Professor Julie MacArthur

UTM Researchers Receive Connaught Funding

By Carla DeMarco

Professor Julie MacArthur is one of 16 U of T Mississauga researchers to receive support generously provided by the U of T’s Connaught Fund Program. With a New Researcher Award of over $18,900, she is off to Kenya to pursue her project, “Radical Cartographies: Mapping Sovereignty, Belonging, and Dissent in Eastern Africa, 1950-76,” which examines colonial governance and territorial and geographic practices in the postcolonial era in Africa.

“The Connaught Award provides me with crucial funding to allow for archival and oral history work across multiple sites in eastern Africa,” says MacArthur. “It will also allow for the development of partnerships and collaborative projects with institutions in eastern Africa, and will be the first step towards a much larger project that will look at the mapping and counter-mapping of Africa on a continental scale.”

MacArthur started to pursue this line of research while working on her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She traced the social history of borderlands in eastern Africa, found a mine of information contributing to the debates around identity, territory and sovereignty, and uncovered a more extensive history about “alternative mappings of independence” that needed to be further explored and brought to light. She is currently doing preliminary research in Kenya and Uganda, and will return to the area next summer, along with more intensive work across Tanzania, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and the Somali territories.

Along with MacArthur, the full list of UTM researchers who have received a 2016 Connaught New Researcher Award includes the following:

  • Pat Akey in the Department of Management for the project, “Policy Uncertainty, Firms, and Financial Markets;”
  • Joshua Barton Scott in the Department of Historical Studies for the project, Liberalism and Hindu Reform Across the British Empire;”
  • Natalie Bau in the Department of Economics for the project, “Affirmative Action and Student Effort;”
  • Laura Brown in the Department of Geography for the project, “Monitoring and Modelling Lake Ice in Canada;”
  • Brett Caraway in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology for the project, “Connective Action in Social Movement Research;”
  • Boris Chrubasik in the Department of Historical Studies for the project, “Sanctuaries and Empires;”
  • Sebastian Dyrda in the Department of Economics for the project, “Taxes, Regulations of Businesses and Evolution of Income Inequality in the US;”
  • Melissa Gniadek in the Department of English & Drama for the project, “Unsettled Spaces, Unsettled Stories: Temporalities of Settlement in Nineteenth-Century American Literature;”
  • Jiaying Gu in the Department of Economics for the project, “Heterogeneous Treatment Effect and Selective Instrumental Variable Regression;”
  • Jacob Hirsh in the Department of Management for the project, “Increasing Employee Engagement by Making Work More Meaningful;”
  • Peter Landry in the Department of Management for the project, “Developing Neuroeconomic Theories of Decision-Making;”
  • Neda Maghbouleh in the Department of Sociology for the project, “Civic Engagement in Toronto ‘Mothers’ Groups;’”
  • Loren Martin in the Department of Psychology for the project, “Understanding Chronic Pain-Induced Depression by Linking Stress, Inhibition and Behavioural Changes;”
  • Cosmin Munteanu in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology for the project, “Improving the Online Safety of Older Canadian Adults: Understanding and Removing Barriers to Technology Adoption and Increased Online Participation;”
  • Doug VanderLaan in the Department of Psychology for the project, “Children’s Appraisals of Gender Nonconformity: A Comparison of Reactions Based on Verbal Report vs. Facial Emotional Expression.”

“We are thrilled to see our faculty members supported by U of T in this way, and for these projects to receive a substantial financial boost makes a huge difference for emerging UTM researchers,” says Professor Bryan Stewart, UTM’s Vice-Principal, Research.

The Connaught Fund was founded in 1972 and was created from the sale of the Connaught Laboratories, established in 1914 to develop diphtheria antitoxin and later to produce insulin and other antitoxins and vaccines. For over 40 years U of T has administered the Connaught Fund, awarding more than $150 million to U of T researchers since its inception.

To see the full profile of U of T researchers, please see Connaught Committee funds rising research stars.