Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies Past Recipients

Alexandria Brooks is a fourth-year English Honours student at the University of Victoria. She is currently working on two SSHRC-funded digital humanities projects: Medieval Anglo-Jewish Women and Past Wrongs, Future Choices. While her English studies have broadened her interest in literature and literary theory, these projects have encouraged a deeper, more connected interest in Jewish history, language learning and translation, global archival and historic site conservation practices, memorialization, and interdisciplinary analysis.

The Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies will help fund Alexandria's participation in the 2026 I-witness field school. During this three-week field school, students will travel to Holocaust memorial and historic sites in Germany, Poland, and Austria. It will be an intensely emotional experience, and students will engage with diverse perspectives and potentially conflicting historical narratives. As we are currently in an era of emotional exhaustion, short-form content, and disinformation, Alexandria believes that it is important to learn how to have nuanced conversations about topics that she is emotionally involved with. The skills that she will gain in this field school will contribute to her success in becoming a considerate and curious academic as she looks forward to perusing interdisciplinary graduate work after she graduates.

Amy Anderson is a PHD student specializing in film at UVic’s department of Art History and Visual Studies. Informed by her professional background in cinema programming and curation, Amy's work questions how the adoption of digitization technology within film archiving and preservation practices has restructured the contemporary viewer’s relationship to early films as historical documents. Drawing from existing scholarship within the fields of media studies postcolonial theory, her dissertation project argues that cinema’s shift from analog to digital formats actively reconfigures how spectators perceive early films on a deeply temporal level.

The Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies will assist with Amy’s research on the International Federation of Film Archives’ preservation of 19th century films at the Cineteca di Bologna in Italy. This opportunity will allow Amy to complete the training needed to engage with archival film documents directly. She will also participate in film restoration workshops, while learning strategies for educating future generations of film history scholars. Amy thanks the Kalman family for their generous support of her international work in the field of film heritage.

Cooper Foxall is a fourth-year Anthropology student at the University of Victoria. His primary interest is in archaeology and zooarchaeology. The Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies will help him to attend a three-and-a-half-week field school in Mongolia run by NOMAD Science.

NOMAD Science is a non-profit research organization that explores and seeks to preserve the rich cultural history of northern Mongolia. Taking place in the remote mountains of the Darkhad Depression, this field school provides experience working with a diverse international team to investigate the origins of nomadic culture in Mongolia. Using interdisciplinary research methods, the project will provide Cooper with useful skills in the surveying of archeological sites, excavation techniques and lab analysis of artifacts to support a future career in the cultural resource management field. Cooper is grateful to the Kalman family for helping him further his education

Annika Berendt is a first-year graduate student in the Faculty of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria, where they study Greek art and archaeology. Their primary area of study is cross-cultural interactions and regional identity in the work of migrant craftspeople in Archaic Greece. Annika is also interested in the impact of methodological and theoretical approaches in modern scholarship, and the application of post-colonial ideology in archaeology. With their research, Annika aims to contribute a new understanding of migrant potters and painters, craft production, and regional identity in antiquity.

The Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies will support Annika’s participation in the 2024 Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project’s field school in Greece at the site of Ancient Eleon, where they will work with the ceramic material. Annika is grateful for the donors’ generosity as this trip is essential to conducting research for their thesis. Annika is well-positioned to make a significant contribution to knowledge production within the field of heritage studies in general, and Greek and Roman studies in particular. Annika has developed an active research agenda centred on how the study of pottery can enrich our understanding of migrant potters, artistic style and technology transfer in antiquity; they have shown a deep interest in the study of pottery, not solely as an art object, but as a social document.

Alicia Ward is a graduate student at the University of Victoria in the Department of Germanic and Slavic studies. Alicia’s primary area of study is Slavic studies, with a focus on Ukrainian and Russian cultural studies. Funds from the Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies will be used for the 2023 European memory tour in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy.

Participants on the tour will visit sites of memory including former concentration and death camps, museums, and memorials, while engaging with scholars and activists in the community. This research trip is invaluable to Alicia’s graduate studies, which focuses on sites of memory and Holocaust memorials in Ukraine. Participating in the European memory tour would not be possible without the support of the donors generosity and she is grateful to be named this year’s recipient. Alicia hopes to further develop her understanding of sites of memory and prepare her for future work in Ukrainian memorial projects.

Mira Engelbrecht is a fourth year History Major in the Honours program at the University of Victoria where she is also completing her Minor in Germanic Studies. Mira’s primary area of study is European history, with a focus on German history. Mira will be using the Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies to attend a 6-week intensive language and culture immersion school run by Saint Mary’s University in Kassel, Germany in the summer of 2022. Through in-class participation, assignments, presentations and immersion in German language and culture, Mira hopes to further develop her intercultural understanding and prepare herself for further studies in the area of Public History.

Janice Niemann is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English. Janice will be using the Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies for a research trip this summer to visit the British library, Cuckfield Park, and the Attingham Summer School, where participants spend two and a half weeks visiting historically significant British country houses, exploring their grounds, and attending lectures on their conservation, archives, grounds, and history. This research trip is invaluable to Janice’s doctoral research which focuses on garden spaces as sites of deviance or transgression in nineteenth-century British novels. This opportunity would not be possible without the support of the Kalman Award for International Heritage Studies. She is grateful for the donors’ generosity and honoured to be named this year’s recipient.