The Canadian Centre for Architecture welcomes applications for two virtual fellowships, each to be held for a three-week period between mid-October and mid-December or between mid-January and mid-March. The format of the fellowship supports our long-term investment in thinking through how digitized CCA Collection material can generate new historical configurations and timely interpretations, and how it can have a broader reach within architecture research. It also puts the two fellows into conversation to share perspectives and research insights. The Virtual Fellowship Program runs alongside our Research Fellowship Program to increase the accessibility of our Collection.

The 2026 edition of the CCA Virtual Fellowship Program returns to the lines of inquiry opened in its 2022 iteration, Papers that Remain: Post-Custodial Archives on the Continent. At that time, the CCA’s Find and Tell Elsewhere initiatives were in their most nascent form, with local collaborators in Khartoum just beginning the process of selecting and digitizing key materials from the office of Abdel Moneim Mustafa. The following year, the pilot project continued in dialogue with a group of researchers in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria, to make the work of first-generation architect Michael Olutusen Onafowokan available on Wikimedia Commons. Both substantive online archives are now accessible for research by diverse users worldwide, fulfilling the premise of a post-custodial approach, in which physical archival materials remain in Khartoum and Lagos, respectively. 

In parallel to these efforts, the CCA is currently undertaking a digitization project in Dakar focused on the materials that were initially archived by the Bureau d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme in the city for the Musée des civilisations noires, a project conceived in 1966 under President Léopold Senghor that was never built. Moreover, the CCA Collection has been evolving to reflect the professional trajectories and life experiences of diasporic African architectural culture with the recent donation of materials related to the work of Ghanaian-American architect Victor Adegbite, as well as those of Nigerian architect Frank Mbanefo. Adegbite’s materials—a diverse collection of reports, talks, and visual documentation—relate primarily to his involvement with the Tema Development Corporation and their work in developing masterplans and low-cost housing for a newly conceived section of Accra. Mbanefo’s wide-ranging collection of drawings, photographs, and correspondence traces projects from the 1970s and 1980s, including the Mausoleum for the President (1977) in Onitsha and the NIDB Head Quarters (1982) in Abuja. In addition, British-born architects John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood donated materials related to their nearly six-decade practice in Nigeria, with projects ranging in scale from private homes to masterplans, focusing on the country’s climatic zones as well as its political regimes. While not part of a full-fledged digitization initiative, select project materials will be made available as reference images for participants. 

Based on these materials and approaches to digitization, the 2026 Virtual Fellowship Program supports research that can draw intersectional lines of inquiry through these diverse bodies of digitized archival materials. These inquiries can look toward physical archives located in specific African and/or diasporic urban contexts and strengthen the CCA’s initiative in supporting African-led architectural archives. Extending questions shaping Fugitive Archives, the collective outcome from the CCA-Mellon Foundation Multidisciplinary Research Program Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecturehttps://www.cca.qc.ca/en/61282/centring-africa-postcolonial-perspectives-on-architecture), participants in the program can explore the shapes that architectural archives can take in the service of diverse national and urban contexts on African continent. These approaches can foreground questions of archival risk, informality, access, and institutionalization, while also critiquing the legacies of Sudanese, Nigerian, and other nation-state sustained forms of modernism that, through their iconic status, conceal active forms of marginalization. The 2026 program invites participants to highlight the historiographical and methodological implications of threading intersectional lines between diverse forms of architectural practice on the continent, beginning in the 1950s. Drawing on the CCA’s practices of post-custodial digitization and provision of access to materials in our Collection, participants can come together to bring overlooked practices and practitioners into view.

Fellows are encouraged to put CCA Collection material into conversation with a wide array of research materials held elsewhere, particularly project-specific documentation.

Virtual Fellows will collaborate with CCA staff to curate a selection of objects related to the theme that can provide an open-access resource for future research and instruction. Fellows will commit to working twelve hours per week on their project over three weeks, between mid-October and mid-December 2026 or between mid-January and mid-March 2027, for which they will each receive a CAD 2,500 honorarium, with the additional benefit of research assistance provided by the CCA Collection team.

Applicants to the Virtual Fellowship Program should undertake an initial survey of our Collection—processed archival material, Prints and Drawings, library materials, and our Photography collection—and briefly describe the specific objects they will mobilize to examine the 2026 theme.    

Applications should include the following materials (in English or French):

• A proposal (500 words) that describes the question holding the applicant’s attention with regards to African-led and defined architectural archives  

•  An abstract of the research proposal (250 words)  

• A curriculum vitae, including the names and contact of two references 

• A short biography (80–100 words) 

All applications must be submitted online through the CCA application portal  

Deadline: 16 October 2026 at midnight (EST) 

The 2026 Virtual Fellowship Program selection committee will be announced soon. 

For questions regarding the program, please contact studium@cca.qc.ca.

For updates on the program, please subscribe to the CCA newsletter.

2025: The Day to Day: What Matters to Architects Now?

2024: The Architectural Media of Urgency

2023: Embodied Visions: Photography Beyond the Technical Image

2022: Papers that Remain: Post-Custodial Archives on the Continent

2021: Building Matter