Amy Airhart-Sheldon, Project Administrator and Lab Manager

Amy Airhart-Sheldon has an academic background in Old English vernacular saints’ lives, the treatment of bodies, and the language of punishment. Before that, she studied Latin and Greek literature and sang opera. She has held various governmental administrative positions and taught a range of English courses at the University of Toronto. The combination of these experiences, along with her doctoral training, has allowed her to occupy a unique position between academic and administrator within OBNS. For the Hidden Stories project, she assists with communications, finances, and events, as well as copy-editing, drafting, and occasional research.

Arkaprabha Chakraborty, PhD Candidate

Arkaprabha Chakraborty is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Their dissertation considers the question of when England became Britain, and hence, when the “British Empire” began by examining phonologically-centred multilinguality, scribal limitation, and longue durée misrecognition in the literary cultures of later medieval Cymru, England, and their March. He was most recently awarded the M. Jane Toswell Prize by the Canadian Society of Medievalists.

Bard Swallow, PhD Candidate

Bard is a Latinist and palaeographer who has supported the lab on various projects, including the Thomas Chaucer life records and palimpsest fragments. Their own work primarily revolves around Medieval Latin poetry and its manuscript contexts.
Department Profile

Cai Henderson, PhD Candidate

Cai Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and holds an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York. In addition to working for OBNS, Cai is part of the Henry Daniel Project and does palaeography and translation for Records of Early English Drama. Cai currently works on cognition and theories of the mind in late medieval English literature and text technology and tweets from @cemhend.

Chana Algarvio, PhD Candidate, Rare Book Librarian

Chana researches ancient Egyptian art and book culture, with her dissertation looking at Egyptian iconographic influence on the Achaemenid Empire. As the Assistant Librarian at Massey College, Chana focuses her work on the non-Western manuscript and print material in the Robertson Davies Library.
Linkedin | Academia

Christina Nguyen (she/her), PhD Candidate

Hidden Stories Doctoral Fellow Christina D. Nguyen is a researcher and librarian specializing in conservation science, digital scholarship, and cultural heritage preservation. Her doctoral work bridges material science with information and archival practice, providing evidence-based solutions for conservation practices. Alongside collaborators and facilities at the Faculty of Dentistry, she is investigating the mechanical properties of collagen in parchment (animal skin), and its degradation due to hydrolysis, oxidation, or gelatinisation. Second, she is developing open-access tools to conduct condition assessments of parchment. For Hidden Stories, Christina has been a brilliant instigator of creative outreach initiatives to share our work with the public.
Department Profile

Isra Saymour, PhD Candidate

Isra Saymour is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research maps the looting and illicit trade of documentary heritage from the colonial era to the present. Her dissertation reconstructs the journeys of three looted Asian manuscript collections, each taken by different colonial powers, to reconfigure looting as a colonial and imperial strategy of dispossession, epistemic violence, and control. Isra also runs the Looting Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub for the study of looted and contested cultural heritage.

Jack McCart, PhD Candidate

Jack McCart is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies, where his research focuses primarily on English economic and social history, material culture, and manuscripts, c. 1200–1500. His forthcoming studies concern mercantile networks, death and commemoration, and the recovery of erased text in manuscripts. In the 2025–2026 academic year, he will be the Medieval Academy of America’s Schallek Fellow.

Julianna Chiannelli, PhD Candidate

Julianna Chianelli is a Direct Entry PhD Candidate in the University of Toronto’s Department of English. Her research is concerned with Middle English literary texts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that use seals and the language of sigillography to explore inherited ideas about identity, and generate powerful and enduring new ones. Julianna is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Graduate Scholarship; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship; the Ontario Graduate Scholarship; UofT’s Doctoral Completion Award; and the UTM June Scott Teaching Excellence Award.

Katherine Morrissette, PhD Candidate

Katheryne Morrissette is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto. Her project investigates the making and maintaining of both material and metaphorical whiteness in medieval scientific, medical, and literary texts, as well as craft recipes. Hailing from Montreal, Kat received her BA and MA in English Literature from Concordia University.

Morgan Moore, PhD Candidate

Morgan Moore is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies. She holds an MA in Medieval Welsh Literature from Aberystwyth University and a BA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Wellesley College. Her work deals with medieval performance, especially vernacular verse and drama, and its transmission in manuscript from medieval England and Wales. Morgan also engages with digital humanities tools and research in her work with the Records of Early English Drama, and as Teaching Assistant for Professor Bolintineanu’s undergraduate global medieval studies courses.

Raquel Robbins, PhD Candidate

Raquel Robbins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. Her dissertation research focuses on the representations of the Laḫmu/ naked hero figure in Mesopotamian art and literature (Sumerian and Akkadian texts) from the 3rd to 1st millennium BCE. Her research interests include Mesopotamian religion, cuneiform studies, Near Eastern art and archaeology, and museum studies.

Sana Hashim, Research Fellow

Sana Hashim researches the use of multi- and hyperspectral imaging of cultural heritage material for ink analysis and text recovery. In this role, she works with the Remote Sensing and Spatial Ecosystem Modeling Lab (UTM), the OBNS Lab (UTM), the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and the Cultural Heritage Imaging, Preservation, and Research (CHIP-R) lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

Sara Ameri, PhD Candidate

Sara Ameri is a PhD candidate at the Department of English, University of Toronto. Her project focuses on medieval devotional and mystical texts and their conceptualization of the medieval plague from a psychoanalytic perspective. She is also interested in postmodern theories of madness and writing and their precedents and manifestations in medieval works.

Shaun Midanik, PhD

Shaun Midanik holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied at the Department of Art with a collaborative specialization in Book History and Print Culture. His research connects the fields of Art History and Book History through his study of Italian books of prints, bound groups of printed pictures that emerged as a new medium in the early modern period. His focus on a more dynamic early modern print culture has led to a diverse set of research interests related to books of prints, including virtual pilgrimage, drawing manuals, and emblem books.
Books of Prints Cataloging Project (BPCP)

Stephanie J. Lahey, Dr., Post-Doctorate Fellow

Stephanie J. Lahey is the Mark Andrews Postdoctoral Fellow in Book Sciences at OBNS, where she heads the lab’s MISHA Project. She also freelances as a medieval manuscript cataloguer in the rare books trade. Her research interests include Book History, Book Science, and Manuscript Studies (paleography, quantitative- and bio-codicology, materiality, provenance studies, manuscript production); cataloguing; public humanities; legal manuscripts, and Fachliteratur.
Humanities Commons