Academic Appointments
2025 – present: University of Toronto (St. George, Downtown)
· Associate Professor, Black Studies & the Archive, Faculty of Information
· Founding Director, The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis
· Affiliated Faculty, Women’s & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI) (since 2022)
· Steering Committee, Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (since 2022)
2022 – 2025: University of Toronto (St. George, Downtown)
· Assistant Professor, Black Studies & the Archive, Faculty of Information
2018 – 2022: Assistant Professor, UCLA
Department of Gender Studies
Department of African American Studies
2017 – 2019: UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Irvine
Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies (2017 – 2018)
Department of Anthropology (2018 – 2019)
Education
PhD – History of Consciousness – UC Santa Cruz
Designated emphases (concentrations) in Literature & Feminist Studies
MA (Hons.) – History of Consciousness – UC Santa Cruz
Certificate in Italian Language, Corso di perfezionamento, (CEFR: C1/ILR4)
Alma Mater Studiorium Università di Bologna
Res.Cert. – Italian and Gender & Women’s Studies – UC Berkeley
BA/MA – Russian Philology and Italian Literature (Hons.) – City University of New York
Certificate in Italian Language & Semiotics – Erasmus mundus Programme
Alma Mater Studiorium Università di Bologna
Research Appointments & Fellowships
2024 – 2025: Leighton Studios Fellow, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity Residency
2023 – 2024: MacDowell Fellow in Multimedia Installation
2022 – 2026 Core Faculty, Black Queer Everything (Mellon-funded project at Morgan State HBCU)
2021 – pres. Senior Fellow, Center for Applied Transgender Studies
2021 – 2022: American Academy of Rome “Rome Prize” for Modern Italian Studies
2019: “On the Matter of Blackness in Europe,” UCHRI Conference Grant
2017: “Queer of Color Formations and Translocal Spaces in Europe” @ UCHRI (Winter)
2016 – 2018: Co-PI for “Queer Italia Network,” £60,000 AHRC (UK) grant
2016 – 2017: Academic Fellow, Department of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara
2016 – 2017: “Where Blackness Meets the Sea” funded by Black Studies Consortium
2016 – 2017: Co-PI for Black Studies: Vocabularies and Genealogies @ UCHRI
2015 – 2016: Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research
— (Centre for Cultural Memory and the Centre for Women’s Writing), University of London
2015 – 2016: Visiting Researcher, Medieval and Modern Languages, Cambridge
2014 – 2015: Research Assistant for Professor Angela Y. Davis
2013 – 2015: Graduate Student Researcher for Professor Gina Dent
Teaching
University of Toronto (St. George), Faculty of Information (postgraduate)
– Culture & Technology Studio II (W25)
– Trans Technē (MA/MI/PhD) (W24; F24; F25 [in SDS])
– Black Custody (PhD) (F23; F25)
– Black Studies & the Archive (MI; w/ MA/PhD) (W23, F23, F25)
– Methods & Memory Work (MI) (Winter I & II 2023)
University of California, Los Angeles
– Black and Migrant Imaginaries (S21, undergraduate)
– Blackness and Borderscapes (W21, graduate)
– Black Trans Poetics (W21, undergraduate)
– Black Poetics, Black Future(s) (F20, PhD reading seminar)
– Black Migrants & Movements (W20, Fiat Lux course, UG)
– Black and Migration Literature (W20, undergraduate)
– Blackness and Borderscapes (W20, grad seminar)
– Blackness and Indigeneity in Europe (F19, MA/upper division UG)
Other Institutions (abridged)
– The Black Mediterranean (UC Santa Barbara, Spring ’17)
– Black Europe (UC Santa Cruz, Summer ’16)
Languages
Italian (fluent)
German (intermediate)
French (proficient)
ASL (adv. beginner)
English (natal)
Russian (degree prof.)
French (proficient)
Arabic (adv. beginner)
Spanish (intermediate)
Latin (reading)
Somali ( beginner)
Teaching Areas + Research Interests
critical theory (social philosophy); speculative historiographies; black theoretical and extant archival formations and cultural memory work; black/migration writing and performance; law and the literary imagination; abolition geographies; trans poetics; black, migrant, and abolition geographies; black feminisms; transdisciplinary black method(s); anticolonial humanisms; black nonbinary possibility.
SA Smythe, PhD 