A two-year fellowship with the Coach House Institute at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information will allow UWindsor professor Michael Darroch to consolidate years of archival research as he prepares a book on the history of early media studies in Canada.

The book is a SSHRC-funded collaboration led by Dr. Darroch, associate professor in the School of Creative Arts and director of the IN/TERMINUS Creative Research Collective, and including co-investigator Janine Marchessault, professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, as well as York University's professor Michael Longford, who is developing graphic design concepts for the book.

The Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship provides each recipient with $10,000 over the course of a residency at the University of Toronto. It honours McLuhan, a media theorist whose works included “The Gutenberg Galaxy” and “Understanding Media,” and who taught for a period at Assumption College.

Darroch will divide his time between research in Toronto and his teaching and administrative duties at UWindsor.

“The fellowship will also allow me to build connections to a network of scholars interested in the foundations of research in media technologies and creative arts in Canada and internationally,” he says.

His project, Explorations in Anonymous History, builds on Darroch’s research on the collaborations of McLuhan, the unorthodox cultural anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, the modernist town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and the architectural historian Siegfried Giedion.