By: Carmen Tang
Throughout the academic year, we often have students from numerous post-secondary programs coming in to complete their internships. Our interns come from a variety of programs, including (but not limited to): Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management, Information Studies, History and International Studies, Art History, English, Sexual Diversity Studies, Museum and Cultural Management.
Interns are a valuable asset to our staff and volunteers! It is a unique opportunity for the student to gain experience in the field, simultaneously apply and enhance the knowledge base from their subject area in a practical application and to explore career options. In 2018 The ArQuives welcomed 14 interns to assist with arrangement and description projects, communications, programming, and many other day to day tasks. These people tend to accomplish a tremendous amount of work during short period of time that they spend with us, and some chose to stay on as volunteers.
We remain grateful for their contributions and wish them all the best in their future careers! Now, meet some of our new interns for this spring and summer:
Julia Marcello
Julia Marcello is an MA candidate (2018-2020) in the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management program at Ryerson University, and holds a BA in Photography (2015) from Sheridan College. She is interested in vernacular photography with a focus on sexual diversity, as well as in pornography and its place in the canon of photographic history.
“Working in archives is like working on a puzzle. I’m so excited to help the ArQuives piece together the stories of our community!”
Alex Pospisil
Alex is an MA Candidate in the Literatures of Modernity program at Ryerson University, and has completed a Specialised Honours BA in English at York University, as well as a Certificate in Technical and Professional Communication at Glendon College. Her research interests are in exploring racial, transnational, and gender identities, queer theory, as well as the Digital Humanities. She is working as a Research Assistant at the Centre for Digital Humanities, on the Yellow Nineties 2.0 Project, where she is in charge of migrating data from a previous website, primary the ever-growing collection of biographies. At the ArQuives she’s working on a digital exhibit about the history of hyper-marginalized queer people of colour in Toronto… and if there is not enough archival material to be found, then an exhibit on this gap needing to be filled.
“It is with great hope that I begin my internship at the ArQuives, and the knowledge that my pursuit in visualizing the invisible may not lead me to a satisfactory end. I chose to volunteer here because I aim to validate the experiences of living LGBTQ+ people of colour in Toronto and Canada; demonstrate that they are not alone, and that there are strands of the past worth grasping for the sake of finding connections to a larger historical tapestry.”
Leonardo Gomes
Leonardo is a first-year student in the Film Preservation and Collections Management MA program at Ryerson University. He is originally from Brazil, where he attained a bachelor’s degree in Film Studies, having written his final paper on John Waters’ work. He is particularly interested in historical representations and narratives of male homosexuality in the arts and media, and believes that community archives are essential for the safekeeping of queer memory. Both as a volunteer and as an intern, he hopes to improve the preservation and access to the archive’s moving image collection.
“As a gay international student, The ArQuives seemed the natural place to start my career, combining my love for the moving image and my personal politics, and I am proud to take a small part in the preservation of our collective memory.”
Interested in completing an internship at The ArQuives? Contact Executive Director, Raegan Swanson at executivedirector@arquives.ca for more information.