Project Personnel

Principal Investigator: Dr. Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University

Dr. Leith Davis researches and teaches long eighteenth-century literature and media history. She is the author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (Stanford UP, 1998) and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish Identity, 1724-1874 (Notre Dame UP, 2005) as well as co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland, 1688-1745 which explores sites of cultural memory in the British archipelago within the context of the shifting media ecology of the eighteenth century. Dr. Davis is currently Director of Simon Fraser University's Centre for Scottish Studies. 

Research Assistants:

• Project manager; principal Research Assistant; transcription of manuscript items: Dr. Emma Pink
• Transcription team:
  • Alyssa Bridgman: Alyssa Bridgman is an MA student at Simon Fraser University. Her areas of focus are manuscript studies, digital mediations of Emily Dickinson's late manuscript poems, and contemporary ecological poetry. She lives and works on the unceded territories of the Kwikwetlem First Nation.
  • Grace Chen
  • Courtenay Connor: Courtenay Connor received her MA in English from Simon Fraser University in June, 2020. 
  • Gurleen Grewal: Gurleen Grewal has an MA in English from Simon Fraser University. Her research interests are in the fields of Black Studies, Discourse Analysis, and Gender and Sexuality. She now serves as the International Development Communications Specialist with a NGO based in Interior BC, and was a delegate to the UN's 65th Commission on the Status of Women.  

Simon Fraser University's Digital Humanities Innovation Lab Team: 

• Rémi Castonguay 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. He now starts at SFU as the new Digital Scholarship Librarian. In recent years his work has focused on online streaming services, film preservation, social media, and the digital humanities. He has presented numerous times at the International Association of Music Library (IAML) and the Music Library Association (MLA) conferences and his articles have appeared in Fontes Artis Musicae,  Music Reference Services Quarterly, the Journal of Web Librarianship, and other publications. Remi plays the piano, harpsichord, accordion, guitar, recorder and a little bit of ukulele! Remi’s mother tongue is French but besides that and English he also speaks decent Italian and can read Spanish. He also has rudimentary knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL). He likes to write poetry, plays, novels and compose music in his free time. One of his ancestors was a man named Charles Pearson who was abducted by traders in England and put on a ship. He travelled the world until he escaped the ship while stationed on the Saint-Laurent River. In the Gaspesian peninsula in Quebec, he married a French-Canadian girl and the rest is history!
• Rebecca Dowson is the Digital Scholarship Librarian and Library Collaborator at 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.Rebecca is on leave until 2021
• 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.
• Joey Takeda is the User Interface Developer for the DHIL. He has worked as a programmer for a number of DH projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Landscapes of Injustice, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, and The Winnifred Eaton Archive. He is also in the final throes of an MA in English (Science and Technology Research Stream) from the University of British Columbia, where his research focuses on Indigenous and diasporic literature, textual and editorial approaches, queer theory, and ecocriticism.