Cristina Wood is a Ph.D. candidate in History at York University, committed to creative storytelling about the past. Her dissertation project, Enchanting the Ottawa: An Affective Environmental History of the Ottawa River, will follow the waterway’s transition from a transit and trade thoroughfare to a regulated, recreational place. Building on her work in public history and digital humanities, Cristina draws on archival and oral histories and material culture to bring alive environmental pasts and futures. Cristina’s work has also been supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship. Her Master’s research featured the history of one section of the Ottawa through data sonification – a novel method for communicating information through sound. For this project, she received the 2019 University Medal for Outstanding Graduate Work at Carleton University. Cristina was the 2018-2019 Garth Wilson Fellow for Public History at Ingenium: Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, and she later introduced tools for digital curation to museum staff. Born in France, Cristina grew up near the shore of the Kichi Sibi River in Ottawa. Her undergraduate studies at Queen’s University helped her discover passions for history and environmental studies, along with public history and community engagement, especially through a commemorative project reaching schools across Canada.
