Speaker Series
Upcoming Events
DH@Guelph and the School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing present…
Christian Bök: The Making of the Xenotext'
Date: Monday, Nov. 10, 2025
Time: 4-5:30PM
Location: ImprovLab, Mackinnon Building, Room 108, University of Guelph
THE MAKING OF THE XENOTEXT
Christian Bök has been labouring for 25 years to create a poem, called “The Xenotext,” a work of “living poetry,” embodied in the genome of a deathless bacterium so resistant to evolution, and yet so utterly adapted to the lethality of the universe, that, by storing his poem in this organism, he has succeeded at writing a "book" durable enough to persist on Earth until the death of the Sun itself — and even more incredibly, the organism can read this poem and write a text in reply. “The Xenotext” establishes a dialogue between the genetic code and an English poem — and the sheer scale of the strictures upon such a dialogue might make this work one of the most stringently constrained texts ever written in the history of literature. In this lecture, Bök demonstrates how he has beaten the odds against him in order to accomplish this feat.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia, a globally renowned bestseller, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (in 2002). Bök is one of the earliest founders of the literary movement called ‘Conceptualism’ (a poetic school of global renown, responsible for the creation of the website UbuWeb). Bök has exhibited his ‘objets de poesie’ at dozens of galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in both the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (for his contributions to the Arts). Bök has also received a nomination for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry (in 2023) and for the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck – Centre Pompidou (in 2025). Bök currently teaches Fine Art in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds (UK).
Past Events
DH@Guelph presents…
Jason Boyd: Scholarly Editions of Videogames
Date: Oct. 27, 2025
Time: 5:30-6:30pm
Location: THINC Lab, University of Guelph
Talk Title: Scholarly Editions of Videogames: An Uncharted Realm
Please join us to welcome our first DH@Guelph presents... talk of the 25/26 academic year! Dr. Jason Boyd of TMU will be discussing scholarly approaches to video game studies.
Jason Boyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at TMU the Director of TMU's Centre for Digital Humanities. Jason’s current research focuses on the connection between digital technologies and life writing (The Texting Wilde Project), narrative in digital games (the Stories in Play Initiative), and queer digital humanities.
DH@Guelph presents…
Media Archaeology with Arun Jacobs
Date: January 25, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph
Register for Free on Eventbrite
Talk Title: BiblioTech Sbagliato: Pursuing Paywalls, Publishers, and Platforms in Research Information Management Systems
Arun Jacob (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. He completed his Master of Arts in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory and Master of Arts in Work and Society at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and his Master of Professional Communication from Toronto Metropolitan University. Arun's doctoral work unites media genealogy, intersectional feminist media studies, and critical university studies to explore how contemporary university data management techniques and information management systems shape our socio-cultural relations, experiences, and knowledge.
DH@Guelph presents…
Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio
Date: February 15th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph
Register for Free on Eventbrite
Talk Title: Human-Wearable relationships: A Digital Humanities approach through Patents
Paula Nunez de Villavicencio is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and a Jackman Humanities Graduate Fellow. Her research focuses on the historical and political dimensions of media technology used for the governance and surveillance of select populations. Specifically, her work looks at wearable technology and their role in shaping human conduct in different information systems, as well as their ethical implications. In broader terms, she is interested in information behaviours and practices, wearable technology, systems of AR, digital humanities and ethics. This research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
DH@Guelph presents…
Kanika Lawton
Date: March 7th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph
Register for Free on Eventbrite
Talk Title: Genealogies of Pain: Wounded Attachments and the Queer/Trans Archive.
Kanika Lawton is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, as well as a 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow with the Evasion Lab at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Their SSHRC-funded research foregrounds an aesthetic and political critique of surveillance, arguing that it both preludes and produces scenes of violence via appeals to neutrality. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Spectator and Media Fields.
DH@Guelph presents…
Aaron Tucker
Date: April 4th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: THINC Lab, 2nd Floor, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph
Register for Free on Eventbrite
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Talk Title: Media Archeology and Critical Digital Humanities: The Symbiotic Technical, Representational and Political Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies
Aaron Tucker defended his dissertation “The Flexible Face: Unifying the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” in March 2023, in which he studied the cinema of facial recognition technologies and their impacts on citizenship, mobility, and crisis, receiving the Governor General’s Gold Medal. During his graduate studies he was an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar, and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow; in addition, his graduate writing has won the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada Graduate Student Essay Prize as well as the The Ian Lancashire Promise Award at The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. In September 2023, he began a SSHRC post-doctoral position at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Information recreating the Canadian history of artificial intelligence as a techno-national project.