UTP Journals Blog University of Toronto Press Journals Blog Page 2

What virtual reality (cinema) is, today.

7 October 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger Philippe Bédard.

What is Virtual Reality (VR)? The answer depends on who you ask and where one encounters VR. In my case, my vision of VR has been informed by the experience of attending the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) since 2015. This particular context means that while VR has been around for decades, in one shape or form, my encounter with VR has been limited to cinematically-inclined “VR films,” displayed on single-user devices named Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs).

Coming full circle: How my 1980’s U of T experience and a millennial student inspired a new research agenda

30 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Mounties at Fort Walsh in 1878.

Written by guest blogger Pierre M. Atlas.

With the publication of my article, “Frontier Violence and Law and Order” in UTP’s International Journal of Canadian Studies, I have come full circle. My undergraduate experience at the University of Toronto in the 1980s first made me a comparativist, and then helped to reset my research agenda 30 years later.

Vampires and Research and Romance,
Oh My! Or, On Making Scholarship Fun

23 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger Melanie A. Howard.

It all started harmlessly enough. Trying to unwind from long days of studying for my comprehensive doctoral exams, I picked up Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight to provide some light, mindless entertainment. As one friend helped me justify the reading choice, “Sometimes you want a 5-course steak dinner; other times you just want a Twinkie.” Twilight was my Twinkie.

Peer-Review – why it matters

18 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger Kathryn Simonsen.

The Ivory Tower doesn’t exist. Forget what anyone says. All scholarship is a collaborative effort. No one has ever achieved anything alone. We all depend on the insights of our predecessors and our colleagues for whatever we do. This is true for every single step along the way from initial concept to final publication. Peer review is part of this process and it matters. A lot.

Peer reviewers: the unsung heroes of the academy

17 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger David Dyzenhaus.

As editor of the University of Toronto Law Journal, I follow my predecessors in taking the peer review process very seriously.

Finding reviewers is often difficult. While the reward people get is the knowledge that they are making a significant contribution to scholarship, there is no real public acknowledgement of their contribution and, given that the request comes when there are always many more pressing tasks, it is both hard to get people to agree to review and then often hard to get them to deliver. Editors spend a lot of time being pesky nags!

Gatekeeping and the Growth of Knowledge

16 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger John Budd.

The Journal of Education for Library and Information Science Education (JELIS) has a specific purpose. While there are more general resources in library and information science (LIS), JELIS focuses its attention and its content on the education of library and information professionals. To that end, the journal aims to assist those who teach these professionals-to-be.

Words missing from the archive, but a serendipitous clue to the mystery of montage

9 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger Grant Wiedenfeld.

Subtitles must be the answer, I thought. The question of how montage developed has fascinated film and media scholars since people began taking the subject seriously in the 1920s. Lumiere and Dickson simply set up the camera to record a stage performance, then by the 1910s films were full of camera angles, editing, and suave acting that told long stories silently. How did this language-like system develop, and set apart cinema from theater and photography?

A Sense of Time and the Arbitrariness of Anniversaries

3 September 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger Shirley Tillotson.

A historian’s sense of time has a lot in common with a musician’s. Both are about rhythms, resonances, repeating motifs with variations, and moments of change, like changes of key. If that’s how you think about time, then the one hundredth year of something is no more interesting than the one hundredth note of a Mozart concerto.

Sounding Out the Archive: Listening to the Caribbean Artists Movement’s Bilingual Performance of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

26 August 2019 Contributor Blog

Written by guest blogger Jacob Edmond.

Fifty years ago this June an extraordinary reading took place in London. John La Rose brought together a Caribbean cast for a staged bilingual French-English performance of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land).

After the Deluge: Rethinking Resistance in the Digital Age

21 August 2019 Contributor Blog

YCL blog image
Written by guest blogger Alex Wermer-Colan.

The enigmatic graffiti in the above photo, following Jean Yanne’s coinage of it on the radio, soon spread like a viral meme across the streets of Paris during the revolutionary protests of May 1968. In the half-century since the grassroots insurrection’s historic failure, however, this surreal demand for liberation has been sublimated, insidiously, into our phantasmagoric society of the spectacle.

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