Meet Our Team
Community scholars. Students. Creatives. Tech collaborators. Meet the team bringing the Pussy Palace Oral History Project to life.
Meet Our Team
Community scholars. Students. Creatives. Tech collaborators. Meet the team bringing the Pussy Palace Oral History Project to life.
For the Collaboratory
Founded in 2014 by Professor Elspeth Brown and based at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory is a public and digital humanities research initiative. We preserve gay, queer, and trans life stories, using new methodologies in digital history, collaborative research, and archival practice. The below list features the research team for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project. For a comprehensive list of our current members and past research collaborators, visit the people page of our website, linked above.
Elspeth Brown
Principal Investigator
Elspeth is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where her research focuses on modern queer and trans history, oral history, queer archives, public history, the history and theory of photography, and the history of U.S. capitalism.
She currently serves as Director of the Collaboratory. From 2020 to 2024, she was Associate Vice-President, Research (Strategic Initiatives) at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Director of the university-wide Critical Digital Humanities Initiative.
Elspeth is the author of numerous publications and public humanities projects, including Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University Press, 2019); “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam, Oral History Review, 2022); and “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria, 2020).
From 2014 to 2021, she served on the Board of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, most recently as Co-President.
Alisha Stranges
Project Manager & Co-Oral Historian
Alisha is a public humanities scholar and multi-modal artist with a passion for storytelling across mediums. She currently works as Digital Research Creation Specialist for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and serves as the Collaboratory’s Research Manager and Project Oral Historian.
Before stepping into academia, Alisha earned a Diploma in Theatre Performance from Humber College and spent a decade creating original plays in Toronto’s independent theatre scene.
From 2010 to 2015, she worked as a teaching-artist with Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s PrideCab, an intensive training program in collective creation and performance for queer, trans, and gender variant youth. Her background in performance fuels her creative approach to sharing research in innovative and accessible ways.
Elio Colavito
Co-Oral Historian
Elio is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. His research centers transmasculine histories of care, mutual aid, and community formation in 20th-century Canada and the United States. As Co-Oral Historian, Elio co-conducted interviews with project narrators; assisted in the archiving of digital materials; oversaw the collection of donated ephemera; generated interview summaries and official transcripts; and collaborated with team members on multiple digital media creation projects.
Ayo Tsalithaba
Creative Producer
Ayo is a visual artist, originally from Ghana and Lesotho. Their primary mediums include film, photography, and illustration. Their work explores questions of home, visibility, and (un)belonging as they relate to Black queer and trans* African diasporic subjectivity. From August 2021 to December 2022, Ayo served as Video Editor and Creative Producer for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project, developing project branding; editing interview access copies; illustrating digital paintings; creating animated video shorts; and building a robust library of visual media assets that serve as the aesthetic foundation for the project’s immersive, digital exhibit.
Emily Mastragostino
Interview Coder
Emily is a PhD student in Counselling and Clinical Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in the University of Toronto. From a positive psychology lens, Emily’s research focuses on investigating the ways in which marginalized communities cultivate wellbeing, despite institutional and social barriers. From May 2021 to August 2022, Emily supported the Pussy Palace Oral History Project in the synchronous coding of interview transcripts with their associated Zoom video recordings. Through the coding process, she identified and organized themes in the lived experiences of organizers, patrons, and community members involved in the Pussy Palace bathhouse events.
Katherine Zheng
Social Media Manager
Katherine completed their undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto in May 2023 with majors in English and Women & Gender Studies. Along with passions in graphic design and literature, they are interested in topics of identity, sexuality, and gender, particularly as they relate to East-Asian diasporic queerness. As our Social Media Manager during the 2022-2023 academic year, Katherine ran all Collaboratory social media accounts, amplified our research activities, and connected our audiences to LGBTQ2+ public and digital history projects, creative interventions, and the people behind them.
Aisling Murphy
Social Media Manager
Originally from Baltimore, MD, Aisling holds an MA from the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto (2022). Her research interests include contemporary theatre criticism, the canon and critical legacy of queer British playwright Sarah Kane, and multilingual/translated dramaturgies. Aisling is the Senior Editor at Intermission Magazine in Toronto, and graduated Magna Cum Laude with her Honours BA in Theatre from the University of Ottawa. As our Social Media Manager during the 2021-2022 academic year, Aisling ran all Collaboratory social media accounts and generated shareable, conversation-starting content about our oral history collections.
Andy Huynh
Communications Assistant
Andy completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto in May 2021 with majors in History and Political Science and a minor in French. Her research interests have ranged from topics of decolonizing the mind to the concept of gender in queer theory. As an aspiring polyglot, she currently speaks English, Vietnamese, French and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic. Having already completed a Certificate in Global Perspectives, she aims to further her insight into cultural and socio-political global issues. As our Communications Assistant, Andy was in charge of our social media presence during the 2020-2021 academic year.
