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Hyacinth Simpson

Dr. Hyacinth M. Simpson

Associate Professor; Dimensions Faculty Chair, Faculty of Arts
EducationBA Honours and MPhil (West Indies-Mona); PhD (York)

Biography:

Dr. Hyacinth Simpson is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Dimensions Faculty Chair in the Faculty of Arts. Her Scholarly, Research, and Creative (SRC) activities and teaching prioritize Caribbean, Black, and Decolonial studies; and she launched her work at TMU in these areas in 2005 by organizing the SSHRC-funded international conference Caribbean Migrations: Negotiating Borders. From 2005 to 2014, Dr. Simpson was the Editor of MaComère, (external link)  the peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars. Under her editorship, MaComère won the Horizon Award (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) in 2010. She has also guest edited special issues of other scholarly journals. In her individual publications, she has contributed significantly to research and scholarship on, among other topics, Caribbean oralities, the history and poetics of the Caribbean short story written in English, and the burgeoning film industry in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. 

In addition to her literary research and publications, Dr. Simpson is the Principal Investigator on the multitiered SRC social history project Black Canada and the Great War, which includes the eponymously titled SSHRC-funded Symposium (2021). Keeping true to her commitment to use her SRC undertakings to enhance the lived experience of Black and Caribbean peoples in the Caribbean and Canada, Dr. Simpson continues to make community engagement a hallmark of her work. She also emphasizes public-facing methods of disseminating SRC results (including engaging with media (external link)  outlets (external link) ) in the interest of reshaping public perceptions of, and narratives about, Black and Caribbean lives and histories.  

A member of the Yeates School of Graduate Studies, Dr. Simpson has taught in the MA program in Literatures of Modernity (LitMod) and the MA program in Immigration and Settlement Studies (ISS), and has supervised extensively in LitMod, ISS, the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture, as well as the MA program in Early Childhood Studies. She is also involved in supervisory committee work in the Policy Studies PhD program. Under her supervision, several of Dr. Simpson’s graduate students have published, and co-published with her, in reputable journals.

 

Research Interests:

Caribbean and postcolonial literatures; migration, diaspora, and transnational studies; short fiction studies; orality.

Graduate supervision mainly in the following areas:

  • migration, diaspora, immigration, identities 
  • non-Western literatures and cultural productions of the 18th and 19th centuries 
  • contemporary international English literatures (particularly Caribbean and South Asian)