A writer shining light on the legacies of genocide, a lawyer working to humanize administrative justice, and a researcher turning lived experience into tools for change – these are the forward-thinking projects being led by this year’s recipients of three prestigious alumnae fellowships.
Awarded annually to female-identifying and non-binary ʹ’s grads, the Jean Royce Fellowship, Marty Memorial Fellowship, and Alfred Bader Fellowship in Memory of Jean Royce support a year of study, research, or a project that fosters creative expression or drives progress in knowledge or society.
Keep reading to meet this year’s recipients and discover how they’re planning to use the next 12 months to tell powerful stories, influence policy, and make a real-world impact.
Ani Colekessian, Artsci’07
Jean Royce Fellowship
For nearly 20 years, Ani Colekessian fought for human rights in Canada and around the world – all while holding onto a dream: to write a novel about the choices we make and the lives we build in the face of atrocity. Now, with help from the Jean Royce Fellowship, that dream is finally taking shape.
“As a writer, there aren’t many financial guarantees,” says Colekessian. “For years, I tried to write this book at the side of my desk while working a demanding job. This fellowship grant allows me the time to finalize the research and writing of this novel.”
Colekessian recently left her senior leadership and communications role at Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights so that she could focus on the project full time.
Blending historical research and creative storytelling, the novel explores how everyday people survive and enable systemic violence. Drawing on Colekessian’s own family history in both the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, it tries to humanize these events through the lens of ordinary lives while addressing questions of complicity, survival, and the social conditions that allow violence to take root.
Grounded in interviews, archival research, and her career in human-rights advocacy, the novel will connect the past to the present, says Colekessian, showing how patterns of misinformation, apathy, and scapegoating continue today.
Her aim, she says, is to build empathy and spark dialogue across communities, helping readers understand how history repeats and how individuals can choose different paths.
“In my work especially, I could see the ways in which misinformation was creating increasing division, fear, and anger,” says Colekessian. “I knew that now was the time to tell this story with its call for empathy and message of our shared humanity.”
Megan Pfiffer, Artsci’16, Law’19
Alfred Bader Fellowship in Memory of Jean Royce
We’ve all been there: applying for a driver’s licence, accessing social supports, or dealing with any number of government services often means going through an official decision-maker. But sometimes we don’t agree with the outcome – like when an immigration visa is denied. In those cases, we can ask a court to step in through a process called judicial review.
The problem, says Megan Pfiffer, is that the law that governs a particularly important kind of judicial review is “notoriously unstable.” The doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law wants to help change that and says that this fellowship will help her do that.
“Without this fellowship, I would have to dedicate much more energy to part-time work to support myself financially. And as any academic knows, time freed from competing obligations is invaluable for the purposes of pursuing challenging intellectual work, so the fellowship will be a huge benefit to the overall project.”
More specifically, the fellowship will support the final year of work on Pfiffer’s doctoral thesis, which is all about trying to fix long-standing issues in administrative justice. She is proposing a more person-centred approach where those affected get clear, reasoned decisions in those judicial reviews that show them respect and uphold the rule of law.
Pfiffer says she applied for the fellowship not just because of the generous financial support but because it comes from the place that gave her the intellectual foundation to complete this project.
“ʹ’s has, in so many ways, helped me to reach the place I am now, and so it felt fitting that the final stage of my studies would be supported by and dedicated to the university.”
Halima Wali, PhD’25
Marty Memorial Fellowship
Born in Northern Nigeria and raised between the north and south, Halima Wali knows all too well the complex pressures many women and girls face in Northern Nigeria – especially the push and pull between the confinement of domestic expectations and the freedom that can be found through education, she says.
These kinds of tensions run through her doctoral dissertation, “Women’s Lived Experience of Education in Northern Nigeria,” and she plans on continuing to explore them and the stories of the women at the core of her study with the funding from the Marty Memorial Fellowship.
“I applied for this fellowship because it aligns with the heart of my work, which is bridging research and community through storytelling,” says Wali. “I wanted the chance to carry my PhD research beyond the academic space and into the hands of educators, communities, and women whose stories shaped it.”
Wali’s research explores what it means to grow up as a girl and woman in a society where silence is often expected over brilliance. Grounded in feminist and intersectional frameworks as well as interviews with women from the region she weaves a collective story of resilience, constraint, and the hunger to learn. Part of the goal, says Wali, is to illuminate how women navigate educational spaces shaped by cultural expectations, gendered limitations, and unspoken rules.
Now, with the help of the fellowship, the goal is to take that research beyond academia. Her plan is to develop a series of workshops and storytelling resources for classrooms, communities, and policy spaces across Nigeria, Africa, Canada, and beyond. The idea is for these tools to spark meaningful conversations and connections that might drive change.
“It’s an opportunity to honour the voices at the core of my research and ensure they spark dialogue and change far beyond the dissertation,” says Wali.
Head to the Awards and Fellowships page to learn more about all the honours offered to alumni and others from the ʹ’s community.
