Meet the Senior Doctoral Fellows

Binta Bajaha 

Born and raised in The Gambia, Binta has always developed a sense of curiosity about the world and the complex historical past that binds and separates the globe’s population and shape distinct geographies, genealogies and geopolitics. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in History and Global Studies, and a postgraduate degree from the London School of Economics in Gender, Development and Globalization. Binta is currently in her third year of her PhD journey at the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI), pursuing research that brings together and reconceptualizes the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene in the Sahel. Binta is a recipient of SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship- Doctoral Program award, as well as the Senior Doctoral Fellowship at New College for African Studies. 

Amber Moore 

Amber is a Ph.D. Candidate and sessional lecturer in the Dept. for the Study of Religion who holds degrees in Religious Studies and Himalayan Languages and Buddhist Philosophy from Wilfrid Laurier University and Kathmandu University.

You can read more about Amber’s work here: 

A workshop on Newar Buddhist texts

European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, Vol. 55, “Abodes of the Vajra Yoginīs: Mount Manicūḍa and Paśupatikṣetra as envisaged in the TridalakamalaandManiśailamahāvadāna.” 

Ryan Persadie (he/him/they/them)

Ryan Persadie is an artist, educator, and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies and Senior Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto. His aesthetic and scholarly work investigates queer Caribbean diasporas, transnational feminisms and sexualities, performance, and Afro-Asian intimacies. His current doctoral project specifically explores how Anglophone Caribbean music, dance, vocality, and embodiment offer salient archives to pursue critical pedagogies and practices of erotic place- and self-making within queer Indo-Caribbean diasporas. His writing can be found in the Stabroek News, Gay City News, MUSICultures, the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, the Canadian Theatre Review, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies and the Journal of Indenture and Its Legacies. He also works with and organizes with multiple community groups including the Caribbean Equality Project based in Queens, NY. Outside of academia, Ryan also performs as a drag artist where he goes by the stage name of Tifa Wine.

In drag, he/she draws on lessons passed down from soca and chutney music, and traditions such as Carnival, whereby drag becomes a transgressive medium to center the experiences, voices, and histories of queer and trans Caribbean agitators and anti-colonial trouble-makers, often drawing upon the spirit of fearless and unruly Caribbean women who continue to remind us what transnational feminist praxis can feel and looks like. Tifa Wine has performed across Canada, the US, and the Caribbean and can be found on Instagram @tifa.wine.

Hannah Quinn

Hannah Quinn is a 5th year PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar in Anthropology and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She is working with intellectually disabled adults in Montréal, Québec to build consent cultures and dismantle ableism. Hannah completed her ethnographic fieldwork in 2021 at day centres that provide social and education services to the anglophone disability community in Montréal. Her research focuses on theories of consent and the modes of relationality that cultures of consent and coercion both allow and foreclose. Specifically, Hannah is working with her participants to understand how notions of ‘capacity to consent’ buttress ableist structures as well as limit the kinds of intimacies her participants can engage and experience. Methodologically, she is invested in challenging assumptions about who can and cannot participate in research by co-creating accessible research methods that meet the needs of participants. Her work emerges at the intersection of anthropology, disability justice, and queer studies. As an applied anthropologist committed to public-facing scholarship, Hannah is invested in community-driven work, feminist research methods, and accessibility as a research ethic and relational mode. Hannah is also an educator and facilitator with expertise in sex education, consent practices, and accessibility. 

Hazal Halavut

Hazal Halavut is a PhD student at the Women & Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto. Her research interests include critical literary theory; trauma and memory; witnessing; the aesthetics of mourning; genocide and perpetrator studies. She has given talks and published various pieces on state violence and collective memory in Turkey, specifically on sexual violence under custody and women’s resistance practices. The Armenian Genocide and literary responses to it has been another field in which she has produced academic and non-academic pieces. She is currently working on her dissertation project on the limits and possibilities of witnessing and mourning for the perpetrator. She is a writer and co-editor for online feminist journal 5Harfliler. 

YiQing Lü

YiQing Lü is a cancer genetics researcher and lecturer based at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University. He has been a proud member of the New College and the Human Biology programme for more than five years, both in teaching and organising many science outreach events. A native of Beijing, YiQing completed his trainings in medicine and biomedical sciences in Beijing and Montreal, and have taught at universities in Alberta, before returning to his current research. His research interest is in functional genomics, cancer biology and human adenoviruses. Outside of his works, YiQing loves classical music, nature and reading.