We are pleased to announce that the 2025 Underhill Graduate Student Colloquium will feature two keynote presenters!
Our opening keynote will be given by Dr. Patricia Bérubé on Thursday, February 27th @ 6:00 pm at the Ottawa Art Gallery. Dr. Bérubé is an independent researcher in accessibility and inclusive design. Patricia completed her PhD in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University and her thesis work was funded by SSHRC, NSERC, and a scholarship from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. This participatory and interdisciplinary research resulted in co-designing multisensory translations of paintings with and for people with visual impairments. Her doctoral thesis, Towards a More Inclusive Museum: Developing Multi-Sensory Approaches to the Visual Arts for Visually Impaired Audiences, was awarded a Senate Medal.Since graduating, she has been working for the Federal Government in diverse accessibility-related roles and she also teaches Universal and Inclusive Design at Carleton University. She identifies as neurodivergent and likes to think of design as something that should be accessible to all. Dr. Bérubé is a contract instructor in the Industrial Design program, as well as within the Accessibility Institute’s Professional Education for Accessibility Competence (PEAC) program.Her research explores the challenges of access to art and exhibition spaces, with a particular attention for visitors with disabilities and their representation within the curatorial space. Patricia is also interested in the translation issues that arise in discourses surrounding disability.
Our Colloquium day keynote address will be given by our departments very own Dr. Marc Saurette. Marc is a medievalist at Carleton University in the Department of History, Digital Humanities and Medieval and Early Modern Studies. His teaching combines the study of medieval religious and cultural history with innovative, game-based learning, including the student-led development of pedagogical role-playing games and analyses of games as representations of the past. This teaching seeks to explore ideas of communication – how we represent the past in games (especially digital games) and how the process of game design might parallel the critical thinking of historians. His research similarly considers a medieval communication revolution by looking at the twelfth-century monks of Cluny as the written word comes to dominate (and structure) their lives, laws and power structures. By focusing on three particular authors: Peter the Venerable and two of his monks, Peter of Poitiers, and Richard of Poitiers, he seeks to understand the worldview, power relationships, and forms of emotion disseminated from Cluny in their literature. He has developed the Petrus Project, a collaborative DH translation project for the works of Peter the Venerable, which has begun to make these writings more accessible in English to modern audiences. He is a proud Manitoban, having received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History from the University of Manitoba before moving to the big city to complete a Masters and PhD from the University of Toronto. He was lucky to receive a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Département d’histoire at the Université Laval.
We are honoured to have Dr. Patricia Bérubé and Dr. Marc Saurette present at this year’s Colloquium and are excited to hear their presentations!