[1] Fischlin has a BFA in Music Performance, an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Musicology/English Literature; Concordia University), and a PhD in English Literature (York University), with a dissertation on the English lute song directed by Richard Hillman.
[4] In early 2009, he launched the Shakespeare Made in Canada Virtual Exhibit, which he curated at the MacDonald Stewart Arts Centre, in Guelph, ON.
[5] The Exhibit houses a multitude of resources (film, photographs, and other multimedia) that document the relationship between Canadian culture and Shakespeare.
[5] The exhibit inspired the publication of a book, Shakespeare Made in Canada: Contemporary Canadian Adaptations in Theatre, Pop Media, and Visual Arts, which documented the Shakespeare Made in Canada Exhibit and was edited by Fischlin and co-curator Judith Nasby.
Among others, he has been creator and designer on a number of online projects including literacy games for youth, interactive readers, content-based site design, and the Romeo + Juliet app, released in 2011 on the Apple iOS platform for iPhone, iPad, and iPod.
[7] Fischlin was also the lead designer/creator/producer of ‘Speare, an online 3D video game for youth that teaches Shakespearean literacy, launched in April 2007.
[8] He was also the creative mind behind the online literacy game Chronos, launched in the fall of 2008 on the CASP site.
[9] Additionally, Fischlin played a key role in the 2008 film Battle of Wills by Anne Henderson, documenting the steps taken to authenticate the Sanders Portrait of Shakespeare.
Fischlin is active as a musician and has recorded most recently with the Vertical Squirrels, an instant composition, free improvisation collective he co-founded with Ajay Heble, Lewis Melville, and Rob Wallace.
[11] The Vertical Squirrels is "a Canadian free improvisation musical collective dedicated to diverse musical expressions as a teaching and learning tool––and also as a vehicle for building community and establishing positive dialogue across personal, cultural, linguistic, geographic, and political barriers.
"[11] Initially conceived as an informal outlet to get Heble back into playing piano after years of curating the Guelph Jazz Festival (but rarely performing himself), the Squirrels quickly morphed into a recording and gigging band focused on their distinctive brand of in-the-moment improvisation.
[12] The band's latest endeavor is an album in collaboration with Grammy-nominated Canadian jazz musician Jane Bunnett, as well as Larry Cramer, Ben Grossman, and Scott Merritt, forthcoming in 2013.
The first book in the trilogy, Eduardo Galeano: Through the Looking Glass[20] was the first full-length, critical study of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, author of the Memory of Fire trilogy, and of the ground-breaking political critique Open Veins of Latin America.
[21] Part political biography, part cultural theory, Fischlin's and Nandorfy's book examines events that shaped Galeano's life through the lens of the rights implications embedded in the stories he tells—from his close personal friendship with Allende, through the dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina that forced him into exile, to the ongoing relationship between Galeano and Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Chiapas rebellion.
[19] Published with Duke University Press is another co-authored book (with Ajay Heble and George Lipsitz) that addresses rights issues in relation to improvisation and musical discourses associated with jazz, entitled The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Co-creation.
Fischlin is also the General Editor of the new Duke University Press book series entitled Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice, featuring books written as part of the research outcomes associated with the MCRI project of the same name.
[24] He is a founding co-editor of Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation, a journal, which is an open-access, peer-reviewed, electronic, academic journal on improvisation, community, and social practice housed at the University of Guelph.
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2011, and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Creator and editor; The Interactive Folio and Study Guide: Romeo and Juliet.
Shakespeare Made in Canada: Contemporary Canadian Adaptations in Theatre, Pop Media and Visual Arts.