Co-creating a “usable past” for LGBTQ+ people in the present.
How We Work
As a “collaboratory,” this team-based project creates a virtual working space where members come together to share work, ideas, and new knowledge about the creation of LGBTQ oral histories in the digital age. Our team members are specialists in LGBTQ history, trans studies, and oral history, as well as key personnel in LGBTQ archives in Canada and the U.S.
The Collaboratory also works regularly with undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers, mostly in Toronto at the ArQuives; some of these positions are volunteer, whereas others are paid, depending on funding.
Current Members
ORGANIZATIONAL LEADS
Elspeth H. Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Associate Vice-Principal, Research at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Her research focuses on modern queer and trans history; the history and theory of photography; and the history of US capitalism.
She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University, 2019) and The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (2005); co-editor of “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014), Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014), and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006).
Recent articles include “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam); “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria 2020); and “It’s Raining Men: Physique Photography and Racial Capitalism,” in Brian Wallis, Tina Campt, Marianne Hirsch, and Gil Pasternak, eds., Imagining Everyday Life (Steidl, 2020).
She has published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks, and others.
She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year digital history and oral history public, digital humanities collaboration. At the University of Toronto, she is also the Faculty Lead for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, a three-year Institutional Strategic Initiative. She is an active volunteer and former President of the Board for The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, the world’s largest and oldest queer community archive.
COMMUNICATIONS
Ashley Gold is a queer Jewish educator and researcher based in Toronto. In 2021, she obtained an MA from the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Ashley is a current Master of Teaching candidate at OISE. Her research interests include critical pedagogy, care, anticolonial theory, and queer and trans studies. She is thrilled to work with the Collaboratory as a Social Media Manager, managing our Instagram presence and amplifying our collection of oral histories through bespoke narrator portraits.
CREATIVE SCHOLAR
IN VIRTUAL RESIDENCE
IN VIRTUAL RESIDENCE
Megan Ingram (They/She) is a Teaching Adjunct in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University, and a creative scholar living and working between so-called Kingston, Ontario and Sooke, British Columbia. Their research interests include disability studies, queer and feminist theory, the sociology of education, and art activism and visual knowledge mobilization. Current research-creation projects include a counterarchiving project on queer and disabled activisms in so-called Tkaronto with the Collaboratory, and work on the intersections of medical records as governmental body archives. Her artistic practice draws on her academic research and lived-experience as a queer, multiply-disabled person to mobilize knowledge in accessible ways for the community it matters to. This work is primarily through documentary film, including an ode to queer friendship (ReelOut Queer Film Festival 2021), disability, sexuality, and gender (UBC Research to Practice Microgrant 2022), and miss/carry (Short Circuit Pacific Rim Film Festival 2024). Their current hyperfixation is the role of memory, and the hazy, complicated ways that our bodies hold stories.
FOR THE COLLABORATORY
Elio Colavito is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. As a trans non-binary researcher, Elio’s passion lies in archiving and re-telling queer histories in Canada. Their research interests include policing, sex culture, and the intersections of lesbian and trans identities. They hold an M.A. in History from the University of Toronto and a BSc (Hons) in History and Political Science from Eastern Michigan University.
In 2020, Elio supported the Collaboratory as a research assistant for the Queer Peel Oral History Project. Since January of 2021, Elio has been the Co-Oral Historian for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project. Beginning in March 2022, they launched Traversing Temporalities, a bi-weekly blog series, featuring interdisciplinary reflections on queer and trans oral history. As the series curator, Elio self-authored 6 entries and edited 6 entries submitted by external authors. In September 2022, they launched a new iteration of the series, which features monthly Zoom interviews with practitioners and allies of queer and trans oral history, paired with Elio’s own critical reflections.
FOR THE ARQUIVES
Raegan Swanson serves as the Executive Director of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ Archive. She holds a BA from Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and a Masters of Information from the University of Toronto iSchool. She has worked as an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute and as the Archival Advisor for the Council of Archives New Brunswick. She is currently working on her PhD focusing on the role of community archives in Aboriginal and Inuit communities. She is member of the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives Taskforce to respond to the “Calls to Action” Report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
PROJECT TEAM
Dr. Aaron Devor, PhD, FSSSS, FSTLHE, has been studying and teaching about transgender topics since the early 1980s. He established and holds the world’s first Chair in Transgender Studies; initiated and hosts the international, interdisciplinary Moving Trans History Forward conferences; and founded and is the subject matter expert for the world’s largest Transgender Archives. He has published widely on transgender topics, including as an author of four books and editor of one. Devor’s opinions are frequently sought by the media, and he has delivered public lectures to audiences around the world, including more than 35 keynote and plenary addresses. He is a national-award-winning teacher, a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and an elected member of the International Academy of Sex Research. Dr. Devor is a former Dean of Graduate Studies (2002-2012), and a professor of Sociology, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Former Members
COLLABORATORS
Dr. Margot Wilson is an Associate Professor, Emerita, in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Victoria. Her academic interests include culture change, international development and planned change. Her research has focused primarily on Bangladesh but she has spent a considerable amount of time in India, mostly directing field schools for student groups.
As a collaborator in the first iteration of the Collaboratory (2014-2019), Margot worked closely with Dr. Aaron Devor, Transgender Archives, in interviewing trans elders whose papers were in the Transgender Archives, especially Stephanie Castle. in 2018, Margot published Girl in the Dream, a life history of Castle, a Canadian transgender woman and early advocate for the rights of transgender people and, more specifically, for transgender people incarcerated in the Canadian prison system. Margot has founded TransGender Publishing, a small independently owned publishing house focusing specifically on publishing transgender manuscripts.
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHERS
Juan Carlos is a historian of sexuality, race, and visual culture in Mexican and transnational contexts. He holds a B.A. (Hons) in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (2014) and an M.A. (2016) and Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto (2022). His research and teaching focus on Mexican, Latin American, LGBTQ+, and Indigenous history. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, and he is writing a book that examines the relationship between transnational gay liberation politics, print culture, and visuality in the Americas from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. In 2017, Juan Carlos assisted the Collaboratory in the digitization and processing of audio tapes and transcripts for the Foolscap Gay Oral History Project. He briefly rejoined the team in summer 2023 as our resident blogger, offering monthly reflections on LGBTQ2+ public and digital history projects, creative interventions, and the people behind them.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Emily Mastragostino is a PhD student in Counselling and Clinical Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in the University of Toronto. From a positive psychology lens, Emily’s research focuses on investigating the ways in which marginalized communities cultivate wellbeing, despite institutional and social barriers. From May 2021 to August 2022, Emily supported the Pussy Palace Oral History Project in coding narrative interviews. Through the coding process, she identified and organized themes in the lived experiences of organizers, patrons, and community members involved in the police raid of the 2000 Pussy Palace bathhouse event. She holds an MA in Counselling and Clinical Psychology from the University of Toronto and a BA (Hons) double major in Psychology and Humanities, with a research background spanning classic quantitative methods to participatory arts-based qualitative approaches.
UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Katherine Zheng holds a BA in English and Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto. Along with passions in graphic design and literature, they are interested in topics of identity, sexuality, and gender, particularly as they relate to East-Asian diasporic queerness. In September of 2022, Katherine joined the Collaboratory as the Social Media Manager. They were responsible for developing content for social media to help amplify queer voices and broaden the public engagement with our oral history collections.
