SA Smythe

SA Smythe is an Associate Professor of Black Studies and the Archive at the Faculty of Information and an affiliate faculty member of the Women & Gender Studies Institute (WGSI). Prior to joining UofT, they were an Assistant Professor of Black European Cultural Studies and Black Trans Poetics at UCLA and a Fellow awarded the 2022 Rome Prize for Modern Italian Studies by the American Academy in Rome. Shortlisted for the 2025 Creative Capital Award (in Multimedia Performance), they are the recipient of numerous composer/artist fellowships and residencies supporting their transmedia artwork including 2025 Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and 2023-24 MacDowell Fellowship in Multimedia Installation.

Professor Smythe is a critical theorist, poet, transdisciplinary artist, and translator committed to black belonging beyond all borders and the study of how archives of otherwise possibility come to be narrated, realised, and remembered. They hold a PhD in History of Consciousness with emphases in Feminist Studies and Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. For decades, Smythe has organised with literary/performance, abolitionist, and migrant support collectives across Turtle Island, Europe, and the Mediterranean.

Professor Smythe’s intervention and commitment to black radical traditions and (an)archival-insurgent practices agitates across black cultural studies, trans poetics, performance, literary criticism, postcolonial historiography, contemporary Mediterranean studies, queer and trans feminist studies, and critical human geography. Their primary research is on 20th and 21st century literature and other cultural responses to racism, misogyny, colonialism, and other relational aspects of inequality and oppression between Europe (in particular, Italy), East Africa, and the Mediterranean. They are also invested in black trans poiēsis (that is, both poetics and the philosophy of creation/creativity in relation to black trans cultural politics, praxis, and embodied experience) as practitioner and theorist.