Associate Fellows

Bellaviti is an Instructor at Ryerson University.  His research interests include the development of musical nationalism in Panama, genre studies, the political economy of Latin America and Caribbean popular music and dance, and folk music collections in the Americas.  More recently, he has undertaken a new area of study best described as a social history of Toronto's salsa scene.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Canada and US

Keywords: ethnomusicology of Panama, nationalism, Canada and US Latin@ diaspora, political economy of musical performances, arts and media, cultural studies, genre studies, salsa

Shaunasea’s research collaborates with artists in Toronto to delineate a specifically second-generation understanding of Black women’s arts practices. She is interested in how Black Canadian women artists of Caribbean descent offer blueprints for living relationally and suggest methods for radical community care. She also sings and plays piano and guitar. Her current playlist includes Chronixx, Bob Marley, Koffee, Shenseea, Adria Kain and Mustafa the Poet.

Future research will explore how sound can be used to rearticulate Black life in ways that refuse anti-black logics perpetuating Black death worldwide.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Canada, Caribbean Region

Keywords: black canadian women's art, music,

Ricia Anne Chansky is Associate Professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is editor of the new book series, Routledge Auto/Biography Studies; coeditor of the journal, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and of The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader; and, editor of Auto/Biography Across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing and Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives. She is a Fulbright Specialist in US Studies with a focus on literature, a member of both the Executive Board of the Modern Language Association Genre Studies Forum in Life Writing and the Executive Board of the International Auto/Biography Association as well as the Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Auto/Biography Association Americas Chapter. She has ongoing projects on diasporic Caribbean literatures, transnational narratives, pedagogical autoethnography, feminist visual rhetorics, and gender and identity.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Puerto Rico, US

Keywords: diasporic Caribbean literatures, transnational narratives, pedagogical autoethnography, feminist visual rhetorics, and gender and identity.

Kristin Ciupa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina. Her research explores the intersections of law, technology and power relations, and how they shape contemporary forms of extractive capitalism. She is the author of The Political Economy of Oil in Venezuela: Class Conflict, the State and the World Market (Brill, 2025) and co-editor with Jeffery R. Webber of The Labor of Extraction in Latin America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Venezuela, Mexico, Canada

Keywords: Political economy, resource extraction, international development, international law, social movements

Dr. Davis's research focuses on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas. She is particularly interested in the intersections of the literatures of the Caribbean, the United States and Canada and her work encourages an intertextual cross-cultural dialogue about Black women's experiences in diaspora. She is the author of Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation (Northwestern University Press, 2022) and co-editor with Carl E. James of Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence (Fernwood 2012).

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Jamaica, Canada, Caribbean diaspora in Canada

Keywords: Caribbean, African American and Black Canadian Literatures and Theatre, Social Histories of the African Diaspora, Black Cultural Studies; Anti-Racist Feminism; Black Youth Studies

My research concentrates on the 19th and 20th century Caribbean in the context of the African diaspora and the British empire.  I address such topics as urban history, gender, the history of childhood, and the social history of health and medicine.

My most recent book is Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery (http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/12613.html University of North Carolina Press, 2014).  It explores ideas and policies about population growth and infant and maternal welfare in British Caribbean colonies from the nineteenth century to the 1930s.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: the Caribbean

Keywords: gender, history of health, urban history

Her research concentrates on:

• Democracy, Mining and Development in Latin America
• Women and Mining Development
• Women and Nuclear Development
• Indigenous Women and the Mining Industry in Canada and Latin America
• Canadian foreign policy

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: Latin America

Keywords: Development, Foreign Policy, Human Rights, Indigenous, Mining, Nuclear, Politics, Resource Development, Women

Her research concentrates on issues related to:

• The Caribbean & Africa
• Humanitarianism & Human Rights Discourse (Caribbean)
• Childhood & Children
• Slavery & Human Trafficking
• Critical Applied History, Memory, Historical Consciousness
• Race & Racism

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization:  The Caribbean and Africa

Keywords: Caribbean, Africa, History of Childhood & Children, Slavery, Race Relations