We are pleased to announce the 2026 Graduate Student Summer Research Fellows, Adrianna Michele and Aparna Raghu Menon! Read about past projects supported by the fellowship here, or read on for a description of this year’s projects.
2026 CGDS Summer Research Fellows’ work highlights
Adrianna Michell (PhD Candidate, Department of English) and Aparna Raghu Menon (PhD Candidate, Public Health Sciences) received the 202 Summer Research Fellowship from the Centre for Global Disability Studies.
Adrianna Michell is a PhD candidate in the department of English, situated in the fields of disability studies and contemporary literature. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation explores the relationship between disability and temporality in American and Canadian fiction. Her project, “Worth Living: Disability, Temporality, Narrative” posits that authors mobilize disablement to provoke ethical and aesthetic experimentation. Adrianna received her MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her academic writing has appeared in Synapsis and Media, Culture, & Society. Adrianna is also a co-founder and editor of Toronto Review, a literary magazine. Her public writing can be found in Public Parking, the Cleveland Review of Books, and the Pittsburgh Review of Books.
Aparna is a PhD Candidate in Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and a Course Instructor at New College. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research, grounded in Critical Disability Studies, explores autistic non-verbal communication among children and youth, also drawing on communication studies, posthumanism, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) frameworks. Aparna’s research also includes projects on disability and food security, food and autism, and ethnocultural food supply chains. She has just completed her doctoral fieldwork among children and youth labelled autistic and non-verbal in Mississauga, ON, and is currently writing her dissertation. Aparna works in the community as a parent counsellor, a tutor for autistic adolescents, and a member of the Equity and Diversity Council in the Halton District School Board.
The CGDS Summer Research Fellowship is designed to support UofT graduate students conducting critical, anti-colonial, anti-ableist disability studies research.
Each year, awardees are granted $5,000.00 each to support summer research endeavors that further the completion of the dissertation, either writing or supplemental research not covered by other funding. The Centre for Global Disability Studies is dedicated to promoting global, transnational, anticolonial disability studies at the University of Toronto and beyond.
[Image description: Adrianna, a white woman with short brown hair, stands quietly facing the camera. She wears a crisp white shirt; the photo is a scanned film and has a grain to it. A lush green plant is to her right.]
[Image description: Head-and-shoulders portrait of Aparna Menon photographed indoors showing a brown woman with shoulder-length black hair. She is wearing dark-framed glasses, a silver nose pin, a green top, and a dark jacket.]
Previous Graduate Student Summer Research Fellows
2025 Fellows
To be updated
2024 Fellows
To be updated
2023 Fellows
Tania Ruiz-Chapman – Ruiz-Chapman’s dissertation presents a sociological analysis of migrant labour and disability. Incorporating critical race theory, Marxist theory, and critical disability studies, Ruiz-Chapman argues that the social conditions of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program systematically disable and compromise the health of many temporary foreign workers.
Walter Villanueva – Villanueva explores representations of Asian Canadian experiences of madness in contemporary Canadian literature. In a dissertation chapter prepared over the summer of 2023, Villanueva analyzes Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl through a mad studies lens, to examine how non-Western logics of neurodiverse experience coexist with medical diagnosis in the novel.
2022 Inaugural Fellows
Elaine Cagulada – Deafness, Race, and Policing: A Critical Analysis of Police Accessibility Education in Community
Vanessa Maloney – The politics of ‘looking after’: Disability and economies of care in the Cook Islands