Faculty bio

Research Interests: transnational feminism, intersectionality, migration, South Asian diaspora, caste formations, settler colonialism, Hindu right-wing mobilization in India and Canada

Harshita Yalamarty (she/her) holds a PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies from York University (Tkaronto), and an MPhil and an MA in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Most recently, she was an Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax (K’jipuktuk) and has previously taught at University of Delhi. Her dissertation was awarded the National Women's Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize (2022) and the Mary McEwan Memorial Prize in feminist scholarship (2022) by the Centre for Feminist Research, York University. She also enjoys reading sci-fi and fantasy, watching baking shows, is a budding birder and can talk for hours about the transformative potential of playing tabletop roleplaying games. 

Supervisor: Katherine McKittrick
Research interests: Black Canadian Art, Art history, Aesthetics, Black studies

This PhD project "Liberatory Aesthetics: Community, Archives, Activism and the matter of Black Canadian art"  builds on the research I began with my Master's thesis, "When and Where We Enter: Situating the Absented Presence of Black Canadian Art." I observe and build on the methodological and aesthetic practices of Black Canadian artists and think through how their creative works elicit new or different understandings of Black Canada.
 
My preliminary research in the area of Black Canadian art has revealed an intricate and coherent narrative of creative practices across the nation, one that notices how Black artists grapple with exclusion and racism, while also aesthetically attending to diasporic belonging. More specifically, my research has shown how Black art and visual practices work through and exist outside of colonial structures such as the gallery, the museum and other sites of curated procurement.
 
I see Black creative practices as illuminating unique methodologies and aesthetics that are invested in shaping narratives of liberation that do not rely on Black victimhood. My research program will track these narratives of liberation across the nation in order to provide a critical archive that recognizes otherwise hidden Black Canadian art histories and, at the same time, acknowledges how Black Canadian artists are producing creative works that are, perhaps, not intended for celebratory curation.
 
I have written about art for museums and galleries across Canada, as well as for international publications including Art in America, Vogue, Flash, FADER, Vulture, VICE Motherboard, Chatelaine, Canadian Art and C Magazine. I've lectured at universities and led writing workshops at galleries and non-profits, most recently at de Appel Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute, the Eindhoven Design Academy, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Momus.  I have adjudicated many awards and prizes and have been on the organizing committees for several conferences, symposiums, and public events. I was an editor at Canadian Art magazine from 2017-2021 and I started editing for Archive books in 2021.
 
This year I have been organizing the monthly event series what it looks like is good enough with Archive books Berlin, where I invite artists and writers to engage in conversations about black and anti-colonial praxis by sharing their current work and the ongoing ways in which they navigate the assumptions, violences and extractive imperatives of the present world order.
 
I am now working on a longer piece of fiction writing for the first time. Provisionally titled The Black Artist, the story is a satirical portrait of race in the art world.
 
https://www.archivesites.org/2023/02/21/what-it-feels-like-is-good-enough-1/
 
Recent writing includes:
 
Jan Wade: Soul Power, exhibition catalogue review
RACAR: Canadian Art Review , 2022, Vol. 47, No. 2, For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories (2022), pp. 124-126
 
Private Archives: Jorian Charlton at Gallery TPW
Art in America, 2021

Unrequited Love: June Clark Profile
Canadian Art, 2021
 
Excesses and Refusals: guest editors' introduction to Chroma, an issue dedicated to Black art in Canada (With Denise Ryner)
Canadian Art, 2020
 
Glitch and Figure: representation and refusal in the videos of Buseje Bailey and ariella tai
Vtape.org, 2020
 
Group Theory: Black queer organizing in the 1980s and '90s in Toronto
Canadian Art Magazine, 2019
 
"On Fire: Notes on the Spread of a Non-deterministic Schema" (with Rosa Aiello)
Public (Toronto), 2018, Vol.29 (58), p.169-177
 
When and Where We Enter: Situating the Absented Presence of Black Canadian Art
MA dissertation, 2019

Research Interests: Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, Black Studies, Gender Studies, Accessibility and Technology, Transnational Feminisms, Digital Literacy and Accessibility

Angela Stanley (MA 2014; PhD Candidate, Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies, York University) completed a Masters in Critical Disability Studies at York University, writing a major research paper on Disability and Sexuality: Perceptions of Beauty, Sexuality and Desirability for Queer, Disabled Youth. Her doctoral research pays attention to the intersection of race/culture, queerness and disability in order to understand how people make sense of their intimate and sexual lives. She has presented original work on these themes at conferences within North America and her work has been published in Canadian peer reviewed journals. Accessibility is at the core of her work, and she is the current Accessibility Coordinator for the Ontario Digital Literacy and Access Network (ODLAN). She has also shared her expertise on access/ accessibility needs with planning committees and research units at the university, corporate and non-profit levels, and is a reviewer for the Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal. She is Guyanese born and an avid fan of Star Trek. 

Research Interests: Performance (Practice and Research), Theatre History, Sociology of Theatre and Drama, Applied Theatre/Theatre Therapy, Literary and Performance Criticism, African & Black Drama and theatre , Canadian Drama, Indigenous American Drama, Trauma and Memory Studies in Drama and Performance, Interdisciplinary Studies, Film Studies, Playwriting, Acting, Directing.

Soji Cole studied Theatre and Film at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where he was also a teaching faculty for almost a decade before relocating to Canada. He was a Fulbright scholar in the School of Music, Theater and Dance at Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA. He is a winner of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) ‘Emerging Scholars’ Prize’, as well as a winner of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT) ‘New Scholars Prize’. He has also won the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Playwriting Prize, and the Nigeria Prize for Literature. He has been a finalist of the BBC World Playwriting competition, and the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature.

His current research focus is on African Black Immigrants and Specters of Otherness, with particular focus on creating drama works on black African immigrants’ experience of racism. 

Soji Cole has a PhD in Theatre and Film. He is currently on a second PhD program in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brock University.

Research Interests: victimology, women's rights within the legal system, sexual violence, gender-based violence, intersectionality and (digital) feminist activism.

Kharoll-Ann Souffrant is a doctoral candidate in social work at the University of Ottawa. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work from McGill University. Her dissertation focuses on Black feminist activists and Black survivors' perspectives on the #MeToo movement in Quebec. Kharoll-Ann Souffrant is also the author of Le privilège de dénoncer - Justice pour toutes les victimes de violences sexuelles, a book that offers an intersectional perspective on the #MeToo movement. It was published in Quebec and Europe by Les éditions du remue-ménage. She has been named a 2020 United Nations Fellow for People of African Descent and is a columnist for several Quebec media outlets.

Supervisor: Katherine McKittrick
Research interests: historical and contemporary feminism in the United States

Jeden O. Tolentino is an historian and an economist. His doctoral project at Queen's University focuses on African American podcasters becoming feminist and anti-racist in order to resist cis-heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. This work seeks to demonstrate the value of podcasts as oral histories for the use of future researchers, teachers, and students of gender studies and of Black studies.

Before coming to Queen's, Jeden earned master's degrees from De La Salle University (2010) and from York University (2021) and published research on various historical themes (e.g., immigration, colonialism, memory, psychiatry, feminism). He has also worked as a social scientist for almost two decades, first in the Philippines and then in Canada.