QTRL Cohort 2024-25

Dana Seitler is Professor of English and Director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (2008) and Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction (2019), which was a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBTQ Studies. She has published in several academic journals including American Quarterly, GLQ, Criticism, Cultural Critique, American Literature, Genre, and A/SAP. Her current project, Narcopoetics: Biopolitics, Withdrawal, Ecstasy focuses on the politics and aesthetics of the opioid crisis at the intersections of race and sexuality in the U.S.

Christopher (C.G.) Smith received their Ph.D. from the Department of Social Justice Education – Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) / University of Toronto in 2020. Their research interests reside in the productive interstices of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, Black expressive cultures and practices, Black and Queer geographies, Queer of Color Critique, and Black Feminist theories of decolonization. Their first manuscript tentatively titled “Itinerant Hospitalities: Black. Queer. World-making”, explores the aesthetic and performative strategies cultivated by contemporary Black LGBT+ artists and activists that enable collective responses to the persistence of HIV in Black communities globally. Their publications include “Where U From, Who U Wit!?”: Black Pride Festivals as Itinerant Hospitality” in the special issue “Queer Canada” in the Journal of Canadian Studies (2020). Their book chapter, co-authored with Dr. Heather Sykes, “Trans*, Intersex and Cisgender issues in Physical Education and Sport” (2016) offers a decolonial analysis of Trans* inclusive policy initiatives addressing Trans* experience in K-12 educational settings. It will be reprinted in the 2nd edition of Queerly Canadian: An Introductory Reader in Sexuality Studies in 2022 by Canadian Scholar’s Press. Their most recent article “Matters of Formation and the Queer Afterlives of Stuart Hall” (2024) can be found in SX Salon, a Small Axe project.

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.

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, TV, film, and fashion. A Canadian Screen Award winner, Vivek is the creator and writer of the new CBC Gem Original Series How to Fail as a Popstar, which had its international premiere at Cannes. She has collaborated with musical icons Jann Arden, Peaches, and Jully Black, and was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. Her best-selling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and she is the founder of the award-winning publishing imprint VS. Books, (featured on CBC’s Canada Reads) which supports emerging BIPOC writers. Vivek has been a brand ambassador for MAC Cosmetics and Pantene, and she is a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation.

Rafael Grohmann is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Critical Platform Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media & Faculty of Information. His research focuses on how workers are learning and failing to govern digital technologies, such as platforms, data, and artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus in Latin America. During the faculty fellowship, Grohmann will conduct the research for his project Failure in Queer and Trans Worker-Owned Platforms. The aim of this project is to analyze how the concept of queer failure can be applied to understand platform cooperatives owned by queer and trans working people. Working with and on these queer and trans-led platform labour cooperatives in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, Grohmann engages platform and digital labour studies via queer and trans methodological innovations in digital research. The project informs his SSHRC-funded project Worker-Owned Intersectional Platforms (WOIP), with a focus in Brazil and Argentina. During the faculty fellowship, Grohmann will also work on his first book project in English, Laboratories of Organizing: Workers Failing and Learning How to Govern Digital Technologies. The notion of queer failure is one of the core concepts of the book, which will provide a notion of failure from a queer and anti-capitalist framework to understand the experimental, out of place, incomplete movements of Latin American workers – especially queer, trans, black and brown people, and women – in their struggles around platform labour as they work to build and govern their own digital technologies.

Liza Blake is Associate Professor of English, with research interests in early modern literature, the histories of philosophy and science, and asexuality studies. With two U of T students, she founded the online Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography, a resource with tagged bibliography entries meant to help scholars find relevant writing on the topics of asexuality and aromanticism studies. She has published on “Teaching Premodern Asexualities and Aromanticisms” in The Sundial and is co-editing (with Catherine Clifford and Aley O’Mara) a collection called Early Modern Asexualities. While at the QTRL, she will be bringing the edited collection to completion, updating the online Bibliography, and beginning work on a new monograph entitled “I want not love”: The Asexuality and Aromanticism of Early Modern Love Poetry. The book argues that though the modern trend is to read Renaissance love poetry as erotic and saturated with desire, it is in this body of work that we can find some of the clearest first-person assertions of never having experienced attraction or desire, so that we might label this poetry as one of our earliest “asexual archives.” But it also argues we cannot embrace these early forms of ace and aro representation without critically analyzing the misogyny, racism, and ableism that that “asexuality” includes. Through careful close reading and in conversation with modern theory, the book will dissect early modern love poetry, tracing the long afterlife of this poetry in the ways we talk about, theorize, and normalize sexual desire and romantic attraction today.

