Three PhD alumni receive Governor General’s Gold Medal

Former University of Toronto graduate students Karl Manis, Chido Muchemwa and Tatiana Ruiz-Bedoya have received the 2024 Governor General’s Gold Medal in recognition of academic excellence at the graduate level. The gold medal, awarded each year to three U of T students determined to have the highest academic standing, is one of the most prestigious honours reserved for graduate students in Canada. Candidates are evaluated based on their performance in degree courses, the merit of their thesis and its defense, and the originality and importance of their research.

2023–24 Governor General’s Gold Medal Winners

Dr. Karl Manis

PhD 2023, Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Science

Karl Manis has a PhD in English from the University of Toronto, where he is currently a postdoctoral fellow. His research and teaching span the fields of literature, media studies and digital culture. His SSHRC-funded doctoral research examined how recent fiction adapts and absorbs changing technological milieus, with a focus on the sensory and embodied experiences of reading. His current work includes ongoing projects on how narrative fiction (including novels, films and video games) reimagines past and present media technologies; and on computational approaches to literary and cultural analysis. Dr. Manis also has experience as an educational developer and trainer for graduate student teachers, and he is a recipient of the Department of English President’s Teaching Award. His writing on comics, literary sounds, postmodernism, and styles of reading appears or is forthcoming in NOVEL, Critique, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Music In/As Literature. He is an avid collector of old media.

Dr. Chido Muchemwa

PhD 2023, Faculty of Information and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Chido Muchemwa is a Zimbabwean writer currently living in Canada. In 2022, Muchemwa was a recipient of the Morland African Writing Scholarship. Her work has previously appeared in several literary reviews and journals, and she has been shortlisted twice for the Short Story Day Africa Prize and placed second in the Humber Literary Review’s 2020 Emerging Writers Fiction Contest. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming. Dr. Muchemwa graduated in 2023 with a PhD in Information from the Faculty of Information and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research fields are critical archival studies, queer African studies and postcolonial studies. In her dissertation, Muchemwa theorized how queer people are defining non-normative sexualities in Zimbabwe by tracing the myriad ways they engage in social negotiations of identity, and the stories they tell.

Dr. Tatiana Ruiz-Bedoya

PhD, Department of Cell & Systems Biology

Tatiana Ruiz-Bedoya acquired an appreciation of natural diversity exploring the Chicamocha Canyon near her home in Colombia. From an early age, she sought to understand nature through science. Moving through academia in Bogotá, Uppsala, Munich, Boston and Toronto, Ruiz-Bedoya accumulated prodigious experience in genetics. Her interests ranged from identifying trafficked animals through DNA to evolutionary genetics of flower colour.

Ruiz-Bedoya is fascinated by the rapid evolutionary changes coming out of the arms race between pathogens and hosts. Her doctoral research in Toronto changed the way the scientific community assesses the evolution of virulence. She continues to pursue this fascination in her postdoctoral research at Harvard. Ruiz-Bedoya attributes her drive to values instilled in her by her family and relates her love for science to a sense of service towards nature and humanity. Her mentors showed that fulfillment can come from passion for research and that happy people do the best science; Ruiz-Bedoya appreciates and seeks the contentment that comes from finding time to enjoy life.

Governor General’s Academic Medal

The Academic Medals were created in 1873 and are presented on behalf of the Governor General by participating educational institutions, along with personalized certificates signed by the Governor General.