Christine Mitchell, PhD
College of Arts and Sciences
Assistant Professor
Biography
Professor Mitchell received her PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University in 2011. Her academic background spans visual arts production and linguistics and she holds both a BFA and MA from the University of Alberta. For the past decade, she has been an active professional contributor to cultural media industries, spanning television producing, screenwriting for children’s animated television, immersive multimedia storyworld production, content marketing and social media management.
After completing her PhD, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the SpokenWeb digital archive project at Concordia University in Montreal in 2013-2014, conducting research and leading an iOS app design project team. From 2014 to 2016, she was Visiting Scholar in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University, where she advanced research on early AI and pedagogical technologies and hosted a symposium on machine translation. In 2021, she was Visiting Researcher in the Arts, Culture, and Media Department at the University of Toronto, where she led a video-based project on educational technology history.
Professor Mitchell’s dissertation presents a first-of-its-kind investigation of machine translation as a precursor to AI, and her ongoing research focuses on cultural and technological implications of language learning machines and pedagogical media. She designed and taught McGill’s first undergraduate course on digital media and was appointed course lecturer repeatedly on the strength of her course proposals and student evaluations.
She served as co-editor and served on the editorial board for Amodern, an online academic journal on digital media and culture. Dr. Mitchell’s research appears in scholarly and public venues, and she has been invited to present her research findings at conferences in Canada, the US, Germany, and Switzerland.
- Communication and culture
- Media forms and messaging
- Media history and theory
- Pedagogical media and technology
- Machine translation and AI
- Language and translation
- Creative storytelling
- Digital content creation and curation
- Mediations of language
- Creative storytelling
- Writing for digital media
- Media forms and messaging
- Media production
- Digital content creation and curation
- Mediations of language
- Communication and media history
- Machine translation and AI
- Pedagogical media and technology
- Language and translation
- Feature article, “How Canada Accidentally Helped Crack Computer Translation,” The Walrus (Canada’s premiere national culture and politics magazine), March/April 2022.
- “Whether Something Works: Finding the Human in the Margins of Machine Translation.” In Raley, R. and C. Mitchell (eds.) Amodern 8: Translation-Machination. January 2018.
- “Who Will Translate the Web?” Mathias Denecke/Anne Ganzert/Isabell Otto/Robert Stock (eds.): Reclaiming Participation. Technology – Mediation – Collectivity. (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 245-256.
- “Again, the Air Conditioners: Finding Poetry in the Institutional Archive.” In Camlot, J. and C. Mitchell (eds.) Amodern 4: The Poetry Series. March 2015.
- Arawjo, I., Mitchell, C. and Camlot, J. “PoetryLab: a close listening game for iOS,” Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play (Toronto, ON, Canada — October 19 – 22, 2014). (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 311-314).
- “Unweaving Weaver from Contemporary Critiques of Machine Translation.” Canadian Association of Translation Studies Young Researchers Program, 2010.
- “Materiality: Tracking a Term, Tackling a Turn,” in Kritische Perspektiven: “Turns,” Trends und Theorien, ed. Michael Gubo et al. (Münster: LTI Verlag, 2011), 281-300.
- “Translation and Materiality: The Paradox of Visible Translation.” Spectator, the USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism, 30(1), Spring 2010, 23-29.
- Review essay. “Speaking in Science,” Public Books, 9.15.2015. Review of Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English by Michael D. Gordin. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
- Review Essay. “Does Not Compute: Language Circuits and Translatability.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 26 (Fall) 2011, 179-185.
- (2011) PhD in Communication Studies, McGill University
- (1997) MA in Modern Languages and Comparative Studies, University of Alberta
- (1993) BFA in Art & Design with distinction, University of Alberta
- 2023 Writers Guild of Canada Award for Best Screenwriting, Children’s category
- FQRSC Postdoctoral Fellowship (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture)
- Media@McGill Graduate Student Travel Award
- Beaverbrook Dissertation Completion Award
- McGill Faculty of Arts Bursary
- FQRSC Doctoral Fellowship (Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture)
- Slavic and East European Studies Award in Russian Studies (University of Alberta)
- Louise McKinney Post-Secondary Scholarship (University of Alberta)
