Rachel Fernandes is a PhD candidate studying contemporary Canadian literature. Her dissertation focuses on the mixed race Asian Canadian identity in poetry, memoir, and the novel. Her secondary areas of interest include food studies, African American literature, and the digital humanities. As a Teaching Fellow at Queen's in the Fall of 2022, she taught ENGL284, "Marginalized Voices in Can Lit: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality". She also worked as a Research Assistant to Dr. Kristin Moriah from 2020-23, providing assistance in organizing the Black Studies Summer Seminar and supporting work on digitizing the archives of 19th-century Black abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd Cary.
Rachel is currently a 2023-24 Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Black Digital Studies at Pennsylvania State University where she continues to work on digital projects that celebrate and commemorate Black history.
Critical Mixed Race Studies, Contemporary Literature, Canadian Literature, North American Literature, Critical Race Theory.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Listening to Loving: Mildred Loving and the Case for Quiet Activism”. Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Vol. 3, Issue 3, Fall 2022, 288-308, https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2022.3.3.288.
Book Chapters
[Forthcoming]“Appetites and Identity: Mixed Race Identity Construction Through Food and Sex in Carmit Delman’s ‘Footnote’”. Significant Food in American Literature, edited by Jeff Birkenstein and Robert Hauhart, University of Georgia Press, 2024.
Selected Book Reviews
“The Pull of the North”: A Review of Tainna by Norma Dunning and White Resin by Audrée Wilhelmy. Canadian Literature, August, 2022, https://canlit.ca/article/the-pull-of-the-north/.
"Flow and Flight”: A Review of Northern Light by Kazim Ali and Flight from Grace by Richard Pope, Canadian Literature, June 2022, https://canlit.ca/article/flow-and-flight/
“All the Feels”: A Review of Feeling it All, Edited by Marie Carrière, Ursula Mathis-Moser, and Kit Dobson, Canadian Literature, October 2021, https://canlit.ca/article/feeling-it-all/.
My dissertation explores representations of Asian mixed race identity in memoir, poetry, and the novel.
