Surviving Memory Welcomes Two New Postdocs

From L to R: Dr. Tania Cañas, Dr. Giada Ferrucci, Dr. Adriana Alas, and Dr. Amanda Grzyb at a Western University event in September 2024.

The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador team is pleased to welcome two new postdocs – Dr. Tania Cañas and Dr. Giada Ferrucci – who are working under the supervision of Dr. Amanda Grzyb in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) at Western University. Cañas and Ferrucci join Surviving Memory postdoctoral scholar, Dr. Adriana Alas, who started her appointment at FIMS in February 2022.

Dr. Cañas is the recipient of a prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and she began her appointment at FIMS on June 1, 2024. With a Ph.D. from the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne, Cañas is one of the most prominent Salvadoran Australian scholars engaged in participatory research on migration and memory in Australia, and her postdoctoral research stands to make path-breaking contributions to refugee studies, postwar reconciliation, and arts-based research methods.

Commemoration at the new Sumpul River Massacre Memorial, 13-14 May, 2024. You can read more about this project here.

As a former Salvadoran refugee herself, Cañas’ lived experience of displacement and migration as a child contributes an important perspective to her scholarly inquiry. Her record of academic scholarship and arts-based projects – including from peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, opinion pieces, scripts, exhibitions, and presentations – is remarkable for a person at her career stage.

Dr. Ferrucci was awarded a Western Postdoctoral Fellowship shortly after successfully completing her Ph.D. in Media Studies at Western. A member of the Surviving Memory research team since 2017, Ferrucci started her position as a jointly-appointed postdoc at FIMS and Western Libraries on September 1, 2024. Ferrucci’s postdoc plan builds on her doctoral research about contemporary environmental justice and anti-mining movements in Central America, while integrating a new focus on historical memory of the Salvadoran Civil War. She will take on new leadership roles in Surviving Memory’s vibrant and diverse interdisciplinary research team, bringing important expertise about environmental reparation to our research and supporting several key areas of the project: digitization of archival materials about El Salvador in the collection at York University’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC), leading a collaboration with ASALCA on a community book about the experiences of the Salvadoran Canadian diaspora, and organizing our governance committee of students.

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