Shawna Dolansky, professor of biblical studies and undergraduate advisor at Carleton University, was recently awarded the Federal Insight Grant for her research project on female historical figures.
Titled Women of the Ancient World: Graphic Reconstructions and Digital Resources, Dolansky’s large-scale project aims to educate students on the culture and lives of women in the past with a visual twist. Dolansky and her team will create a website that will feature a large number of women from the past with details on who they are and what they did.
“My colleague and I were talking about using graphic history to communicate visual information about the past in a very distinct way,” Dolansky said. “We want to bring the student in visually to the architecture, styles, fashions and the different ways the world looked in the past.”
Insight grants are delivered through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) with the goal of “supporting research excellence in the social sciences and humanities,” according to their website. A total of 23 Carleton researchers, including Dolansky, have recently received funding from SSHRC.
Despite what some researchers and historians say, Dolansky said there is a lot of information about ancient women that doesn’t get talked about enough through archaeologic and ethnographic findings.
The project grew from a graphic novel about history to a graphic-focused interactive website with stories about women from the Bible and the past.
Dolansky said her team’s prototype so far has been Jezebel, an ancient Queen of Israel in the Bible.
“It’s not just about the achievements of women, but also about the way they lived their lives,” Dolansky said. “If we can imagine what [Jezebel] looked like based on what we do know, then we [can] reconstruct her and the details of her life, like what her hair looked like or what clothes she wore.”
Dolansky said she uses a variety of sources such as the Bible, historical and archaeological findings and ethnographic studies on the individuals to piece together the fine details.
Jezebel, for example, is said to have lived in the ninth century. Using that information, Dolansky and her colleagues can use information known from that time-period to recreate an appropriate wardrobe and other details to reconstruct the figure.
Dolansky said she will not only present the information but also show where it came from and how it was verified.
“Part of the process of constructing history through a graphic lens from work that I’ve seen is about being transparent with the research,” she said.
The Insight Grant played a tremendous role in moving the project to the next step, according to Dolansky, as the funding will allow the team to hire a web developer and launch the site.
Director of the Insight program, Katie Hamilton-Harding, credited the grant program for contributing to the development of knowledge and training the next generation.
“Not only does it contribute to the research and knowledge, but also part of the funding that gets released goes to pay for the salaries of the students working on the projects,” she said. “They’re being mentored by the top scholars around the country so that speaks to the health of the Canadian research environment.”
The end-goal, according to Dolansky, is to have a website that features a vast amount of women from the ancient world through inscriptions, records, letters and other documents.
“The Jezebel part will be a small template so that we can invite other researchers who specialize in Assyria, Egypt, or even Sudan and other countries to use that template and plug in their own research,” Dolansky said.
Featured graphic by Angel Xing.