For the ArQuives
Founded in 1973, The ArQuives is the largest independent LGBTQ2+ archives in the world and the only archive in Canada with a mandate to collect at a national level. Established to aid in the recovery and preservation of our histories, The ArQuives’ mandate is to acquire, preserve, organize, and give public access to information and materials in any medium, by and about LGBTQ2+ people, primarily produced in or concerning Canada; and to maintain a research library, international research files, and an international collection of queer and trans periodicals.
Raegan Swanson
Executive Director
Raegan serves as the Executive Director of The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ Archives. She holds a BA from Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface and a Masters of Information from the University of Toronto iSchool. Raegan has worked as an archivist at Library and Archives Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute and as the Archival Advisor for the Council of Archives New Brunswick. She is currently working on her PhD focusing on the role of community archives in Aboriginal and Inuit communities.
Lucie Handley-Girard
Archivist
Lucie has worked at The ArQuives as an Archivist since 2017. She holds a BA and a Masters of Information, both from the University of Toronto. In the summer of 2016, she was the Archives Assistant at The ArQuives, and has previously worked in records management. She currently sits on the Association for Canadian Archivists’ Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Taskforce. Her research interests include community archives, archival performativity, and archives as spaces for activism, resistance, and identity formation.
Jordan Saroya
Communications Assistant
Jordan has been the Administrative Assistant for The ArQuives since January 2020, and in 2021 provided administrative support for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project. He holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Toronto in Human Geography and Women & Gender Studies. He has worked in various administrative capacities and LGBTQ2+ community spaces. He personally values QTBIPOC (specifically trans) history and storytelling so is proud to be part of both The ArQuives and Collaboratory teams for their work in this area.
For the CDHI
The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) at the University of Toronto enables trans-disciplinary collaborations that emphasize questions of power, social justice, and critical theory in digital humanities research. Its vision is to harness the very tools of the digital revolution to forge a new paradigm of critical humanities scholarship, one that bridges the humanities’ emphasis on power and culture in historical perspective with the tools and analysis of digital technology.
Danielle Taschereau Mamers
Managing Director
Danielle served as Managing Director of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) from 2021-2024. In Summer 2022, she co-created CDHI’s UX Design for DH Accelerator Program. “The Pussy Palace: A Digital Exhibit,” was one of the first projects to work with the Accelerator. Danielle provided collaboration support between the Accelerator team and the Collaboratory and was genuinely thrilled to watch the project move from idea to design to interactive exhibit.
Matt Lefaive
Resident Web Developer
Matt graduated from the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) in 2019 with an HBSc in Computer Science and Linguistics. From 2022-2024, he served as the CDHI’s Digital Humanities (DH) Developer, aiding DH researchers in creating project websites and digital exhibitions. He is also the Project Manager for Bioline International and Project Coordinator for UTSC’s Department of Language Studies. As our resident web developer, Matt supported the Collaboratory with both the front- and back-end development of this very website as well as our digital exhibit. Matt is interested in open access research and developing web applications to assist in language preservation and learning.
Jesse Sinfield
Collaborating Web Developer
Jesse is a web developer with over a decade of experience transforming thoughtful web designs into rich, interactive, and accessible digital experiences. From large-scale WordPress platforms to dynamic React apps, he thrives on turning complex content into user-friendly, high-performance websites. Jesse joined the CDHI’s Accelerator team to optimize and refine the digital exhibit after its initial build. His work focused on enhancing interactivity, streamlining navigation, improving accessibility, and fine-tuning the overall user experience—ensuring that the final product is as dynamic and engaging as the history it showcases.
Drop a line to jessesinfield@gmail.com if you’d like to get in touch.
Peter Luo
UX Designer
Peter is a User Experience (UX) professional with a practical approach to design thinking and a passion to improve user experiences. As UX Designer for our digital exhibit, Peter collaborated with developer Matt Lefaive and in partnership with our research team to create and evolve a series of interactive design prototypes. He also conducted usability testing to ensure the designs were intuitive and presented the result to project narrators, showcasing how users would engage with their stories in an interactive, playful, yet respectful way.
Parita Patel
UX Design Consultant
Parita is a Master of Information (UX Design) student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. As a UX design consultant for this website, Parita assisted in enhancing user experience and navigation. She supported strategic restructuring of the information architecture to improve logical organization of website content. She guided the team in considering users’ perspectives, which helped to identify pain points and increase site usability and user engagement. In her free time, you can find Parita dancing to Bollywood tunes or curled up in a cozy corner with her latest read.