Age Bog People, aging, dying, the ecology of death, and the sacred, with an overall theme about preservation, of ourselves and our planet. Having gone through long-time infertility struggle, I feel a kinship to bogs that are often described as ‘infertile’ or ‘barren’ environments. I am intimately familiar with the sting of such terminology. I am consequently drawn to fertility and infertility in both humans and environment and where they intersect in humans, the more-than-human, and our shared landscapes.
Above are some of the photographs I have made thus far during my research in Denmark, Ireland, at Canada’s only ‘body farm,’ the REST[ES] facility at UQTR in Québec, and since moving to Nova Scotia, where I currently reside.
For inquiries about my writing, my book, and ongoing research, please reach out.