Category: events

Dr. Charlotte Schallié is a professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria. Her areas of interest include memory studies, visual culture studies, Holocaust education, care ethics, and arts-based research. She also edited the award-winning collection of graphic novels ‘But I Live. Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust.’

Duncan McCue is an award-winning broadcaster and educator, and Associate Professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication in Ottawa, ON. At Carleton, he launched the Certificate in Journalism in Indigenous Communities, a journalism skills program for learners in remote communities. He is the author of Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities and The Shoe Boy, a memoir of his time spent on a trapline with a Cree family in northern Quebec. Canadians know him well as a longtime CBC radio host and TV news correspondent, including host of Cross Country Checkup and the Kuper Island podcast. He previously taught journalism at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and Toronto Metropolitan University. Duncan is a proud Anishinaabe from the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario. He is the SCVN Turtle Island Research Cluster Co-Lead collaborating with Mangeshig Pawis-Steckly to share the experiences of residential school survivor George Kenny and his son Mike Auksi.

Dr. Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and settler scholar in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia Vancouver. She is the SCVN Research Cluster Co-Lead of Turtle Island, working with Dr. Shannon Leddy in collaboration with residential school survivor Dorothy Visser and graphic artist Natasha Donovan.

Biz’s research and teaching are grounded in the belief that popular culture is capable of both reflecting social and political discourse and intervening in it. Biz’s scholarship examines the representation of complex histories in comics and digital and tabletop games, Tarot’s capacity for innovating classroom teaching, and the role of comics and arts-based research in preserving Indigenous knowledges, sharing Indigenous storytelling traditions, and revitalizing Indigenous languages. Biz established the UBC Comics Studies Cluster in 2023, where she continues to support community partners, local nonprofits, BC’s First Nations, and UBC faculty and students in making comics about the important issues facing society today. She is also the Director of the UBCPop Culture Cluster, which is home to the UBC Critical Play Lab, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum.

Dr. Erin Jessee is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where she works across the Gender History, Global History and War Studies research clusters. She has over 15 years of experience using oral historical, archival and ethnographic methods to elicit and bring into conversation people’s diverse experiences of genocide and related mass atrocities, especially in Rwanda and Bosnia. She is the author of Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History and co-editor of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide and has published in Medical History, Memory Studies, Conflict and Society, History in Africa, Oral History Review and Forensic Science International, among others. She is co-leading the SCVN Rwanda Research Cluster with Dr. Fransiska Louwagie from the University of Aberdeen, working with artists Duta Ebene and Michel Kichka.

Dr. Fransiska Louwagie is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Aberdeen.  She took up this position in August 2022 and was previously employed at the KULeuven, where she completed her PhD, and at the University of Leicester, where she held a post as Lecturer and then Associate Professor of French. She is the author of Témoignage et littérature d’après Auschwitz (2020) and has co-edited several volumes and thematic issues, including:  Un ciel de sang et de cendres. Piotr Rawicz et la solitude du témoin (2013); Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (2018); Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (2021); Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists (2023), The Future of World War Two France in Academia (2026), and Henri Raczymow: sauver les noms (forthcoming). She led the AHRC-research project ‘Covid in Cartoons’, conducted in collaboration with Shout Out UK and Cartooning for Peace.

Dr. Ajnura Akbaš is a Research Coordinator at the War Childhood Museum, where she leads research and documentation projects focused on the lived experiences of individuals whose childhoods are affected by armed conflict. She is also a PhD graduate from the London School of Economics and Political Science, specialising in Gender studies. Her research examines women’s military service during the Bosnian war, with a focus on gender, militarisation, and post-war memory. Ajnura’s work is grounded in creative, trauma-sensitive and survivor-centred methodologies, including collage-making, body mapping, and collaborative documentary practices. She also supports the SCVN Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster as community liaison and primary contact with the War Childhood Museum, as well as developing an Archiving Toolkit specific to the Bosnian War. 

Dr. Matt Huculak is Director of the Kula: Library Futures Academy at the University of Victoria Libraries. A Library Journal “Mover and Shaker,” he was recognized for his work as a digital scholarship innovator during his tenure as Head of Advanced Research Services at UVic Libraries, where he led initiatives in digital asset management, grant-supported scholarship, and digital exhibitions connecting faculty, students, and communities. His research and leadership focus on transdisciplinary knowledge creation, positioning libraries as incubators for emerging technologies and collaborative inquiry across disciplines. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Tulsa and an MLIS from San Jose State University, with graduate study at McGill University and UC Davis — a formation that reflects his grounding in both the humanities and information science. He also serves as Data Director for the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) project, overseeing the development of the project’s archival infrastructure.

Olivia Kozlovic is an MA student in the Holocaust Studies stream in the University of Victoria’s Germanic and Slavic Studies department. Her research examines the entangled memories of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Wars in the Balkans, focusing on sites of memory as physical manifestations of this entangled memory in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia. Her aim is to understand how the memories of these two events impact one another in the public memory landscape of the Yugoslav successor states. She is supporting the SCVN project as a research assistant archiving the artistic materials, beginning with the Holocaust and Yugoslav Wars Research Clusters.

Franziska Zaugg is a lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg. From 2018 to 2022 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation/Ambizione. From 2015 to 2018, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin, Centre for War Studies, and from 2016 to 2018, she worked as an early career researcher in the “Transnational Resistance Project” at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on conflict and war history, resistance and collaboration movements, youth cultures, and the dialectal relationship between archives and society. Franziska Zaugg is a co-founder of the working group “History-Society-Violence” (Geschichte-Gesellschaft-Gewalt). She is also the SCVN Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster Co-Lead, working with a survivor who is a Roma woman, sharing her life experiences in Serbia in the 1990s where the discrimination and violence of the Yugoslav Wars shaped her childhood and youth. 

Nathaniel Brunt is a Canadian interdisciplinary scholar, documentarian, and educator whose work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. Trained as a cultural historian and documentary photographer, he studies how individuals, institutions, and communities interpret their worlds visually during wartime. He completed his PhD in the Communication and Culture joint program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Brunt’s photographic work has been widely published and exhibited internationally. He is currently undertaking long-term documentary projects in Northern Iraq and Kashmir, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries, and will be a Hannah Arendt Fellow in 2026. He joined the SCVN project in 2025 as a Research Advisor and will share his experience archiving in Iraq to support the Yezidi project archives. 

Kjell Anderson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba, specializing in genocide, perpetrator studies, international criminal law, and transitional justice. He is the author of Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (2017) and co-editor of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (2020). His fieldwork spans Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and northern Iraq, where he has investigated atrocity crimes, victim experiences, and perpetrator narratives. He has held academic positions at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the University of the Fraser Valley, and the National University of Rwanda, and worked with NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations. His current projects include books on Dominic Ongwen, the Rohingya genocide, and epistemic justice and transitional justice. He is also the SCVN Iraq/Syria Research Cluster Co-Lead working with a Yezidi survivor, ‘Jilan’ (not her real name) and graphic artist Birgit Weyhe to develop a graphic novel about Jilan’s experiences during the Yezidi Genocide. His interdisciplinary research integrates legal, criminological, and social science approaches to mass violence and post-conflict accountability.