Humanities at Large

What happens when an oil company builds not just an industry, but an entire community? Historian Luis van Isschot traces the rise of Standard Oil's company towns in Colombia and Peru, where coveted jobs, housing and social services came with tight corporate control over everyday life. His research explores the workers and communities who challenged that power, and the lasting connections between oil extraction, inequality, violence and environmental harm. Luis was a 2025-26 JHI Faculty Research Fellow.

How can music give voice to a history that has been denied? Pianist and composer Eve Egoyan explores this question through In Stone, a deeply personal work shaped by her family's connection to the Armenian Genocide. Blending piano, her own voice and AI-generated sound, Egoyan turns to music to confront silence, memory and denial, and to imagine nature itself as a witness to history. Eve was the JHI's 2025-26 Artist in Residence. Watch Eve's performance of In Stone on YouTube.

Seeing a place through someone else's lens can shape how we imagine it. In this final episode of Series 2, photographer Tamara Abdul Hadi revisits the Iraqi Marshes, layering her own images, family archives, and crowdsourced photographs over a colonial-era photo book that once defined the region in the global imagination. Her project develops a decolonial vision of a landscape central to Iraq's cultural identity and to her own. Tamara was the JHI's 2024-25 Artist in Residence. View some of Tamara's photos on the Doris McCarthy Gallery website. 

Talking about death is never easy, but how we handle it says a lot about how we live. Chris Miller examines the rise of natural burials, from simple shrouds to human composting, and what these eco-friendly practices reveal about our relationship with death and nature. His work invites us to see endings as part of a wider cycle of life. Chris was our 2024-25 CDHI/JHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow.

Julien Lefort-Favreau explores print nationalism, the government-funded system that keeps Canadian publishing alive, and the new pressures it faces from neoliberalism, Amazon, and algorithm-driven culture. His research considers why literature remains central to Canada's public life and how publishing connects to democracy, freedom of speech, and the idea of culture as a public good. Julien was the JHI's 2024-25 Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow.