Academic Appointments
2022 – present: Assistant Professor of Black Studies and the Archive
Faculty of Information (iSchool), University of Toronto
Affiliated Faculty, Women’s & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI)
Founding Director, The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis
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 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
2022 – pres. 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
– Black Custody (PhD/MMSt)
– Black Studies and the Archive (MA/PhD)
– Methods & Memory Work (MA)
University of California, Los Angeles
– Spring 2021: Black and Migrant Imaginaries (undergraduate)
– Winter 2021: Blackness and Borderscapes (graduate)
– Winter 2021: Black Trans Poetics (undergraduate)
– Fall 2020: Black Poetics, Black Future(s) (PhD reading seminar)
– Winter 2020: Black Migrants & Movements (Fiat Lux course, UG)
– Winter 2020: Black and Migration Literature (undergraduate)
– Winter 2020: Blackness and Borderscapes (grad seminar)
– Fall 2019: Blackness and Indigeneity in Europe (MA/upper division UG
Other Institutions (abridged)
– Spring 2017: BLST 191DS – The Black Mediterranean (UC Santa Barbara)
– Summer 2016: CRES 60E – Black Europe (UC Santa Cruz)
Languages
Italian (fluent)
German (intermediate)
French (proficient)
Arabic (adv. beginner)
Russian (degree level)
Spanish (intermediate)
Latin (reading)
Somali ( beginner)
Teaching Areas + Research Interests
critical theory (social philosophy), speculative historiographies, black theoretical and extant archives, black/migration writing and performance, law and the literary imagination, cultural memory, trans poetics, black geographies, black feminisms, transdisciplinary black method(s), anticolonial humanisms, black nonbinary possibility.
SA Smythe, PhD 