Kiera Obbard

Kiera Obbard is a poet and PhD candidate in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her SSHRC-funded project, “The Instagram Effect: Contemporary Canadian Poetry Online,” examines the complex social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions that have enabled the success of social media poetry in Canada, how the technological affordances of social media platforms mediate reading and writing, and the relationship between social media poetry and data mining practices. She completed her MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University and her honours BA with a joint major in English and Communication at the University of Ottawa. She is currently a graduate research assistant for the Translating Digital Canadas project, a fellow at The Humanities Interdisciplinary Collaboration (THINC) Lab, and an editorial board member for the Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies.