Conrad James

Director, Centre for Caribbean Studies
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Caribbean Studies
conrad.james@utoronto.ca
Conrad James received his PhD in Latin American literature from the University of Cambridge and has taught at the University of Durham and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, and at the University of Houston. Prof. James’s research focuses on Spanish Caribbean literature and visual culture and Afro-Hispanic cultural production. His publications include Filial Crisis and Erotic Politics in Black Cuban Literature (2019), Writing the Afro-Hispanic: Essays on Africa and Africans in the Spanish Caribbean (2012) and The Cultures of the Spanish Caribbean (2000).

Néstor E. Rodríguez

Professor of Latin American Literature and Caribbean Studies
nestor.rodriguez@utoronto.ca | 416-585-4438
Néstor E. Rodríguez is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Caribbean Studies. He is the author of Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana (2005), translated into English as Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature (2010), and two books of essays: Crítica para tiempos de poco fervor (2009) and Interposiciones (2019). He has written on Dominican, Cuban and Puerto Rican cultural production, particularly on issues of race and nationalism in literature, on the role of intellectuals in Hispanic Caribbean societies and on Latin American poetry. He has also published five poetry collections: Animal pedestre (San Juan, 2004), El desasido (Mexico City, 2009), Limo (Rio de Janeiro, 2018), Poesía reunida (Santo Domingo, 2018) and Ojo de agua: antología poética (2001-2021) (Toronto, ICE). 

Kevin Edmonds

Assistant Professor of Caribbean Studies
kevin.edmonds@utoronto.ca 
Prof. Edmonds received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Toronto, specializing in Caribbean political economy, histories of alternative/illicit development, foreign intervention and the region’s radical political tradition. His publications include “Guns, Gangs and Garrison Communities in the Politics of Jamaica at the Turn of the Century”, “An Illusive Independence: Neocolonial Intervention in the Caribbean” and “Eradicating Opportunity: Global Capitalism and the Future of Cannabis in Caribbean”. His work has been recognized by multiple scholarships, including the Dr. Josiah Deboran and Flora Seedansingh Award, Centre for Critical Development Studies, OGS, IDRC and SSHRC.

Ramabai Espinet

Sessional Lecturer II
ramabai.espinet@utoronto.ca
Dr. Ramabai Espinet is an academic, a writer, and a critic. A graduate of York University, (B.A. Hons. English, M.A. English), she completed her Ph.D. (1993) at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. Her thesis examined the place of Euro-Creole women writers, with particular reference to the work of Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. She teaches in the Caribbean Studies Program (Post-Colonial Literature and Women’s Studies) at New College, University of Toronto. Dr. Espinet retired recently from her post as Professor of English, Seneca College, Toronto. She is also a Fellow of CERLAC (Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean) at York University. Her published creative works include the novel, The Swinging Bridge (2003), a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2003, a text of the Robert Adams lecture series (Canada), long-listed for the IMPAC literary prize in 2005 and published in Paris by Editions du Rocher (Le Pont Suspendu) in 2007. In 2008, Ramabai Espinet received the inaugural Nicolás Guillén Prize for Philosophical Literature from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Her publications include the collection of poetry Nuclear Seasons (1991), the performance piece Indian Robber -Talk, and the children’s books The Princess of Spadina (1992) and Ninja’s Carnival (1993). Espinet’s short fiction and poetry are published in anthologies such as Trinidad Noir, Blue Latitudes, Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam, Beyond Sangre Grande, Another Way to Dance and Wheel and Come Again, and also in journals such as Small Axe and the Massachusetts Review. She edited Creation Fire (1990), an anthology of 121 Caribbean women poets in several languages. Her scholarly essays are published widely; she also writes in a popular medium on subjects of current interest. Her field of academic research and writing is Post-Colonial Literature. A documentary on Ramabai Espinet’s work, Coming Home (2005) has been made by Leda Serene Productions in Toronto.

Bernardo García-Domínguez

Sessional Lecturer II
bernardo.garcia.dominguez@utoronto.ca
Bernardo García-Domínguez holds a PhD in Sociology. His doctoral dissertation, Transculturation in Cuba: A Study of Race, Religion and Revolution (York University, 2004) analyses specific issues of social, cultural and religious interactions. He is a founding member of Casa del Caribe, Cuba’s main research center for Caribbean Studies. García-Domínguez has lectured in Canada at York, Wilfrid Laurier, Brock, and OISE since 2003 and at New College since 2008. He is the author of El pensamiento vivo de Máximo Gómez (Casa del Caribe, Santiago de Cuba, 1991; Editora Búho, Santo Domingo, 1992); and the Consulting Editor of the Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions, University of Illinois, 2013.

Lee L’Clerc

Sessional Lecturer II
lee.lclerc@utoronto.ca
Lee L’Clerc holds a PhD in Painting and Literature from the University of Toronto. His teaching and research areas include visual and performance art, Caribbean and Latin American history, art and literary theory, translation studies, and queer studies. He has written a book and various scholarly articles on the interrelationship between art and literature, art installation, war photography, and queer iconography. As a translator he has worked on a documentary film and a museum exhibition. L’Clerc is also a curator and a Toronto-based artist, with numerous solo and group shows both nationally and internationally, including La Bienal de La Habana.

Melanie J. Newton

Associate Professor of History and Caribbean Studies
melanie.newton@utoronto.ca
Melanie J. Newton is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Louisiana State University Press, 2008) and other scholarly articles and book chapters on gender, slavery and slave emancipation. Recent and forthcoming publications include Melanie J. Newton, “Returns to a Native Land? Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean” (Small Axe, vol. 41, July 2013, pp. 108-122) and Stefanie Kennedy and Melanie J. Newton, “The Hauntings of Slavery: Colonialism and the Disabled Body in the Caribbean,” in Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic eds., Disability in the Global South (Springer, 2017). She is also the co-editor, with Matthew Smith, of two Small Axe special issues on “Caribbean Historiography” (43 and 44, March and July 2014).

Alissa Trotz

Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Caribbean Studies
da.trotz@utoronto.ca
Prof. Alissa Trotz is the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute and am affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. She is a member of Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana and editor of In the Diaspora, a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News. Her work is situated within a tradition of feminist political economy, and a Caribbean feminist tradition in particular, that takes an intersectional approach to social reproduction as a starting point and node of interrogation to think through histories and processes of dispossession and their contemporary manifestations. Prof. Trotz’s research trajectory unfolds across related themes that address processes of social reproduction, neoliberalisation and Caribbean feminisms; coloniality, difference and violence; transnational migration and diaspora; and Caribbean knowledge production.