It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of the 2024 Ian Lancashire Award for Student Promise! This year’s award recipient is Parham Aledavood (he/him), a PhD candidate at the Université de Montréal enrolled in the Literature – Digital Humanities program. The title of his upcoming thesis is A Computational Analysis of Trauma in Contemporary Novels of Migration. Aledavood uses telescopic reading, a hermeneutic method that combines the best of both close and distant reading, to create models of migratory trauma through sentiment analysis. Aledavood worked on similar themes in his 2024 article “‘Life is for the living’: Surveillance and gender freedom in the refugee camp’s non-place in Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue”, published in 2024 in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Parham Aledavood is the associate director of DHSI – The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which will be held for the first time in Montréal in the summer of 2025. He is a Fonds de recherche du Québec Doctoral Fellow, and his Master Thesis received the Herman Servotte Prize from the University KU Leuven and the Multilingual Thesis Award in Literary Studies from Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Aledavood recently published an article in Digital Studies/Champ numérique on the subject of the winning presentation: “Taking the Middle Road: Reflections on Mixed Methodology within the Digital Humanities.” His presentation, which members of the jury praised for its compelling distillation of contemporary conversations in DH, undertakes a comprehensive exploration of reflections on mixed methodology that have emerged within the field, emphasizing calls for a blending of distant reading and close reading.

Thank you kindly to this year’s evaluators for their time and care! Are you interested in supporting CSDH/SCHN graduate students by reviewing for the Lancashire Award? Please inquire with Awards Chair Julia Polyck-O’Neill or any member of the executive committee!