Full-Time Faculty

Research Interest/Specialization

I specialize in interdisciplinary research at the intersections of gender, economy, environment, and development; gender and work; and social, political, and economic inequality. Most of my current research aims to understand how to ensure that a global low-carbon economy will be more gender equitable and socially just than its fossil-fuel based predecessor.

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies

Research Interest/Specialization

Anishinaabeg mothering; Maternal education; Contemporary issues facing Anishinaabeg women.

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies & Indigenous Studies

Research Interest/Specialization

In my current research, I collaborate with PI Jessica Polzer to examine how people engage with menstrual and fertility self-tracking apps.

Teaching

Currently on a teaching-intensive appointment with Western, I have taught our department’s Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies course since 2015. This course is the most exciting to teach because it invites students to reflect on their personal (gendered, raced, classed…) location in society and address the issues they think are most in need of activism or change. My graduate teaching includes our Feminist Methodologies course (GSWS 9464). I supervise Master’s students conducting discourse or other analyses of digital and social media in the areas of health, sexuality, subjectivity, and representation.

Research Interest/Specialization

My research is primarily in feminist phenomenology though my background, my teaching and writing are interdisciplinary in scope. I often write on artworks in order to think about certain questions from an embodied perspective. Thematically, I explore questions about the intersections of technology, art, perception, embodiment, and subjectivity.

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies & Philosophy

Research Interest/Specialization

She has two primary research areas: 19th-century U.S. literature written by women and contemporary young adult literature. She is most interested in the ways in which women and girls resist and transgress societal and familial expectations. She has published on Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Sarah Pogson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder as well as young adult dystopian fiction. Along with Prof. Alyssa MacLean, she is co-investigator on The Black Londoners Project, a digital humanities project that recovers the histories of formerly enslaved individuals who fled the US and settled in London, Canada West in the mid-nineteenth century. The Black Londoners is a SSHRC funded project.

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies & English and Writing Studies

Research Interest/Specialization

Black Studies; Black Diaspora; Black Feminisms; Black Queer Studies; Queer Health; Queer Diaspora; Critical Health Studies; Critical Race Studies; Sexual Health; HIV/AIDS; Masculinities

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies. My teaching is guided by a Black feminist ethics of care that treats education as a civic practice rooted in reciprocity, curiosity, and social responsibility. I design courses that encourage students to think critically across disciplines, engage with their communities, and connect scholarship to lived experience. To this end, I have incorporated experiential learning opportunities such as student visits to the Toronto International Film Festival, community dinners at Yaya’s Kitchen that explore Black foodways and cultural memory, and collaborative projects with local organizations. I also experiment with cross-institutional partnerships, including a hybrid course on Black Geographies co-taught across multiple campuses, and I extend pedagogy into public spaces through initiatives like library exhibitions on World AIDS Day and Gender-Based Violence at Weldon Library. Across all of these efforts, I strive to create rigorous, imaginative, and caring learning environments where students see their learning as meaningful beyond the classroom.

Research Interest/Specialization

Indigenous philosophy, storytelling, decolonial psychoanalysis, Indigenous feminisms, masochism, futurisms

Teaching

Toronto Metropolitan University (undergrad): Decolonial Theory; Intro to Indigenous Philosophy; Philosophy of Beauty; Philosophy, Diversity, and Recognition; Decolonial Psychoanalysis; (graduate): Indigenous Ecocriticism Winter 2026 (Western): Indigenous Sexualities GSWS 3356G and Indigenous Futurisms GSWS 3315G

Research Interest/Specialization

Collective memory (and amnesia); political economy and corresponding notions of personhood, public/private space, and community of care; national imaginaries and their implications with structures of gender, race and class; class as a forgotten category; communism & memory of communism; queer theory; Marxian feminism; French post-structuralism.

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies & Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction

Research Interest/Specialization

Critical Theory and Cultural Studies; Sexuality, Gender and Popular Culture; Feminist Theory; Queer Theory; Representation, Subjectivity and Embodiment, particularly in response to AIDS and the Holocaust; AIDS and Cultural Production; Sexuality and Citizenship (focus on race, class and ethnicity); Medicalization and the Media; Media and Resistance

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies

Research Interest/Specialization

I write, study, think, and teach in the Black intellectual tradition. I am interested in how Black people construct knowledge from the margins. And I investigate how Black, Caribbean, and African women mobilize against structural violence as politicized maternal subjects. My current SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2024-27) is titled Commemorating the Experiences of Liberian Women Survivors of Conflict Related Sexual Violence for Collective Healing. This community-university based partnership project addresses the ongoing erasure of the experiences of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) from public memory in Liberia twenty years after the end of that country's civil war. The research team, with partners based at Western University and in Liberia, seeks to engage a cross-section of Liberian society to produce arts-based activities, events, and publication outputs designed to remember the war and center the experiences of women survivors.

