Research Seminar Series - Cheryl Thompson

Cheryl Thompson’s latest book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897 begins with the conflicts that shaped North America – the American Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812. Next, it connects these origins with eighteenth-century British immigration, which brought folk dances and masking traditions to North America. From there, it unmasks when and how “Jim Crow” became an Atlantic world sensation, which set the stage for blackface to expand. Finally, it considers how Black acts reimagined the parameters of their own freedom through choral singing. The research for this book began in 2011, and by the time she started writing in 2022, Dr. Thompson had collected 20 amateur minstrel playbills (1910s–1960s), 168 images (dating from the 1860s), and 350 newspaper editorials (1840s onward) that were all found within archival collections in Canada. This talk will discuss Canada and the Blackface Atlantic as an archival study. Dr. Thompson will explain how she parsed through the academic corpus in the US and UK which is much more extensive than in Canada, and the strategies that were used to keep the historical narrative focused on Canada’s blackface history. This talk will use examples drawn from archives in North America, with a focus on London, Ontario.

Cheryl Thompson is an Academic, Public Speaker, Founder and Director of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), a user-experience design platform that has created public access to Black archival collections in Ontario. She is also Director of Black Creative Lab, a digital platform that shares content on Black artists, dancers, writers, and researchers. As an Associate Professor, and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Black Expressive Culture & Creativity, she has secured multiple grants, including an Ontario Early Researcher award, and several Social Science Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants. Thompson has authored four books – Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898–1919 (April 2026); Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (2025), Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021), and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019). In 2021, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists for her contributions to Black Canadian studies.

For more information about the Research Seminar Series, please visit: https://history.uwo.ca/about_us/events/research_seminar_series.html