Citing Our Sources?

Citing sources is often considered a basic element of academic integrity and media literacy. But what happens when our sources are themselves dubious, contradictory, misrepresented, or otherwise unreliable? How should those engaging with historical or contemporary media responsibly engage with claims, sources, and narratives that wind up being more complicated than they might at first appear?

In this panel, Dario Brancato (Classics, Modern Languages, and Linguistics), Kristin Franseen (History), and Meaghan Landrigan-Buttle (History) will each present a source from their research (spanning from Italian Renaissance "fake fake news" to early Romantic music journalism to contemporary Irish mafia romance novels) that leads to a larger story about how historical sources are used and understood. This will be followed by conversation among the panelists and an open question/conversation period.

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca  

Dario Brancato 

Dario Brancato is Professor of Italian at the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics. He is a specialist of the Italian Renaissance, in particular 16th century culture in Florence (including the philosophical debates on language, poetry, and history), and Digital Humanities. His approach involves the study of material and textual evidence to investigate issues related to power and patronage, aesthetics, and poetics. His publications revolve around the network of Florentine intellectuals in the 1500s, and their relationship with the duke Cosimo de’ Medici. He has been the recipient of several awards (including a fellowship at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance), and is currently finishing his SSHRC-funded project titled The Italian Art of Political Correctness: Patronage, Censorship, and Authorship in Florentine Renaissance Historiography.

Kristin Franseen 

Kristin Franseen (she/her) is a FRQSC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Concordia University, where she is also affiliated with the Simone de Beauvoir Institute and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. She received a PhD in musicology from McGill University in 2019. Her research examines the role of gossip, anecdote, and other unreliable sources in the histories of musicology, music theory, and composer biography. Her first book, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson, was published by Clemson University Press in 2023. Articles stemming from her research also appear in Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, and Grove Music Online. In May 2024, she will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University, focusing on research for a new book project tentatively entitled The Intriguing Afterlives of Antonio Salieri: Gossip, Fiction, and the Post-Truth in Music Biography. 

Meaghan Landrigan-Buttle 

Meaghan Landrigan-Buttle (she/her) is a PhD student in history and Irish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on Irish masculinities and histories of Irish men in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using masculinity studies as a paradigm through which to explore men in war and commemoration, she seeks to deconstruct and complicate the traditional idealized masculinity that accompanies the nationalized ‘soldier hero’. Combining her doctoral work with her love of smut and all things romance encourages her to consider how the men in these novels are constructed and consumed. She is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) and is a longstanding member of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies (CAIS).