Research Interest/Specialization

Specialist in 18th and early 19th century history of women and gender in the North Atlantic. Women's and gender history, violence against women and children, and international development.

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies & History

Research Interest/Specialization

My current project focuses on how Black placemaking is produced, inherited, and deployed through the political mobilization of multigenerational, youth-led movements that contest while living through the expansion of Colombia’s tourism industry in Cartagena de Indias. Ongoing collaborative community-based projects are a key part of my work. I co-founded and co-direct, alongside Dr. Orlando Deavila Pertuz (University of Cartagena), a collaborative community-based digital archive project called Memorias de Resistencia (Memories of Resistance) (https://cdscollective.org/grantees-microgrants/) focused on Black women-led organizing for urban infrastructure, housing rights, and justice in Cartagena, Colombia throughout the second half of the 20th century.

Teaching

I approach teaching as an opportunity to empower students to interrogate the structures, relationships, and categories that inform how we understand ourselves and others. My courses are focused on developing critical analysis skills, interdisciplinary and multimodal methods, and intellectual dexterity. I teach classes on race and gender inequality and violence, Black girlhood, citizenship, social movements, tourism, youth, the state, urban development and dispossession, historical memory, time and temporality, and the ethical and political questions and dilemmas of anthropological inquiry.

Research Interest/Specialization

Gender and sexuality studies, including queer theory, feminist theory and critical race theory; Cultural studies; Indigenous film and media; contemporary queer Canadian culture, including Canadian cinema, Canadian popular culture, and Canadian literature; science fiction and sf history, theory and criticism

Teaching

Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Research Interest/Specialization

My interdisciplinary program of research focuses broadly on the biopolitics of health in the 21st century and my research projects to date have examined gendered experiences of health and embodiment in relation to discourses on risk and/or biotechnology. More recently, my work on vaccine hesitancy and my supervision of doctoral research projects related to narratives of caregiving have made important contributions to the field of critical health humanities. My current research is located in critical menstrual studies and focuses on the biopedagogical aspects of menstrual tracking experiences among gender-diverse app users. I have an ongoing fascination with the ways that statistics and statistical language are engaged in official and everyday health discourse and pandemic narratives. I have extensive experience designing, conducting, and supervising feminist and otherwise critical qualitative health research. My dissertation on women's shifting understandings of their genetic risks for breast cancer during the process of BRCA1/2 mutation testing was one of the first to use Michel Foucault's theories of biopower, governmentality, and technologies of the self as a lens to examine the embodiment and lived experience of technological risk within neoliberal health contexts and was awarded the Illinois Distinguished Qualitative Dissertation Award by the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006.

Research Interest/Specialization

Anne Lister; marriage literature; boarding school literature; eighteenth-century women’s literature; history of sexuality; queer theory; feminist theory; poststructuralism

Research Interest/Specialization

Dr. Shire's first book was published in 2016. The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in Florida argues that American political leaders leveraged gender norms – not only masculinity but also femininity – in order to Americanize Florida, setting a precedent for U.S. policy in many subsequent frontier zones further West. They used white women’s presence in Florida to justify violence against Seminole peoples and to rationalize generous social policies for white settler families, many of them slaveholders. At the same time, they relied on white women’s material, domestic and reproductive labor to create homes and families there; the building blocks of permanent colonial settlement. In short, white women were indispensable to the process of settling Florida for the U.S., a process that displaced both Indigenous people and enslaved people of African descent.   Prof. Shire’s next monograph will be titled The Women at 44 Queen Street: Gender and Labor in Early Baltimore. This book will use the women who lived in the household of Mary Young Pickersgill (at 44 Queen Street in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1807-1857) as the subjects of a microhistory on women, race, class, and labour in the early 19th century American city. The women who lived in this household were responsible for one of the most famous pieces of material culture in U.S. history: the Star-Spangled Banner. Although the flag hangs in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, very little is known about the women and girls who created it. This book will reveal the myriad ways in which women’s work – even in the age of “True Womanhood” – supported early U.S. capitalization and urbanization. It builds on my knowledge of gender and nationalist projects in the early 19th century United States, and on my longstanding love for Baltimore. 

Teaching

I enjoy teaching all aspects of the American past that touch on the ways that different people shaped it, especially marginalized groups. I want students to engage with historical content as well as criticism, and to immerse themselves in the culture of the past. I strive to be an accessible and compassionate teacher while also maintaining high expectations. Effective and imaginative teaching requires empathy and encourages students to engage with a variety of material, and to develop stronger research and writing skills. All of my undergraduate courses address historiography and teach students how to engage with primary sources. I also support student development as writers and make myself available to discuss strategies for improvement.

Research Interest/Specialization

Feminist theory, particularly feminist literary theory, and postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial feminisms; women's life-writing; feminist historiography and historiographic metafiction; representation, subjectivities, sexualities; intersubjectivity and (other) theories of relation; Canadian literature, especially contemporary Canadian women's writing; Indigenous women's writing; feminist pedagogy; internationalization; trauma studies