The AMPLab space and equipment support the projects of many professors, students, researchers, and members of the wider research and literary communities. Although the faces you see may change as some members graduate, each person leaves behind their individual contribution to our audio-based research and practice, and takes with them a profound understanding of how audio recordings are developed, managed, and preserved.
Get to know some of the people on the AMPLab team:
Jason Camlot (PI and Director) brings extensive experience in the development and management of interdisciplinary, collaborative research teams, expertise in literary sound recordings, and has developed digital artifacts including a sound archive, digital poetry installations, and mobile media apps. He will guide the vision of the program, foster productive working relationships among network participants, help shape and articulate the goals of projects as they are pursued by working groups, facilitate collaboration across institutions, disciplines and communities, advocate for the project in all contexts, and ensure productive and rewarding experiences for students and emerging scholars.
Ben Hynes is a poet and project manager from Newfoundland and Labrador. Having completed his undergraduate work in his home province, he attended Concordia in 2009 to complete his Master’s degree in English, focusing on Creative Writing. After completing his MA, he ventured West to the Pacific and Simon Fraser University to pursue doctoral studies in poetry. Following his time at SFU, he worked for nearly 5 years as a project coordinator in the construction industry. While working at an engineering consulting firm, he was responsible for scheduling, drafting, executing, and delivering construction documents and studies for over 200 construction projects simultaneously. He acted as the focal point for coordination between the internal engineering team and various external stakeholders, including private-public partnerships, local governments, real estate developers, and private individuals. Here, he gained valuable insight into the flexibility, resilience, and practicality of the strengths and skills he honed during his academic career. He also learned how to somewhat wrangle engineers, which he attests is almost as daunting as poet-wrangling, speaking from experience of years of trying to wrangle himself. Ben is thrilled to return to a creative and scholarly environment and feels his arrival in Montreal as SpokenWeb’s new project manager represents a return to the field of work and activity he values most.
James Healey is the Technical Coordinator at the AMPlab and the Sound Designer for the SpokenWeb podcast. He used to work in film and television as a production technician and sound recordist, specializing in remote locations in the Yukon. Now, other than SpokenWeb, he is mostly an audio engineer and musician, working out of the Sud-Ouest Recording Service studio in Verdun, Montreal. He plays guitar in a band called Bluebird. He has been making his way through a degree in Electroacoustic Studies at Concordia University since 2018. He graduated from art school in College in 2016. He enjoys chatting about records, travelling, cooking and spending time at his cabin in La Peche, QC.
Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. She co-edited with Jason Camlot CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019), and her recent publications include chapters in the books Moving Archives (WLUP, 2020) and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP, 2019). Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she is writing a book about women poets on CBC Radio, curating the Audio of the Week Series on SPOKENWEBLOG and producing digital content for the Audio of the Month as part of The SpokenWeb Podcast feed.
Frances Grace Fyfe is an MA student in English at Concordia University. As a Research Assistant, she has treated metadata in the Archive of the Digital Present, digitized tapes for the Words & Music collection, and produced audio for the SpokenWeb podcast. She is interested in the history of poetry and poetics, reading, writing, and listening. Her master’s thesis-in-progress treats communication difficulties in modern poetry—how poets represent what is too hard to say in the first place.
Maia Harris is an FRQSC-funded MA student at Concordia University in the English Literature program focusing on literary theory. With a passion for cognitive perspectives in the humanities and social sciences, her thesis research concerns readerly physiology. Maia also nourishes a deep love for absurdism, postmodern theory, and sound. Apart from her scholarly research, Maia’s creative work has been published in Bloom Literary Magazine (Red Penguin Press), AZE Journal, the UC Review, DEMO Music Magazine, and most recently The Lamp Literary Journal.
Corina MacDonald is a PhD Candidate in the Communication Studies department of Concordia University. Her doctoral research explores networked scholarly communication practices in the humanities, using the institutional repository as a site of inquiry to explore relationships between publishing, academic labour, and research infrastructure. As a research assistant with Spoken Web she manages the migration of data into the Swallow2 metadata management system.
Jade Palmer (she/her) is pursuing a BA Honours in English and creative writing and a minor in sexuality studies at Concordia University in Tiohti:áke/Montreal. She served as co-editor-in-chief of Soliloquies Anthology, Concordia’s undergraduate literary journal, during the 2022-2023 academic year. She is now a poetry reader for yolk. Her work, concerned with the conversational, the familial, and the found, has previously been published in yolk, Headlight Anthology, and long con magazine. You can find her sipping gin cocktails that are way out of her price range.
Isabelle Devi Poirier is an undergraduate student at Concordia University pursuing a major in Journalism and a double minor in Professional Writing and Law and Society. Her interests include researching the evolving media landscape and social justice. As a research assistant, she creates and edits audio/visual content for the SpokenWeb website.
Ariella Ruby (of Ottawa, Canada) is a second-year prose fiction student in the MA Creative Writing program at Concordia University. When she is not being the social media coordinator at Spoken Web or “working on her thesis, as such,” she can be found over at Headlight being a fiction editor, in a classroom being a TA and/or an active seminar participant, or, possibly, in a coffee shop or a park somewhere, letting her mind wander/ponder. She likes to write, read, and hear about/listen to what other people are writing or reading at any given time.
Aphrodite Salas is a journalist and professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her most recent work is a short documentary and multimedia collaboration with Canadian Television (CTV) called: “from shore to sky: a reconciliation story.” She is a trained workshop facilitator on issues of combating misinformation and disinformation in news through the international organization Journalists for Human Rights. Aphrodite is also a research associate at the Concordia University Acts of Listening Lab, a member of the national board of directors of the Canadian International Council and a regular member of the Concordia Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism Studies. Her experience as a journalist is extensive, having worked as a national reporter, video journalist and assignment editor at CTV, a senior anchor at Global Quebec and a Parliamentary Correspondent for CityTV Toronto and Vancouver.
Angus Tarnawsky is an artist, researcher, audio engineer and PhD student at Concordia University. His research-creation practice focuses on understanding diverse listening orientations to offer generative possibilities for engaging with issues of cultural representation and settler colonialism. For his doctoral project, he is working on site-specific sound installations that productively ‘unsettle’ common spaces in the built environment. As part of SpokenWeb, he currently coordinates an online sound map and is working to facilitate the production of handmade lathe-cut records for future projects.
Safi Ullah is a full-stack developer and a dedicated student pursuing his Masters in Computer Science at Concordia University. Hailing from Pakistan, his work includes in developing adaptive and personalized learning solutions for students based on machine learning. Armed with a passion for creating web development, he is thrilled to leverage his skills in making our digital landscape more dynamic and accessible.
Tina Wayland is completing her Creative Writing MA at Concordia University, where she won the department’s McKeen Award in 2021 and 2023. She’s been published in carte blanche, Headlight Anthology, and Soliloquies Anthology, as well as longlisted for the 2021 CBC Non-Fiction Prize and shortlisted Room Magazine’s 2022 Short Forms Contest.
