Martha LA McCain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto invites applications for a one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship during the 2025-26 academic year, with the possibility of an additional one-year renewal, to support emerging scholars pursuing research in queer, trans, and LGBTQ2+ studies. Our search committee welcomes proposals that span disciplinary boundaries. Applicants from all fields of the humanities and the social sciences are encouraged to apply. The successful applicant is expected to be in residence in the Greater Toronto Area during the period of their award and will join the faculty and students who make up our intellectual community and participate in the Centre’s day-to-day activities. They will also be an active member of the Queer and Trans Research Lab 2025-26 cohort (a collaborative research project based at The Bonham Centre with a focus on methods in queer and trans studies across the disciplines as well as across creative and activist research practices). The Postdoctoral Fellow will work under the supervision of Dr. Dana Seitler, Faculty Lead for the Queer and Trans Research Lab. The Postdoctoral Fellow will offer one undergraduate class for the Sexual Diversity Studies undergraduate program and, at some point during the period of their award, deliver at least one public lecture that highlights their work. They will be able to utilize the vast faculty resources, archives, and library collections available at the University of Toronto, the Bonham Centre, and in the city. The successful candidate will receive a combined research and teaching stipend of $65,000, plus benefits, to support themselves for the duration of their fellowship. To get a sense of the wide disciplinary range and diversity of the Bonham Centre’s community, the Queer and Trans Research Lab, and our academic offerings consult our website (http://sds.utoronto.ca).
All application materials should be submitted via email in a single PDF by January 3, 2025 to The Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the following address: qtrl.sds@utoronto.ca. Fellowships will normally be awarded to candidates affiliated with a university other than the University of Toronto. The fellowship is open to non-Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and international scholars.
Candidates must have completed their Ph.D. within a maximum of 3 years before the appointment date (August 19, 2025). To apply submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research project outline, writing sample, and three confidential letters of reference (submitted directly by the referees via email). At least one of the reference letters should speak to the applicant’s teaching experience and ability.
The normal hours of work are 40 hours per week for a full-time postdoctoral fellow (pro-rated for those holding a partial appointment), recognizing that the needs of the employee’s research and professional development and the needs of the supervisor’s research program may require flexibility in the performance of the employee’s duties and hours of work.
Employment as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto is covered by the terms of the CUPE 3902 Unit 5 Collective Agreement.
This job is posted in accordance with the CUPE 3902 Unit 5 Collective Agreement.
The University of Toronto is strongly committed to diversity within its community and especially welcomes applications from racialized persons/persons of colour, women, Indigenous/Aboriginal People of North America, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ 2S+ persons, and others who may contribute to the further diversification of ideas.
Applications for 2025-26 Postdoctoral Fellowship NOW OPEN (Deadline: January 3, 2025)
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LJ Slovin received their PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. Their first book, Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, is based on a yearlong ethnography conducted with trans youth in a high school. In the study, Slovin interrogates how dominant approaches to trans-inclusivity in schools reproduce constrained understandings of trans identity that are informed by and uphold structures of whiteness, settler colonialism, and ability. Slovin focuses on how this context demands significant labour from youth, including work they must perform daily to navigate relationships with teachers, peers, the curriculum, policy, the physical space of the school as well as to build worlds outside of adult surveillance to exist in their genders more capaciously. Before joining as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre, Slovin was an instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC and in the Women’s Studies Program at Langara College. They will join the faculty at the School for Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria in 2025. Slovin was a Vanier Scholar, the 2020 recipient of the Pat Clifford Award, and the 2021 recipient of the Queer SIG Article of the Year Award at AERA. Their work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Sex Education, Journal of LGBT Youth, and RERM.
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse received her DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. She is currently completing her first monograph, Gays and Girls Make Worlds, which shows how gender and sexually diverse communities of colour living under apartheid in South Africa undertook the politically and culturally significant work of creating more just and expansive realities, with a particular focus on the GALA Queer Archive’s Kewpie Photographic Collection and associated depictions of Cape Town’s lost District Six. Building on this research, Ruth’s next major project will offer the first critical genealogy of the Southern African word moffie: customarily a pejorative descriptor for individuals read as effeminate men that has been recently reclaimed as a defiant term of self-identification in a manner comparable to queer in the global North. Prior to joining the Bonham Centre as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Ruth has been a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, a Research Associate at the University of Manchester’s Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity, and Merton College’s inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Scholar. She remains an Associate of the Stuart Hall Foundation and is an organizing member of the queer South African collective Salon Kewpie. Her writing has appeared in publications including GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography and has been awarded a prize by the Queer African Studies Association.
Previous Postdoctoral Fellows
2023-24: LJ Slovin
2021-22: Elif Sari
2019-21: Sara Shroff
Postdoctoral Fellowship Lecture Archive
Elif Sari:
Sara Shroff: