The Integrating Humanities Initiatives

Summer 2026

Professor Ellen Ketels, RA Madison Floyd, and RA Molly Stephens

Understanding early theatre through performance: from the pageant wagon to the classroom

Understanding early theatre through performance: from the pageant wagon to the classroom. This multimodal project engages a collaborative, performance-driven approach to teaching and researching medieval drama, grounded in the June 7, 2025 production of York Plays 2025 at the University of Toronto (sections of which Professor Ketels co-directed with a collaborator). The project begins with the completion of a publicly available online archive of the 2025 performance, including video footage and curated crowd-sourced photography. Designed for both scholars and theatre practitioners, the archive responds to a growing demand for performance-led research resources while contributing to a forthcoming collection of essays focused on the production. Moving from the pageant wagon to the classroom, the project also aims to reimagine how medieval drama is taught in the undergraduate classroom. Positioning students as dramaturgical researchers and creative collaborators, Ketels and her RAs (as well as the students in her Fall 2026 class) will generate a set of open-access teaching materials that integrate historical inquiry with real-world performance practice. Together, these archival and pedagogical components position premodern drama as a dynamic site for both scholarship and teaching: the project models new ways of learning through embodied practice.

professor Jamel Velji

(Re-)thinking Religion @ CMC and Beyond

The study of religion faces a crisis across institutions of higher education in North America as many departments face closures or dwindling major numbers. The problem is so acute that at last year’s disciplinary conference, the president of the American Academy of Religion held a strategy session to help address issues concerning the closure of religious departments and programs nationwide. The department of religious studies at CMC will use Gould funding to help assess the future of the study of religion at our campus and beyond. More specifically, we will use funds to assess our current curriculum; assess our work across the 5Cs; and think through whether the nomenclature of religious studies accurately reflects the work that each of our members does. This assessment will allow us to sharpen our curricular endeavors, in turn ensuring that we are contributing in the best possible ways to the humanities and CMC’s educational mission.