Kanika Lawton

Kanika Lawton is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies as part of the Collaborative Specialization. They hold an MA from the Cinema Studies Institute and a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia.

Their SSHRC-funded dissertation foregrounds an aesthetic and political critique of surveillance, arguing that is both preludes and produces scenes of violence via appeals to neutrality. Their research interests include surveillance studies, digital humanities, critical theory, Black studies, queer theory, and trans studies.

Lawton was a 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow with the Evasion Lab at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, a 2023 David Rayside Graduate Student Award recipient, a 2022-2023 Queer and Trans Research Lab Research Assistant Award recipient, and the 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship recipient. They currently serve on the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union Board of Directors as a Division I (Humanities) Director.

They have received writing fellowships from Pink Door, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Their scholarly work has been published in Spectator and Media Fields. Their poetry and prose have been published widely and nominated for numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Outside of academia, they work in publishing as the Staff Director of Sundress Publications, a 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective.

Publications

• “Becoming Opaque, Becoming No-Body: Imagining Trans Futurity Beyond Remembrance.” Media Fields 18 (2024)
• “On the Shores of (Counter)memory: Reconfiguring Utopia in Janelle Monaé’s Dirty Computer (an ‘Emotion Picture’),” Spectator 41.1 (Spring 2021): 51-60

Awards

• 2023-2026 SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship
• 2023-2024 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellowship
• 2023 David Rayside Graduate Student Award
• 2022-2023 Queer and Trans Research Lab Research Assistant Award
• 2022 Sundress Academy for the Arts Writing Residency Fellowship
• 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship
• 2020 BOAAT Writer’s Retreat Poetry Fellowship
• 2018 Pink Door Fellowship