Congratulations to the six winners of this year’s Graduate Research and Innovative Thinking (GRIT) awards but in particular one of our own – Johnny El Alam. The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs created these awards for outstanding Carleton PhD students at the ABD stage of their research (all comprehensive exams have been completed and the dissertation proposal has been successfully defended). These awards provide funding to support excellence and involvement in academic research activities. Each student will receive up to $5,000.
Johnny Alam (Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture)
After the Nov. 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, many people chose to overlay the French flag on their Facebook profile pictures. Alam’s research delves into the underpinnings of acts such as these that “bind diverse individuals to imagined communities in a duty of memory expressed through mediums of visual culture, especially photographs.” Recently, Alam won a professional award for his exhibition in the Carleton Art Gallery. He also won a SSHRC Storyteller award. He will use his GRIT funds to attend two conferences – Mapping Memory in New York City and Memory, Commemoration and Communication at the University of Leicester, U.K.
For the full announcement from FGPA and a brief on each of the winners, see here.