Queer and Trans Research Lab Faculty Fellowships

Urvashi Chakravarty (she/her) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto.  She works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and slavery and servitude in early modern England and the Atlantic world. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press 2022) explores the ideologies of Atlantic slavery in early modern England, revealing the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid. While with the QTRL, Chakravarty will spend the year working on her second monograph entitled Racial Futurity: Gender, Slavery, and Property in Early Modernity, which addresses the construction of early modern whiteness and the conscription of labour as property through the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and reproduction, attending to the ways in which Atlantic frameworks of race and slavery were underwritten by early modern formations of racialized gender and sexuality. Alongside Racial Futurity, Chakravarty is working on The Oxford Handbook of Intersectionality in Early Modern English Literature, which focusses on the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the premodern world and which is founded on the idea that early modern English literary and cultural texts are crucial to new directions in critical race studies, queer and sexuality studies, and gender and trans studies. In addition, she is completing work on a co-edited collection titled Race/Queer/Queens and is co-editing another collection on Trans Milton.