Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.
Sharpe is one of the most influential voices shaping Black Studies today. Her work is concerned with black life, slavery and its afterlives. She works on visual and performing art, film, theory, literature and with the evolving ideas, debates, and conversations of Black Study. Sharpe’s work in black diaspora literatures, and black visual cultures has made a vital contribution to Canadian, US, and international intellectual and cultural life, and is the focus of three groundbreaking and highly influential books: Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010); In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016); and Ordinary Notes (2023). Monstrous Intimacies analyzes African Diasporic and Black Atlantic visual, literary, and historical texts to name post-slavery subjectivity and black creative and political possibilities, and set the framework for Sharpe’s incisive and wide-ranging analysis of black peoples’ existence in the wake of chattel slavery.
Hailed as “the woman shaping a generation of black thought,” in the New York Times Sharpe’s work sits at the apex of research and writing on black peoples living in diaspora. Writing and thinking from Canada, she has energized Black Studies research in Canada and internationally. At a time when the Humanities are being decimated and antiblackness is increasing everywhere in the world, Sharpe’s work makes a powerful space to think and do Black Studies in Canada, making it a global leader in cutting-edge scholarship in the Humanities.
