Department of English

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

A postdoctoral scholar or postdoctoral researcher, or sometimes simply called a “Postdoc,” is a recent PhD graduate who is now professionally conducting research alongside a supervisor from our department. Postdoctoral scholars obtain temporary or “Adjunct” academic appointment here at ±«Óătv, which allows them to access university facilities and prepares them for other academic faculty positions. In addition to hosting postdoctoral scholars who are externally funded (most frequently through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, or SSHRC), ±«Óătv University also offers Killiam Postdoctoral Fellowships.Ìę

Here are our postdoctoral scholars, along with a brief biography and their current research.

Madison Trusolio

KasiaVanSchaik

Madison Trusolino is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English working on the project. She holds a PhD in Information Studies from the University of Toronto. Madison researches the intersections of precarity, sexuality, and gender, with a specific emphasis on work and workers in the arts and culture industries. Her current project looks at the relations between unionization in the digital creative industries and social justice movements.

Her research can be found in Feminist Media Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Policy, and Communication and the Publics.

Research Topics:

  • Cretive and Cultural Industries
  • Gender Studies
  • Labour Studies
  • Political Economy of Communication

Education:

  • BA, York University
  • MA, Simon Fraser University
  • PhD, University of Toronto

Selected Publications:

Trusolino, Madison, & Diandra Ships. (2023). “Comedy’s double killjoy: workers’ DIY strategies to address harassment and precarity in the comedy industry.” Feminist Media Studies.

Trusolino, Madison. (2022). “Laughter from the sidelines: Precarious work in the Canadian Comedy industry.” In Miranda Campbell & Cheryl Thompson (Eds.), Creative Industries in Canada (pp. 86-108). Canadian Scholars Press.

Trusolino, Madison. (2022). “‘I wanna kill my rapist’: Margaret Cho’s #12DaysofRage campaign as promotional digital activism.” Communication and the Public, 7(3), 131-145.

de Peuter, Greig, Kate Oakley & Madison Trusolino. (2022). “The pandemic politics of cultural work: Collective responses to the COVID-19 Crisis.” The International Journal of Cultural Policy, 29(3), 377-392. 

Shade, Leslie Regan & Madison Trusolino. (2018). “‘It’s the power, stupid’: Facebook’s unequal treatment of gendered hate speech.” Canadian Yearbook for Human Rights, 1(2), 195-202.

Trusolino, Madison. 2017. “‘It’s not about one bad apple’: The 2007 York University Vanier Residence rapes.” In E. Quinlan, C. Fogel, & G. Tailor (Eds.), Sexual violence at Canadian universities: Activism, institutional responses, and strategies for change (pp. 79-92). Wilfrid Laurier Press.

 

Sheheryar Sheikh

Shero2025

Sheheryar B. Sheikh (aka Shero) is a Donald Hill Family Postdoctoral Fellow at ±«Óătv University.  He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame (’07) and a PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan, where he worked with Dr. Lindsey M. Banco. 

For his dissertation, Shero won the University of Saskatchewan Doctoral Dissertation award in the Fine Arts & Humanities category, and a refined version of the manuscript is forthcoming as a publication from Bloomsbury Academic in November 2025. 

As a Donald Hill Family Postdoctoral Fellow at ±«Óătv University, working along side Dr. Heather Jessup,  Shero is writing a book of short stories about immigrants and refugees in Canada, finishing up a novel about a father-son relationship in early Covid, and creating a series of vignettes, short stories, and novellas set in an ecumenopolis (or world-city) that the Earth may become, set in 2500-2555 CE. 

Recent & Forthcoming Publications:

Academic Monograph

  • The Post-9/11 Great American Novel: Fictional Perpetuations of White American Trauma and Islamophobia. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, forthcoming.

Novels

  • "." HarperCollins India, 2019. **Shortlisted for All-Pakistan Getz Pharma Award, 2020
  • HarperCollins India, 2017. **Longlisted for All-Pakistan Getz Pharma Award, 2019

Book Chapters

  • “Othering ad Infinitum: A Critical-Creative Examination of the Secular and Spiritual in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (Brown Boy Under the Cape),” ReVisions: Speculating in Literature and Film in Canada, University of Toronto Press, 2025, forthcoming.
  •  “Apocalypse Ever After: Lifted Veils and Transcendent Time in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” ReFocus: The Works of Michel Gondry, edited Marcelline Block and Jennifer Kirby. Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. 132-150.

Refereed Journal Articles

  • “The Walls that Emancipate: Disambiguation of the ‘Room’ in A Room of One’s Own,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, 2018, pp. 19-31.
  • “Rebirthing the Referents: Nuclear Criticism Seen Through Shifting Post-Apocalyptic Signifiers in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, vol. 17, issue 2, Fall 2018.

Ben Fried

BenFried2025

Ben Fried is a joint SSHRC-Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at ±«Óătv, having previously been a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in London. He is currently working on “Migrant Editors: Postwar Migration and the Making of Anglophone Literatures, 1967-1989,” a project that explores the transformation of London’s publishing houses and magazines by immigrants from the wider English-speaking world.

Fried received his doctorate from Cornell University, where his dissertation won the Guilford Dissertation Prize and grew into his first book manuscript, "The Empire of English Literature: Editing the Global Anglophone, 1947-1993." His work has appeared in and , among other venues, and he is co-editing The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary Editing with Tim Groenland. In September 2025, Fried will join the University of South Florida as an Assistant Professor of English.

Research Topics:

  • Global Anglophone Literatures
  • Editing and Publishing
  • Migration
  • Postcolonial Studies
  •  Book History

Education:

  • PhD, Cornell University
  • MPhil, University of Cambridge
  •  BA, McGill University

 

Selected Publications:

  • “An Indian Collection in Ithaca: Anglophone Modernism and the Borders of the Bombay Poets Archive,” Archiv fĂŒr das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, forthcoming 2025.
  •  â€œEditing the Global Anglophone: Publishing History as a Framework for the Rising Discipline,” , edited by Pavan Malreddy and Frank Schulze-Engler, Routledge, 2025, pp. 23-37.
  • “Archives of the Air: The BBC Written Archives Centre and Voices of the Global Anglophone.” , edited by Jamie Callison, Matthew Feldman, Anna Svendsen, and Erik Tonning, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 223-34.
  • “‘The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine’: William Maxwell’s New Yorker and the Midcentury Short Story,” Post45, , 2024.
  • “James Baldwin’s Readers: White Innocence and the Reception of ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind,’” African American Review, (Spring 2022).