Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies

Queer and Trans Research Lab Faculty Fellowships

The Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) is pleased to invite applications for the Martha McCain Research Fellowship Program. This fellowship program provides two Twelve-Month Faculty Research Fellowships, with replacement funds to each Fellow’s home unit, allowing for a full year of course release for the successful candidates. In addition, the fellow is provided with a $5000.00 research budget and a Graduate Student Research Assistant. For the 2025-26 academic year there will only be one fellowship offered. 

The QTRL was launched in fall 2021, establishing a cross-campus, multi-faculty, and interdisciplinary humanities-, arts-, and social science-based research lab housed at The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Science. This exciting initiative bridges methodological practices in LGBTQ2S+ and sexuality studies across the disciplines as well as across creative and scholarly research practices. It gathers researchers, students, artists, community leaders, and activists whose work attends to entrenched and emerging social and political problems affecting LQBTQ2S+ and BIPOC lives and communities. 

Central to the mission of the QTRL, the Faculty Research Fellow will be chosen for their distinction in achievements relative to their career stage as well as the excellence of their proposed project and its relation to LGBTQ2S+ and QTBIPOC research initiatives across the disciplines. Research Fellows will participate in QTRL activities, carry out their own research and creative agendas, and work with others in the QTRL cohort on the development of collaborative research and community engagement projects.  

Each applicant must provide the following: 

  1. An updated CV 
  2. A 1-page description of their research project 
  3. A letter from their unit Chair or Director supporting the fellowship application 
  4. The names of three references and their contact information. 

      Completed applications should be emailed to qtrl.sds@utoronto.ca by February 3rd, 2025, for full consideration. 

        Applications for 2025-26 Faculty Fellowships NOW OPEN (Deadline: February 3, 2025)

        Martha-McCain-Faculty-Fellowship-2025-26

        2024-25


        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.



        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.