Shaun Brodie (he/him) is a classically trained trumpet player with a performance degree from the University of Victoria, and extensive experience as a session and freelance musician. Performing live and in-studio with many of Canada’s top indie acts, Shaun has toured internationally and appeared on a wide spectrum of stages including The Late Show with David Letterman and the Glastonbury Festival. In 2014 Shaun founded the Queer Songbook Orchestra (QSO), a formidable 14-piece chamber pop ensemble dedicated to expressing and uplifting 2SLGBTQ+ narratives. In recent years this project has expanded to now include the Queer Songbook Youth Orchestra, an ensemble providing performance opportunities and mentorship to queer, trans, questioning and allied youth; as well as QSO Kids, which offers programming designed to nurture inclusivity and acceptance for elementary school classrooms. A highly collaborative, community-based project, the QSO have worked with 200+ collaborators and toured extensively throughout Canada and were longlisted for the 2018 Polaris Prize for their collaborative album with Vivek Shraya. While with the Queer and Trans Research Lab, Brodie will focus his time on finding ways to expand on the foundation the QSO has built since 2014 and grappling with questions such as: How can we continue to cultivate an effective and ongoing space for a 2SLGBTQ+ youth focused program to flourish? How can we further develop programming for a k – 6 demographic which balances entertainment and education in meaningful and insightful ways? How can we better connect with a broader spectrum of the community and facilitate an even wider selection of experiences being brought to light? How can the QSO address these and other big picture questions in a shifting political environment which is posing more and more obstacles for genuine queer and trans representation?

Yasmeen Persad is a passionate community leader, advocating for the rights of and providing programming for trans and gender diverse people, particularly trans people of color, trans people living with and/or affected by HIV, trans newcomers, and trans women who are sex workers. As creator of the Trans Women HIV Research Initiative (TWIRI) at Women’s College Hospital, Persad has extensive experience conducting community-based participatory research with trans and gender diverse communities. Yasmeen has worked for more than 15 years with trans people of intersecting identities and experiences to create opportunities, reduce barriers, and increase access to health and social services across the province, country, and internationally. During her year with the QTRL, she plans to create a series of brief, strengths-based videos that aim to empower and encourage trans women of color to discuss their sexual health and speak about HIV in a positive light. The videos will discuss pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis (Prep and PEP), which, while widely available, are not accessible and inclusive of trans women’s voices. The videos will debunk myths around HIV and gender-affirming care, share information about HIV among trans women, and work to decrease social isolation in our community. The overarching goal of these videos will be to reduce both internalized shame and stigma among trans women of color, including trans women who are sex workers, who are often left behind in these conversations. Additionally, these videos can be shared with service providers to help reduce the stigma they may perpetuate.

Petra Totten (BA, MFA) is an award-winning nonfiction film and video artist currently based in Toronto, Ontario. Her work has won awards at the Emmys and InsideOut, and has been screened across Europe, Asia, and North America. Currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, Totten’s work is exploratory in nature, seeking to highlight the beauty in lived experience; utilizing the essay film form and visual anthropology to represent queer and trans communities in ways grounded in care and mutual respect.

Upasana Bhattacharjee is a PhD student at the Faculty of Information and Sexual Diversity Studies. Their dissertation “Men, Media, Mohalla: Spatial politics of racialised platform workers in Toronto” explores how mobility and urban infrastructures become sites and sources for the production of masculinities. Food delivery platforms create spatial patterns and temporal rhythms of congregation (for instance, on sidewalks and intersections, or close to laundromats) for their South Asian workforce. By examining the racial and gendered histories of labour in settler colonial spaces, Upasana explores how cities are (re)imagined and (re)organised through technology. Their research works in conversation with queer of colour critique to examine how racialised masculinities are shaped through non-normative kinship structures, temporalities, and migration.

Wiley Sharp is a Doctoral Student in Urban and Cultural Geography and Sexual Diversity Studies. Their dissertation, The underbelly of the colonial metropole: Queer and trans pasts and presents in Toronto’s Bloor Viaduct examines the Bloor Viaduct as a complicated place. The double-decked truss-arched bridge stretches 960 meters across the Don Valley, facilitating flows of people and goods that make Toronto’s urban life possible. The viaduct is also one of the most used suicide sites in the world: more than 400 people have ended their lives there before the construction of a suicide barrier in 2003. Yet, the underbelly of the viaduct is also a site of queer and trans survival in the raves that take place beneath its ironwrought arches. The viaduct, then, is a place of many lives and deaths, a nexus of the settler-colonial power that brought it into being. What are we to make of the vivacious queer and trans lives that take root amid the viaduct’s deathscapes? This project combines archival research into the colonial-modern history of the viaduct, the migrant laborers who constructed it, and the rather queer suicides that haunted its first hundred years, with interviews with the queer and trans people who appropriate the infrastructure of the viaduct for other ends. In doing so, it explores how queer and trans people make their lives in the colonial-modern metropole of Toronto, and how they grapple with the hauntings of its violent pasts and presents.