Team

Dr. Leith Davis (she, her) is a Professor in the Department of English and the Director of the Research Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is a co-founder of the Department of English's MA with Specialization in Print Culture. Her areas of specialization include:

She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707-1832 (Stanford UP, 1998); Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish Identity, 1724-1874 (U of Notre Dame Press, 2005); and Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising (Cambridge UP, 2022) as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 2004); Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012); The International Companion to the Scottish Literatures of the Long Eighteenth Century (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2021); and Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present: Memory, Culture, Networks. She is also the PI of the Digital Humanities project Reconstructing Early Circus: Entertainments at Astley's Amphitheatre, 1768-1833.

Joey Takeda is a Developer in the DHIL, specializing in text encoding and digital editions, digital project preservation and sustainability, minimal computing, and digital exhibits. He holds an MLIS from the University of Alberta and an MA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. He is an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Technical Council (2023–2026) and sits on the TEI By Example International Advisory Committee and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Technical Advisory Committee.

Genevieve is a PhD student in the English Department at Texas A&M University. She received her Master of Arts in English with a specialization in print culture from Simon Fraser University and her Master of Science in Digital Scholarship from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include English Renaissance drama, eighteenth-century British book trades, cultural memory, copyright history, and digital humanities.

Shauna Judith Irani recently earned her Master’s in English, specializing in Print Culture, from Simon Fraser University. She is a Research Assistant on The Embodied Humanities Project and The Lyon in Mourning Project, both led by Dr. Leith Davis. Her research focuses on trauma literature, exploring the intersections of narrative, memory, and humour. Shauna was featured on BBC Scotland in a segment highlighting Edward (Ned) Burke, an unsung hero in Scottish history.

She has presented her work on Ned Burke and The Lyon in Mourning at conferences and events across Canada and the UK, including the SFU Digital Humanities Innovation Lab’s “How Do You DH?” roundtable; the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Montreal; the “Networking Jacobites, 1688 to the Present” conference at the University of Guelph; and at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Humanities at Edinburgh University. She also served as a keynote speaker at the 8th Annual SFU Retirees Symposium and has spoken at community events, including ScotFest BC in 2022 and 2023.

Shauna’s publications include contributions to the International Review of Scottish Studies and a book chapter in Shaping Jacobitism: Memory, Culture, Networks (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), focusing on trauma, narrative, and digital humanities methodologies applied to historical texts.

Kaitlyn MacInnis completed her MA in History at SFU in 2019, and is currently working on her PhD in History. Her research will turn from human to non-human animal history, centering the experiences of sheep in the Highland Clearances.

Abigail Streifel is currently pursuing a BA at Simon Fraser University. She is studying English and political science.

Julianna Wagar is a first-year PhD student at the University of Alberta in the English and Film Studies department. Her research interests include contemporary romance novels, women's romance reading, women's pleasure, and BookTok. She completed her BA and MA in English Literature at Simon Fraser University.

Dr. Ralph McLean is Curator of 18th-century manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland. Listen to Ralph McLean's 2021 St. Andrew's and Caledonian lecture on 'The Lyon in Mourning'.

Bo Pearson is currently working toward her BA in English at Simon Fraser University, and is planning to pursue her certificate in editing from the school's continuing studies program. Her research interests include contemporary fiction, British literature, and film analysis.

Emma Trotter is currently finishing up her Undergraduate BA at Simon Fraser University in English and completing her Certificate in Writing & Rhetoric. Her research interests include 17th-century American and Puritan literature, as well as late 18th-century feminist literary criticism.

Cairen Velasquez is an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University, currently pursuing a degree in Political Science. They have a deep interest in decolonization and contextualizing anti-colonial thought at the centre of politics and economy. Outside of academia, they enjoy writing poetry and listening to albums - preferably doing both simultaneously.

Ronaldo Shrestha recently joined SFU's MA in Philosophy after completing his undergrad at University College Utrecht where he double majored in Mathematics and Philosophy. His research interests include formal logic, philosophy of statistics, computational philosophy, and explainable AI. In those areas, he seeks to explore what it might mean to be rational, to explain, and to justify. His perspective on these questions has been influenced by his readings of Greek tragedy and Gothic fiction.

Jasmyn Bojakli recently completed her MA in English at McGill University. Her research focuses on the representation of the eighteenth-century bawd in literature and media.

Taylor Breckles completed her MA in English at SFU in 2022. Her research interests include Indigenous studies, media history, humour studies, and sociolinguistics.

Alyssa Bridgman recently completed an English MA at Simon Fraser University. Her interests are 19th-century American, Canadian, and Scottish literatures, as well as contemporary poetry. She is the 2020-21 recipient of the David and Mary Macaree Graduate Fellowship in Scottish Studies.

Dr Georgia Vullinghs (active on the project Dec., 2021 to Feb., 2022) is a historian based in Edinburgh. Her PhD thesis was titled ‘Loyal Exchange: the material and visual culture of Jacobite exile, c.1716 – c.1760’ (University of Edinburgh, 2021). It explored the presence of the Stuart court in Rome, and the role of objects in the relationship between the exiled royals and their supporters. In addition to the history of Jacobite material culture, Georgia’s research interests are in Scottish cultural history, material culture and emotions, and women’s histories. Georgia is currently working as Curator of Modern and Contemporary History at National Museums Scotland.

Harry Lewis is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on an dissertation on "Jacobitism and the British Caribbean: a study of Catholicism, Sedition and Otherness, 1688-1745"

Rebecca Dowson is a Digital Scholarship Librarian and is a founding member of the DHIL. In her role, Rebecca supports researchers at all levels who are engaged with digital humanities through project consultations, digital skill development workshops, and coordinating the Library's resources in digitization and project hosting. Her research interests include the intersection of libraries and digital humanities, with a particular interest in digital cultural heritage projects, digital skill building, and new forms of scholarly publishing.

Andrew Gardener is a Developer in the DHIL. Andrew has more than a decade of experience as a full stack developer in post-secondary teaching and learning, having previously worked as a Programmer at the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, as a Software Developer at the Concordia University Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, and as a Web Developer at Vanier College. Andrew has a Bachelor of Computing Science from Concordia University.

Tony Lu is the designer of the Lyon in Mourning logos. He is a Graphics Technician at Simon Fraser University Library.

Michael Joyce enjoys writing software that talks to other software because he’s bad at talking to people and doesn’t understand apostrophes. He brings 15 years of digital humanities and web application development to the DHIL, including working as Web and Data Services Developer for the Bennett Library, a Programmer Analyst for UBC Mathematics, and a Web Developer at the Electronic Textual Culture Lab at UVic. He hates spreadsheets and loves highly structured databases.

Rémi Castonguay (Digital Scholarship Librarian, 2019-2020) received his Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University in 2000 and an M.A. in musicology from Hunter College in 2008. His varied experience in New York City took him from the Frick Collection to Columbia University and the City University of New York. He was Public Services and Project Librarian at Yale University's Gilmore Music Library from 2008 to 2015. In British Columbia he worked at Lucidea, an ILS software company based in Richmond, as a project management librarian until May 2019. In recent years his work has focused on online streaming services, film preservation, social media, and the digital humanities.