Dr. Melanie Dennis Unrau is a poet of mixed European ancestry living on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg. A Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, she is the author of the literary study The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024) and the poetry collection Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). Melanie is a former editor of The Goose journal and Geezmagazine. Current projects include co-editing the “Workers of the Warming World Unite” poetry anthology of climate-related work poetry with Fernwood Publishing.
Past Visiting Scholars
Dr. Maren Hancock (she/her) is a Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Wolverhampton who researches and writes about DJ culture’s untold histories. Maren has published scholarly and journalistic works and is currently co-editing the first academic collection on Canadian DJ culture, We Can Dance If We Want To: Canadian DJ Culture Turns Up and completing a scholarly monograph focusing on the voices of gender-marginalized DJs in Canada, Stereotypes: Canadian Women DJs Sound Off.
Maren’s first monograph Lady Lazarus: Confronting Lydia Lunch was selected for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum and Library. She is the Web Editor for the Journal of Popular Music and acted as Social Media Coordinator for the 2023 Pop Conference. As an artist, Maren has deejayed for twenty-five years, sharing stages with everyone from Frankie Knuckles to Cyndi Lauper. She records and performs with legendary electro-funk-rap group Stink Mitt and occasionally produces, releasing an official remix of Peaches’ “Dick in the Air” with her project #entertainment. She’s produced events since 1995, beginning with Rock for Choice in Calgary and most recently, legendary UK DJ Greg Wilson’s first-ever Toronto performance in 2022. Since 2013, Maren has co-owned Dialed-In DJs, a Toronto-based mobile DJ company specializing in non-cheesy music for weddings and events.
“We Can Dance If We Want To: Canadian DJ Culture Turns Up” Collection, edited by Maren Hancock and Charity Marsh
This edited volume contributes to a distinct foundation of scholarly knowledge on Canadian DJ culture and its attendant industries, including its positionality within the context of global DJ cultures. This academic collection is the first to examine the emergence and development of DJ culture within the geo-political area known by its settler-colonial name, Canada, and the first attempt to gather and synthesize research on Canadian DJ culture comprised of diverse yet intertwined local, regional and national contexts.
Contributors include scholars, journalists, practitioners, and other stakeholders in DJ culture. These contributors explore DJ culture in Canada from historical and current, cross and interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as local and regional expressions. By amplifying diverse voices and stories that illustrate multiple generational and genre-based factions of Canadian DJ culture, this collection offers much-needed contributions about DJ cultures within a Canadian-specific context.
Stacey Bliss is a researcher, educator, and sound artist. Her research interests include: critical studies in improvisation, sound studies in education, ethnography, communities of practice, sonic and performative ethnography, auto- and duo-ethnography. In 2019, Stacey earned a doctorate in Language, Culture, and Teaching from the Faculty of Education at York University, Toronto, Canada. In 2017, she began ethnographically studying with long-term meditators and gong teachers. From 2019-2021, she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance and curated a 10-day/10-theme presentation of her research, disseminated live at the Art Gallery of Regina, and achieved in online audio tours. She is currently an independent scholar, appointed adjunct academic colleague at the University of Alberta, and teaching at varying institutes. She also continues her sound-art practice, playing gong and percussion instruments, in collaboration with local and national scholars, musicians, and sound artists. Find out more about Stacey’s projects, events, and publications at www.blissresearch.org.
Stacey is a SSHRC Insight Development Grant recipient (2021-2023) and currently conducting research for her project titled: Toward a Sound Pedagogy: A Sonic and Performative Ethnography of ‘Sound Healers’ in Canada. The overall objective of this project is to explore how ‘sound healing’ as well as sonic events and experiences are currently offered in communities across Canada. This project queries and enhances discourse of sonic and improvisational practices as pedagogical toward individual and social wellbeing. This work takes a step toward bridging and integrating both sonic and performative ethnographic research methodologies. The research findings will be disseminated multimodally at multiple venues across Canada in 2023.