2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Fair

Established by UTM's Office of the Vice-Principal, Research (OVPR), the Summer Undergraduate Research Fair (SURF) celebrates the research conducted by undergraduate students over the summer. This year's event will be held in person and will include both oral and poster presentations. Faculty, librarian, staff, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students are all welcome to attend.

• Date: Wednesday, August 16, 2023
• Time: 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM 
• Location: Instructional Building/Centre (IB), 1599 Outer Circle, UTM

Registration is now closed. Please contact our team directly with questions or requests.

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Alison Syme, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Studies

Bio: My research primarily focuses on art of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, France, and the United States. Within this field, I study a range of different topics and traditions, from the neomedievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites to society portraiture to early abstraction. All of my research, however, is characterised by a commitment to close looking, examination of the intersection of art and visual culture, interdisciplinary enquiry, and analysis of the role of metaphors in artistic practice and poetics. My first book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (Penn State University Press, 2010), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2011, considers Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynaecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilised ideas of cross-fertilisation and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his works to “naturalise” sexual inversion, visually elaborating a floral poetics of sexual variety. I am currently working on my third book, Burne-Jones and the Book, which explores the Victorian artist’s poetics of materials and animation strategies in the context of Victorian science and print culture. 

Talk title: “Reconceiving the Victorian Artist”

Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Bio: My research investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and neural foundations of human communication in development. In particular, my work studies two important forms of communication: music and language. I ask questions related to how we attend to communicative signals, like speech and song, in real-world listening situations where many sounds compete for our attention. I compare music and language processing directly to one another to understand the similarities and differences between information processing in each domain from infancy to adulthood. And finally, I look at how features of music can be leveraged to improve language processing in individuals who struggle with language, such as those with Dyslexia. In the Language, Music, Attention, and Audition (LAMA) lab, we use a combination of methods like behavioural change detection and neural auditory envelope tracking to get a better picture of how it is we learn to attend to what’s relevant for communication.

Talk title: “Music, language, and busy sound scenes: How do we develop expertise for communicating with others?”